Message me and let me know what you were wanting to learn about me here and I'll consider putting it in my bio.
I definitely feel like I'm more of like a dumpling than a woman at this point in my life.
yeah, both hands can point at one another just fine (and I can alternate, too)
another way these facts get skewed: most gun deaths are suicides, not homicides
in the US, states with the strictest gun laws do also have the lowest suicide rates, maybe because when there isn't an easy way to quickly exit, fewer people do - and the same reasoning probably applies to homicides
either way, there are also accidental gun deaths (kids accidentally shooting themselves or others because they're playing with daddy's gun, etc.) - so gun policies absolutely do save or cost lives
how do you get so much free food!? 🤯 I need better friends. (Maybe I need to connect with my local freegans and dumpster divers?)
haha, three cheers to that - financial independence is the dream.
I tend to be very frugal, but you can only save so much money by being cheap (and a lot of the strategies take up your time rather than your money, and you also only have so much time).
And thank you, that is very kind. I think we'll be OK - just in a stressful period with a lot of uncertainty, but objectively we are very privileged and I don't really feel I have room to complain.
yes, this was originally more of a retirement plan that I would eventually quit my job once we had enough saved up and it wouldn't be too much of a financial burden for me to be unemployed (like, we were hoping there would be a point where we felt life would be overall be less stressful and better if I picked up the domestic labor full-time than if I worked a job full-time while still doing the domestic labor - I'm doing the cooking and laundry no matter what, so retirement is mostly a stress-reduction strategy).
But then I was unexpectedly pushed out of my job, so we found ourselves in this situation a bit too early. I'm constantly stressed about finances now and trying to find a path to get us into a financially viable situation (right now we are far from financially sustainable, the housing shortage and having to flee across state lines meant we were stuck in a massively over-priced housing situation).
Hopefully we find a path to cheaper housing and the stress settles down (and we don't have any major health emergencies or other sudden extreme expenses - e.g. we were in a bad car wreck and we had to replace our car, and let's just say the car insurance didn't suitably cover the cost of replacing it, etc. we can only take so many blows).
But yes, theoretically there is a way this could work out that would be like a dream scenario where I am just taking care of the domestic labor I was doing anyway when I was working full-time, and that life is just easier and happier for it.
ironically I put more effort into my cooking before I lost my job - I think it was a coping strategy, the worse my life got the more I relied on tasty meals to keep me wanting to be alive (and to stay busy cooking so I didn't have to think about anything else).
Cooking is great - besides saving money, I just can't get the quality I can make at home from a restaurant.
Yes, I treat it like a full time job with explicit responsibilities and a rotating schedule to keep myself busy. (Which is a lot, tbh - daily life is already stressful enough ... my lease is up in a couple months and I am struggling to find affordable housing in a particularly bad housing market - it's very stressful.)
I'm not sure I have a single, all-time top dish, but here are some repeat favorites:
I could keep going, but I'm getting hungry and I should stop 😆 I love food, and I love cooking.
I'm unemployed, so I stay home to run errands, manage finances, cook, clean and otherwise manage the house.
I would say cooking is the most intriguing part, as it can be quite complex, involves creativity and skill, and can be quite rewarding.
I would still eat this, well done 👏
maybe they're healthy
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Yes, I also used "lazy gardening" and permaculture oriented techniques - I don't know how to tell you that for most people this is an unreasonable amount of labor. Even if you do no labor on weeding and digging, you are left with significant labor managing harvests, storing your harvest, etc. - for people who work full-time or don't have much time or energy to give, or for people who are differently abled or become injured or disabled, farming can be inaccessible. It is better to think of it as a full-time job, even when approaching it with permaculture and "one straw revolution" style techniques.
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hm, I'm not sure in what way you think I avoided the subject 🤔
sunchokes are a low-calorie food, which is why I specifically don't suggest them as a famine food. It would be better to grow sunflowers that produce seeds, as at least those have oils and will provide calories.
Potatoes are a much better option than sunchokes, but require much more attention and effort, to prevent blight and ensure a good crop, etc. - it's not trivial to produce your own calories.
I'm fine with suggesting you can pick up producing some of your own food or calories, but as someone who has actually tried doing this in a suburban context, I want to warn people about the intensive time and labor involved.
Farming is best done on a farm, by farmers; more people should think about whether their time and effort is best spent on farming or not, whether they want to farm full-time or not, etc. We need to be clear-sighted that nobody can achieve self-sufficiency on their own, and that everyone has limited time and energy.
We also need to be clear that having a victory garden is not going to replace the reliance on farmers for calories or prevent famine or save people from catastrophic collapse of food production systems or supply chains.
Which is why I am emphasizing our reliance on farmers rather than telling everyone to become a farmer.
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I guess my point was more that in both cases of the Great Famine and the Late Victorian Holocausts, there was sufficient food in storage to feed the people dying of starvation - it was the introduction of markets and the resulting false austerity that prevented the otherwise typical food distribution systems during times of famine from happening, and then lots of deaths occurring. In a sense markets are a policy choice to let the poor die. If you can't afford food, you do not deserve to live. That is the logic of capitalism.
