stocking up....

[happyjack12]

what should we be stocking up on, food , tins etc? is there a thread please?

The 'Preppers' board is good, whether you're prepping for winter, power cuts, a no-deal Brexit, or - a little more niche - the zombie apocalypse.

Where I live we've already got shit weather, and had our first winter power cut, so I have storage boxes of tinned food, candles and torches, and cases of bottled water.

Thanks, hadn't thought of zombies!!

Try this thread

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/preppers/3370895-Prepping-for-brexit

Hi, ignore the zombie jibes, you'll find no zombie nonsense on the Prepper topic.
Happy to help:
Imagine being snowed in for three days. Think about what you need in terms of food, hygiene and entertainment. What works for you- spam is NOT the answer. Focus on what you like to eat.
Look at shelf stable or, at a push, freezer stable alternatives to the fresh stuff you buy.
By hygiene, I mean soap and toothpaste.
If you want to do more than that, the Prepper topic is full of ideas.
If that's all you want to do it is already better than doing nothing.
I say three days because that gives you time and space to assess the situation locally without having the urgent need to feed the household.
Don't forget pets.
Don't forget treats to keep you cheerful.
If you don't need it, keep it or give it to a food bank.
Be one less panicked anxious person.

I agree about buying what you like to eat - my emergency rations include tins of sponge pudding / chocolate pudding and custard. And one tin of Spam as a homage to Monty Python.

Also paracetamol and ibuprofen. First aid kit.

Don't listen to people who scoff at you for being prepared for an emergency situation. Like bellinisurge says, if you don't need it all, great, you could give it to a food bank.

I've recently started getting organised but more with a 'snowed in for a few days' view than Brexit.

We were snowed in last year & although I had luckily just stocked up it took well over a week for deliveries to get down to us (Cornwall) so bread/milk was hit & miss for a while.

I have a vague meal plan for 5 days that is food that's easily stored & very easy to cook.

It's all food we eat anyway but whereas I prefer fresh carrots, having a few tins on stand by is handy anyway.

fantastic, thanks for the tips, going to get on to this asap.
re Brexit though- are there any foodstuffs in particular that may be in short supply I should be worried about?

Fresh fruit and veg that we normally import.

I'd get tinned versions that you are ok with.
Don't know if bread making is your thing but that's the kind of thing that runs out quickly in shops so have a think about giving that a try now - you can buy packets that don't need a breadmaker .
The thing is that supermarkets generally might be an unpleasant place to be around if supplies are patchy. Make sure you have basics like toothpaste etc in to avoid having to go.

Some things I thought I might add that might be helpful depending on your circumstances if / when things get rough.

During the worse Argentinan economic crises, people going grocery shopping were being held up for their groceries when they went back out to their vehicles. The solution shoppers found was to go during the day, never at night, and ideally go as a group with family or friends and then come back out together and watch each other's backs until they had all put away their groceries.

If you get a very small cut or scratch don't ignore it, put some type of antiseptic on it and then put on a band-aid or some type of dressing. You don't want an opportunistic runaway infection to occur when antibiotics may not be available. Why lose a finger, hand, or arm when all you had to do was slap on some alcohol, witch-hazel, iodine, or povidone-iodine ( personally I prefer witch-hazel or povidone-iodine, witch-hazel doesn't sting as much and regular iodine seems to hurt by drying out too much ) .

Flesh-eating bacteria is more prevalent than people think. Usually though you need to experience a deep penetrating wound for that to occur. A decent snakebite kit could be used to draw out the bacteria before it begins to spread by draining out a sufficient amount of blood.

Especially when money may be tight, you don't want the expense of a big hospital bill.

A small town with a police force and a hospital is preferable to either living way out in the woods by yourself or living in a big city. Too way out in the woods you don't have much protection from possible roving gangs or criminals. A big city is bound to be full of desperate, hungry people and also criminal gangs.

I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed, people in Moscow were hungry and starving with beggars in the street. The people living in a rural town however were decently fed because a lot of them grew their own food and raised livestock and hunted and fished. If you are not good at these things then perhaps you can help or do chores for someone who is in exchange for food.

Given that people may well be malnourished in the big cities, they are more prone to catching diseases. You would want to avoid as much as possible anyone who appears sick or ill and if you are sick or ill then stay home until you are well and avoid contact as much as possible with other people.

The Prepper's forum is good but doesn't seem to offer much in terms of a longer-range strategy.

