# the best reason for prepping



## FrankW (Mar 10, 2012)

The best reason to prep IMO...
Imagine the consequences....

I know its a ABC link. but enjoy:

American eaters, let's talk about the birds and the bees: The U.S. food supply-from chickens injected with arsenic to dying bee colonies-is under unprecedented siege from a blitz of man-made hazards, meaning some of your favorite treats someday may vanish from your plate, experts say.

Warmer and moister air ringing much of the planet-punctuated by droughts in other locales-is threatening the prime ingredients in many daily meals, including the maple syrup on your morning pancakes and the salmon on your evening grill as well as the wine in your glass and the chocolate on your dessert tray, according to four recent studies.

At the same time, an unappetizing bacterial outbreak in Florida citrus droves, largely affecting orange trees, is causing fruit to turn bitter. Elsewhere, unappealing fungi strains are curtailing certain coffee yields and devastating some banana plantations, researchers report.

Now, mix in the atmospheric misfortunes sapping two mainstays of American farming-corn and cows. Heavier than normal spring rains have put the corn crop far behind schedule: Only 28 percent of corn fields have been planted this year compared with 85 percent at this time in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, drought in the Southeastern plains and a poor hay yield have culled the U.S. cattle and calf herd to its lowest level since 1952, propelling the wholesale price of a USDA cut of choice beef to a new high on May 3-$201.68 per 100 pounds, eclipsing the old mark of $201.18 from October 2003, the USDA reports.

"We are in the midst of dramatic assault on the security of the food supply," said Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The group promotes ecological research into the nexus of diet, food production, environment and human health.

The primary culprit of all this menu mayhem is climate change, which is choking off certain crops already weakened by both genetic tinkering and chemically based farming, some experts contend.

Agricultural history is, of course, laced with tales of crop-munching bug swarms and dirt-baking droughts, leading to famous regional famines. Paleontologists have even argued that the hanging gardens of ancient Babylon dried up because people messed with that micro-climate by slashing too many trees, over-expanding farm fields and exhausting the water supply, Lawrence said.

More From NBC News: 
Consumer Prices Take Biggest Drop in Four Years
Florida Beach House Boasts Cadillac-Turned Bar
Florida's Citrus Industry Battles Potent Foe: A Disease With No Cure

"So there are precedents but they've all been local and people just abandoned those areas and moved on," he added. "What's very sobering about the situation today: This is global and there isn't any other place to go on this spaceship Earth. We need to regard all of these (examples) as a very powerful motivator to try to work on the carbon emissions, to start pushing that parts per million of carbon dioxide back down."

Honeybee Decline Raises Fears
Tuesday, 14 May 2013 | 1:47 PM ET
Is the nation's food supply at risk? There is an alarming drop in the world's honeybee population, reports CNBC's Jane Wells.
Last week, the ratio of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere soared to the highest daily average ever recorded by an air monitor station at Mauna Loa in Hawaii-nearly 400 parts per million (ppm), said John Ewald, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, who called it "an extremely important milestone." When that gauge was installed in 1958, the observatory measured a CO2 concentration of 313 ppm. The number means there were 313 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air for every 1 million molecules of air.

"That warmer and more moist air (caused by the CO2) creates the conditions that certain pathogens thrive on," Lawrence said. "That's the dilemma with things like the coffee fungi and some of the problems with citrus."

The world's collective appetite also is growing as populations rise, leading large, commercial growers and exporters to ship more food internationally-and allowing certain plant-consuming bacteria, fungi and viruses to "hitchhike half way around the world in a day," Lawrence added.

Moreover, to help meet the need to feed those extra mouths, industrial agriculture has increasingly turned to "mono-culture" farming to boost harvests. That means using science to alter plants and sewing huge fields-fencepost to fencepost-with single crops.

(Read More: Mass Honeybee Deaths: Getting Worse, Not Better) 
"For instance, corn plants in the American Midwest are grown closer together and taller than they have been in the past because we're genetically engineering them to do that," said Lee Hannah, senior fellow at Conservation International, a global nonprofit that advocates for sustainable policies. "That produces a lot more food. But it also makes that corn more vulnerable to disease, which, if it gets into that mono-culture system, can sweep through it much as a disease will go through a city a lot faster than it does a rural countryside.

"We're in a situation where the food supply is more vulnerable than it has ever been," added Hannah, also an adjunct faculty member at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Hannah authored a recent study that predicted climate change may shrink California's wine-growing areas by as much as 70 percent by 2050.

