Are You Prepared For the Freezer Apocalypse?

\”Are YOU Ready?\”

So I’m eating lunch with my co-workers earlier this week. It’s harvest season around these parts, and I happened to mention that I had spent all weekend canning bulk fruit orders and pulling carrots and potatoes out of the ground. One of my co-workers tells me she just harvested a bunch of carrots and, “OMG they are taking up so much room in my 2nd freezer I’m not sure where I’m going to put the 1/4 cow I have coming next week!” Yea, 2 freezers, 2 fridges and it’s all full. A couple more start up a conversation about how many freezers they have and where they are. (More than one had space rented at the local meat locker.)  It was … eye opening. I have one fridge, with a normal sized freezer on the top. Freezer gal said she really couldn’t find a better place to store the carrots. All of them have mentioned at one point or another in my hearing that they don’t know how to can. Most of them were storing a LOT of meat. And, that shouldn’t surprise me, I’ve bragged before about how scarce people are compared to cows and pigs around here.

As these conversations often do, it lingered in my mind. A thought has since percolated up from those ruminations. Is there a way I can benefit from this over-extension of stored food when the inevitable extended black out happens?

Most live too far away for me to communicate with them with power down. (See TRW’s post from yesterday to chime in on that thought.) A couple live close enough I could though. If I store enough salt, could I barter some of it in exchange for some of the meat and still have enough to cure some meat myself? That would mean my co-workers, the 2 closest to me, would have to accept the use of and see the value in salt, in time to save the meat before it rotted. i.e. Long storage of meat without powered cooling, implies that the power might not come back on for the aforementioned long time, and that can be hard to accept I think. Could be everything will rot before they accept it.

Maybe I could barter with something they would want for a shorter term lights out, like batteries or bottled water, then they could continue to pretend that the lights will be coming back on. They could pretend like the meat they traded wasn’t going to rot before they could eat it or recool it. I certainly wouldn’t be interested in thawed carrots from a freezer or luke warm microwave dinners. But all that meat…

I could offer my solar dehydrator and some spices to make jerky and keep a portion of that maybe. Or offer my know-how, pressure canner and some jars to can the meat and keep a portion in trade.

Any thoughts on this one y’all? Do you have lots of food in a freezer or two? Do your neighbors have a few deer on ice in the garage? Do you have any plans to handle that food during a long power out?

- Calamity Jane