So my point is that even if we see food production as "solved", we shouldn't forget the problems of food distribution - and sure, they're related, to your point over-production (through the development of fertilizer and other industrial methods of food production) under capitalism we can reduce prices and make distribution more accessible, ... but when production occasionally fails, it is the economic system that starves people first (not necessarily the lack of food, which can also happen as in the cases of many other famines).
In pre-capitalist societies when food production failed, stocks of food were usually released and distribution was ensured in ways that marketized & capitalist societies have not done (where for example in Syria around the time of the Arab Spring, we saw grocers dying from starvation because they couldn't make enough money selling food to afford to buy food for themselves).
And yes, starvation when food is abundant is a monumental policy failure - this is something we should be driving home more to people, that the US chooses to have starving and homeless people as a policy choice.
Completely agreed that social solutions are the only way to solve food insecurity, individual action like doomsday prepping is a distraction that primes us to victim-blame people who die for not "preparing" adequately.
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sunchokes are fairly weedy and hard to get rid of, and don't really produce enough calories to be worth it in a survival situation.
Also, you should grow stuff you already eat - don't expect to grow a bunch of food that you aren't used to cooking or eating and to enjoy it.
tbh, it might make most sense to identify what you spend the most money on and what's easiest to grow that would replace the money you spend with time tending - usually that's fresh herbs. Growing sage, thyme, rosemary, green onions, basil, etc. is usually fairly easy and will save a lot of money (a bundle of fresh herbs can cost like $5 for a very small amount).
Garlic is also fairly expensive per 100 g, and I found it not too hard to grow - I managed to grow enough garlic in one season in a small area on a suburban plot to not have to buy grocery store garlic for over a year.
But on the other hand, you don't tend to buy a lot of garlic by weight, so it may or may not make sense given the amount of time it takes to garden.
People need to understand that gardening is a huge amount of labor and time spent - it's not economical compared to working a job and buying what you need.
So, if you're unemployed and unable to work, but able to garden, it's unlikely to be a great way to spend your time if your concern is saving money.
If your goal is to survive a catastrophe, I think it's delusional to expect gardening to fully provide for your calories, and the same calculus applies: your time will be better spent making yourself valuable to someone who has excess food to give away (like your local CSA farmer friend); even just volunteering on their farm is a better use of time than trying to provide for your own calories by making your small urban or suburban lawn into a food production system.
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I think this somewhat ignores the way markets kill people during times of famine - see the Late Victorian Holocausts or the Great Famine, in both of which there was plenty of food available, but the problem was the introduction of markets and artificial austerity measures that failed to distribute food to people dying of famine
so, food production might be a solved issue (I think that's a bit more debatable given soil degradation and the threats to supply chains necessary for the industrial inputs needed to keep those food production systems going in their current, post-Green-Revolution format), but the distribution issue has not been solved and will likely result in many of us dying due to lack of economic power to afford food that will simply expire and rot in storage and then be destroyed and disposed of in a way that denies us access to the waste
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the photo is of a hydrojelly face mask, and it's probably just seeds - maybe black sesame or flax seeds or something like that; there are many different kinds of hydrojelly face masks, some of them have rose petals or lavender flowers, etc.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00700-y
The American Academy of Dermatology recommends washing the face twice a day with a gentle cleanser, applying a moisturizer and — during the day — putting on sunscreen and protective clothing.
skincare is simple: just wash your face, use moisturizer, and wear sunscreen (and keep out of the sun).
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just a reminder that none of us can sufficiently "doom prep" and avoid the consequences of large catastrophes like those being discussed
beyond typical disaster preparedness: https://www.ready.gov/
probably the best thing would be to develop community ties - get to know your local weirdo farmers doing a CSA, make friends with EMTs, get to know your neighbors, get connected with a local community garden, etc.
We will survive or die together, individual prepping is not going to save you.
EDIT:
The basics:
The extras:
Probably most people already have a pantry with several days of non-perishable foods - think canned foods, etc. Make sure that you are rotating your food - don't have a separate cache as your "emergency food". Instead, have a backstock of foods you already eat, and continue to rotate and eat from your pantry so you don't create waste by purchasing "emergency food" you never eat and then let go bad in your pantry.
You might ensure that you could feed 2,000 calories per person in your household. White rice is around 1600 calories per pound, so a 10 lb bag is 16,000 calories, so that's 8 days of 2,000 kcal per day (obviously you wouldn't eat just white rice, ideally beans and rice would be paired together). It depends on what you already eat, but I eat plenty of beans and have a decent stock of dry and canned beans, as well as rice. I probably have more than 8 days of food in my pantry, which is sufficient for emergency preparation.
Also note that refined foods store better than "whole" foods - so white rice will last longer than brown rice, bleached white flour will last longer than whole wheat flour, etc. (It's because refined foods tend to just have the carbs extracted from the food; whole foods have more natural components like oils that will go rancid, etc.). So when you buy whole foods, buy smaller amounts and rotate through them faster. Don't buy a 10 lb bag of brown rice for just you and a partner, maybe buy a small 1/2 lb bag or less.
oh I see what you mean - yeah, that was something I didn't list in my ingredient breakdown - but I mentioned I left a lot out 😅
look at you being playful - thanks for the clarification 😊
oh, right - cannabis
(EDIT: I use it to cope from laser hair removal, which feels a bit like being poked with a hot iron over and over again)