@xebobfromUS - I recognise your point about long term strategy and your wise words about never ignoring a cut.
To be honest, at the moment, the mood of this topic and threads on it - just my view! - is that lots of non-preppers are looking at it because of Brexit and are freaking out at anything major about preparedness.

I almost long for the days when this topic thread is a sleepy backwater and we can discuss long term strategies. If people want to come to that and discuss they are, of course, most welcome.
My personal priority is to have people think a little harder about resilience in their pantry. Other ideas might flow from that but if you try to get people to go full on "off grid" in their first thoughts about it, I'm not sure that is a good idea.
A little or a lot is better than nothing.

And I have personal experience of an SHTF scenario in former Soviet Union too.

Anything is better than nothing imo. I live semi rural and when it snowed there was no fruit, veg bread or milk in the shops for over a week. I’ve just started adding 3-4 items a week to my online shopping, calpol, paracetamol, nurofen, huge bags of pasta, packs of mince to freeze, tinned stuff etc, if it snows again in the new year, we’ll be prepared, we may have to live on spag Bol for a week but we will have food and won’t need to go to the shops lol.

Standing back and squinting at all this you have to wonder what the heck is going on. I am not belittling any suggestions at prepping, it is something we used to get our Scouts (up to 14 1/2 year olds) to think about. Prepare a weekend away with food, shelter and so on.
What is amazing is that from the outside (well for me, France) why are there no regular demonstrations in the streets, pickets outside MP's headquarters, outside Parliament?
Around half of the UK don't want this, so why do they appear to be accepting the prospect of economic collapse with a resigned shrug of the shoulders? I repeat (from previous posts of mine) that I am not advocating violence in any form, or even damage to any property, as that is taking away from what you already have, making the situation worse.

To paraphrase the "great" Will Smith in Bad Boyz, @1tisILeClerc , the shit has not got real for most people. Which is why there is little public unrest about it.
To quote another "great" Colm Meaney in ConAir (guess what I've been watching!) this situation needs to get unfucked up.
But we aren't there.

Like the boiling frog principle, a gradual slide into mediocrity and less, the expectations of crap and for years not being disappointed about getting it.
Not sure of the actual outcome of the French protests over the last 10 days or so but at least the French ministry has taken a sideways look at the issues. It is very regrettable that the 2 fatalities happened but as far as I am aware they were genuine accidents, the first was a lady getting run over when a woman motorist panicked. The second was a motorcyclist crashing into a car that was trying to turn around and was in a 'wrong' lane.

The One Show this week spoke about shortages of warehouse space and concerns about lack of supplies due to Brexit. Hopefully the the reality of what’s facing us will start to sink in if shows like this reach a wider audience.

Sadly I fear that it will be dismissed as hysteria by those with blind faith that their great leaders will step in sort it out

The word prepper unfortunately conjures up an image of an eccentric, middle-aged to elderly ole coot convinced that the world is going to end tomorrow. I think that is why most people want to avoid that label.

There are some very legitimate concerns that more and more people are becoming aware of however. Most governments and militaries around the world are no longer as much concerned about a massive nuclear strike from a hostile power. What really concerns them is a single nuclear bomb detonated high up in the atmosphere that creates a massive EMP pulse that takes out most of the electrical grid and most electrical devices.

That will cripple a country and is a lot easier to pull off. A massive solar flare from what I have read could create a similar effect.

Unfortunately the technology we use is becoming more fragile and susceptible to such a disruption. There are steps you can take to harden electrical devices but they simply are not being done.

1950's technology was a lot less susceptible and thus more robust in terms of handling an EMP pulse. There were no computer chips in cars or trucks that could be fried for example making the vehicle inoperable. Yes, a good number of transformers and electrical lines would be taken out but at least you had say half a chance of making a comeback.

I learned from studying Y2K issues that with the automation and computerization of so many processes that the manual knowledge of how to do them was being lost.

That reminds me of an episode of JAG where a retired serviceman who was an expert in handling logistics using a pen and paper system was asked to come back to active duty and teach at a base on how to do that. It turned out that in the desert areas the laptops would get clogged with sand making them inoperable and so they needed a more robust system to handle the logistics.

I think a massive solar flare is the more probable event. If you have an old book on Logistics or any other such subject you might want to keep it, it might be important knowledge that your society might need someday.

It's not a question of being a Luddite, of fearing technology. Some things absolutely require IT systems in order to function but attention I think has to be paid to the robustness of technology as a whole.

BackinTime, that's another thing I dislike and adds to the fragility, the virtual eradication of warehouses due to JIT systems.

I agree, Xebob unfortunately there is very little understanding about how fragile the system is.