(Read More: Corn Crop Planting at Third Slowest Pace in Three Decades)

But less wine in our homes could-some conservationists hope-grab the attention of American consumers who can't otherwise get their heads around shrinking polar ice caps.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100743032?__...yahoo&doc=100743032|Food Supply Under Assault


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## swjohnsey (Jan 21, 2013)

Less wine? You got my attention.


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## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

It's not only a good reason to prep, it's a good reason to get out of having other countries produce our food, using our corn for ethanol and genetically mutating / chemically coating everything we grow and eat. Right now it's already uber expensive to go to the grocery store and buy things that are not engineered food like products, imagine what it will be like in a few years. Pass the artificially colored artificially flavored simulated corn soy nibblets please! Now can I have another piece of "I Can't Believe It's Not Chicken"?


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## biobacon (Aug 20, 2012)

What the hell is Margarine?


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## biobacon (Aug 20, 2012)

Why did I ask. Now I know.

The a basic method of making margarine today consists of emulsifying a blend of hydrogenated vegetable oils with skimmed milk, chilling the mixture to solidify it and working it to improve the texture.[4] Vegetable and animal fats are similar compounds with different melting points. Those fats that are liquid at room temperature are generally known as oils. The melting points are related to the presence of carbon-carbon double bonds in the fatty acids components. Higher number of double bonds give lower melting points.

Partial hydrogenation of a typical plant oil to a typical component of margarine. Most of the C=C double bonds are removed in this process, which elevates the melting point of the product.
Commonly, the natural oils are hydrogenated by passing hydrogen through the oil in the presence of a nickel catalyst, under controlled conditions.[5] The addition of hydrogen to the unsaturated bonds (alkenic double C=C bonds) results in saturated C-C bonds, effectively increasing the melting point of the oil and thus "hardening" it. This is due to the increase in van der Waals' forces between the saturated molecules compared with the unsaturated molecules. However, as there are possible health benefits in limiting the amount of saturated fats in the human diet, the process is controlled so that only enough of the bonds are hydrogenated to give the required texture. Margarines made in this way are said to contain hydrogenated fat.[6] This method is used today for some margarines although the process has been developed and sometimes other metal catalysts are used such as palladium.[4] If hydrogenation is incomplete (partial hardening), the relatively high temperatures used in the hydrogenation process tend to flip some of the carbon-carbon double bonds into the "trans" form. If these particular bonds aren't hydrogenated during the process, they will still be present in the final margarine in molecules of trans fats,[6] the consumption of which has been shown to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.[7] For this reason, partially hardened fats are used less and less in the margarine industry. Some tropical oils, such as palm oil and coconut oil, are naturally semi solid and do not require hydrogenation.[8]


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## JayJay (Nov 23, 2010)

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-ne...-colonies-wiped-out-in-the-last-year_05162013


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## Caribou (Aug 18, 2012)

Oh, for the good old days when discussions of 'the birds and the bees' had nothing to do with Colony Collapse Disorder or H7N9.


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## CoffeeTastic (Apr 12, 2013)

I recently read the 11/22/63 book by Stephen King. It is about a time traveler who travels back in time to stop the JFK assassination.

Anyway, this traveler is amazed how much better, more flavorful food and drink tasted in the past.

I wonder if this is true? Any old timers remember how it was? Has it changed?


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## kyhoti (Nov 16, 2008)

You don't have to be old to remember when Coke became New Coke, which became Coke Classic. Just. Not. The. Same.


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## swjohnsey (Jan 21, 2013)

I think a big part of "food tasted better in the old days" is you lose some of your sense of taste and smell as you grow older. Part of why kids don't like brocolli is they taste better. In blind taste tests folks could tell the difference between Coke made with cane sugar and Coke made with high fructose corn syrup. They also could tell the difference between organic and regular produce. The mind is a powerful thing.


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## usingmyrights (Mar 26, 2013)

Bees are fairly easy to keep on the most basic level. I'm hoping to get a couple more hives setup this week.


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## CoffeeTastic (Apr 12, 2013)

> They also could tell the difference between organic and regular produce. The mind is a powerful thing.


I think I saw that same program. What they did was switch the labels on organic and non-organic and people always picked the vegetables with the organic label as better tasting (even when it was the non-organic kind).


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## usingmyrights (Mar 26, 2013)

I wonder if that taste used heirlooms, hybirds, GMO, or kept the same variety of whatever they were testing.


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## TheLazyL (Jun 5, 2012)

Preping?

I figuring I've been "preping" ever since I've been able to learn from life's experiences.

I have medical insurance (at least until ObamaCareless kicks in).

I have life insurance.

A comfortable 401K and a few other investments for retirement.

The only debt is the house mortgage and I'm paying extra to get that paid off early.

Both vehicles have spare tires.

Children married and are self reliant.

The above is for a normal future life.


At this time in my life I have the highest disposable income. Now I can devote more time to a abnormal future life.


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## cowboyhermit (Nov 10, 2012)

This has actually been studied quite a bit, government agencies for instance have to update the nutrient composition of foods in their databases and have tracked a large decline in many nutrients, especially in plant foods but also milk, eggs, etc.
Nitrogen fertilizer and irrigation are a big part of it, simply a matter of dilution, but soil depleted of micro-nutrients and also varieties makes a big difference. The use of pesticides has also resulted in plants that produce less of certain anti-oxidants and similar compounds that are beneficial to humans for reasons other than the plants.

This is just an overview http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/nutrient-value-of-food-zm0z11zphe.aspx#axzz2UhfHSzaU
This is a less biased source saying pretty much the same thing
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss


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## Shammua (Jan 27, 2012)

*Best Reason to Prep?*

That's easy.

Better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it.


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## readytogo (Apr 6, 2013)

*My best reason for prepping.*


Peace of Mind
Security
Self Sufficient
Quality Control
Bartering if Needed
I don`t ever think of a Doomsday, specially a Natural One, life is to pleasurable now to about those issues, I don`t like to wasted my time on anything, (Thinking is a wastes of time without a purpose).
I really enjoy Prepping.


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## Jimthewagontraveler (Feb 8, 2012)

ljdiscounts said:


> www.ljdiscounts.com
> Face Book: L and J Discounts
> 
> Description
> ...


shoot how disapointing i was looking at some of your stuff but by crashing this thread you have virtually guaranteed I will never act on that thought


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## invision (Aug 14, 2012)

ljdiscounts said:


> www.ljdiscounts.com
> Face Book: L and J Discounts
> 
> Description
> ...


Well 3 cut and paste posts... Good way to spam, but you lost my business for sure... Are you a paid sponsor of the site?


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## readytogo (Apr 6, 2013)

The best reason for prepping for me is for a way to have at hand supplies to keep me from acting crazy the moment something happens, we all know this.
My daily routine is in the preparation of food without chemicals, I love to cook and canned, the whole family enjoys it, I try to keep it very simple, my stores consist of the food chain basic ingredients; grains, fat, sweets(honey, sugar),corn meal, flour, rice, meats in the canned form, haven`t dry any yet, but I will be making simple stews for quick meals and some jerky, lots of sauces for pasta, enchiladas, canned chili, beans. So in the event I will be able to fix a quick meal with a small heat signature .I honestly don`t think of a Mad Max scenario in what`s left of my life, I have enough stress in my life to worried about it.


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## jestaq (Oct 12, 2012)

I love the last thread.


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## LongRider (May 8, 2012)

Prepping led me to learn new skills, camping, knot tying, fire making, self defense, firearms training, sailing, navigation, first aid, hunting trapping, fishing, hiking, carpentry, framing, wood working, automotive motorcycle repair, small engine repair, small appliance repair, electrical, plumbing, gardening, farming, animal husbandry, welding, black smiting, pottery, culinary/medical herbal lore, to name but a few. Since 1973 I have been a perpetual student learning new skills. There are few things I cannot build or repair. 
Except for die gallantly I am able to as Robert Heinlein suggested


Robert Heinlein said:


> "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."


Over time prepping led to being self sustaining. I owe no man or entity on the planet a single red cent. Able to provide everything my family needs or wants. My food is tastier, more nutritious, healthier and satisfying than anything store bought. I do not need to work out. I am healthy and fit. Able to out work, out fight and out fornicate most nineteen year olds. Being self sustaining I am dependent upon no man. No schedules or deadlines, unrushed, unstressed, unworried at peace and content. Living at a relaxed peaceful pace, in harmony with my environment. With a degree of freedom and liberty few can imagine. Free to live life as I see fit, doing as I please when I please. Being self sustaining is no longer about what disaster or catastrophe may happen in the world around me because that is no longer relevant to how I live my life.


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## LongRider (May 8, 2012)

CoffeeTastic said:


> I recently read the 11/22/63 book by Stephen King. It is about a time traveler who travels back in time to stop the JFK assassination.
> 
> Anyway, this traveler is amazed how much better, more flavorful food and drink tasted in the past.
> 
> I wonder if this is true? Any old timers remember how it was? Has it changed?


Food did taste better was not as engineered for appearance and long shelf life. Farm fresh food was more readily available. If you have ever eaten garden fresh vegetables compared to store bought. Bird hunted over pen raised chicken. Eaten free range bison or over grain fed beef. Eaten moose, elk, pronghorn, bear, deer, caribou over plastic wrapped red product. You know what I am talking about.


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