Essential System #8 – Nutrition (Extra Food)

Continuing our countdown of the ten essential systems we get to the food category. In our grab and go bags we have a few Clif Bars – they taste alright, don’t require cooking, and have a relatively long shelf life.

The problem with Cliff Bars is that they prove tempting when we have the occasional sweet tooth attack. This is why some people keep MREs (meals, ready to eat) on hand, because they taste so foul you won’t be tempted to bust them open. They also don’t require cooking and some even come with a chemical heating packet. As for the taste of M.R.E.s, SurviveLA correspondent Corey Travis reports on a recent attack of the munches while at the office. All he had was an MRE in the hot trunk of his car. Scared by the main entrĂ©e he just ate the cracker and chocolate. Here is what he had to say, “The cracker was what you’d expect – a cross between balsa wood and salt. The chocolate energy bar was much more substantial with a thick, waxy chocolate-like-ness, almost completely masking a surprisingly malty undertone. I’d use the word cloying, but I hate that word.”

Should you require another opinion on MREs, someone calling themselves “Badtux the Snarky Penguin” has a review of the chicken tetrazini MRE.

We prefer the more upscale freeze dried backpacking food to MREs. They taste better and have an astonishing shelf life. You will, however, need to heat them up with something and they are also expensive. Our favorite brand is Mary Jane’s Farm, though someone should tell her about the implications of her name (read our review of Mary Jane’s Organic Buttery Herb Pasta).

We also keep the SurviveLA pantry well stocked with canned items and we always maintain a vegetable garden, so that we’ll have fresh stuff when the shit comes down.

Essential System #9 – Hydration

As we’ve noted before you can go about three days without water, but you’ll be feeling mighty crabby after just a few hours without it. We’ve got a number of water sources around the homestead, with a few more back-ups in the works.

First off it pays to have some plastic water jugs around – figure two liters a day per person minimum. There are stricter standards for tap water in this banana republic we call the USA than for bottled water so don’t go wasting any money on boxes of Evian. The Red Cross recommends changing out the water every six months. While there are health concerns about plastic bottles, this water is for emergency situations and the synthetic female hormones that plastic bottles leach out should be the least of your concerns if the shit comes down.

In addition to stored water, your house or apartment contains three other sources of water – the pipes, the water heater and the tank of the toilet (not the bowl). To use the water in the water heater turn off the gas or electricity that heats the water. Shut off the main water supply and open a hot water faucet somewhere in the house. You should be able to drain the water out of the heater using the heater’s drain faucet. You can also get some water out of the pipes by closing the incoming water valve and opening the highest faucet in the house while draining the water out of the lowest faucet.

To purify suspicious water we, once again, rely on the world of backpacking. Our grab and go bag contains a Katadyn micro-filter which will remove microorganisms such as Giardia, Cryptosporidium and bacteria. These microorganisms have the nasty habit of giving you very bad diarrhea which leads to . . . dehydration! The Katadyn filter has a tube which you stick in the suspicious water and a hand pump which directs the water through a filter and out through another tube which you stick in a bottle that you supply. You can also kill Giardia and Cryptosporidium by boiling water for at least one minute – perhaps with your handy Pepsi can stove. Instructions for purifying water with iodine or chlorine can be found on this page.

Filters, however, do not kill viruses which include hepatitis A., Norwalk virus, and rotavirus and are present when water becomes contaminated by the feces of affected individuals. In other words, bad dookie in the water. To kill viruses you need to use either iodine, bleach or expensive filters which also use iodine or electrostatic charges. Boiling water for at least five minutes will kill all viruses. Right now viruses in water are more of a concern in the “developing” world, but the Republicans are busy taking our municipal water supplies back to the Middle Ages.

Remember that none of these methods will purify water that is contaminated with chemicals such as arsenic and other bad things lurking in our sad, concrete-channelized Los Angeles River. In a worst case scenario you will need to head up to the hills to get water or invest in an expensive and heavy reverse-osmosis system like boats have to turn seawater into drinkable water.

Lastly we must put in a plug for the geniuses behind the artistic collective Simparch who are experimenting with solar stills to distill water as a method of purification. Distillation takes care of 99.9% of the bad stuff and the Simparch folks have created a solar still as a part of the border art shindig InSite. Solar stills can also be improvised.

One homestead project that is in the planning stages, pending our long wait for the corrupt Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety to approve our foundation repairs, is the construction of a rainwater storage system. We plan to feed one of our roof downspouts to several fifty gallon plastic drums that will be linked together. We will use this water for irrigating plants in the front yard. While, admittedly, we don’t have room for much rainwater storage to make a big difference, we plan on filling these drums with municipal water after the rainwater runs out. That way we will always have a few days worth of water for our vegetable garden should there be a service interruption in the warm summer months. The barrels will be hooked up to a drip irritation system designed for low-pressure gravity feed systems.

While we would love to go off grid and have our own well here, we’d be more likely to strike oil than water and, no doubt, the drilling costs would be prohibitively expensive.

Essential System #10 – Shelter


Counting down on the ten essential systems we keep in our grab and go bags at number ten we have shelter. Note that this list is not in order of importance, in fact if it were shelter would be number one. It’s possible to survive for at least three days without water and there are documented cases of people surviving for forty days without food. But your ass could be either fried or frozen damn quick without shelter even in temperate Los Angeles. The handy rule to remember is three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. In addition to having a place in our grab and go bag the concept of shelter figures into our policy of having a back-up system for every necessity at our urban homestead.

We like things lightweight for our grab and go bags, so we purchased a three pound backpacking tent, the two person MSR “Missing Link”. This tent is spacious for its low weight and uses either hiking polls or trees to stake it out. On the down side, we’re not sure how this thing would hold up in high winds and it requires a lot of room to stake out. The “Missing Link” was also very expensive and, as a cheap alternative, it’s possible to improvise shelter with a large garbage bag or the ubiquitous blue tarp material found at any hardware store. There are also commercially manufactured Bivvy Sacks and even cheaper thermal reflective survival bags which, combined with warm clothing, will function as shelter in a pinch.

Improvised shelters can also be constructed by gathering materials in whatever environment you happen to find yourself in. SurviveLA participated in a wilderness shelter workshop run by noted Los Angeles survivalist and wild food salad chef Christopher Nyerges a few years ago. While it’s possible to construct decent shelters out of sticks and branches you must act quickly especially if the weather is turning ugly. In places where it snows you can construct a snow cave.

Whatever you decide on it must shelter you from the wind and sun and keep you dry. Our tent is for backpacking, but it’s also in the grab and go bag in the event that an earthquake takes out the poorly constructed dump that we live in and we need to sleep out in the yard for a while. We also have an old shed in the backyard that we have turned into an art studio, but it could easily double as a comfortable bedroom.

We don’t know about you, but when that earthquake comes we’d rather not end up in the LA equivalent of the Louisiana Superdome.

Grab and Go

So it’s time to go over what’s in the SuriviveLA compound grab and go bags. These are the backpacks we have for each person here just in case we find ourselves surrounded by zombies and decide its time to run. Conveniently our grab and go bags are the same ones we use for hiking and backpacking. In fact the contents of the bags are based on what the Sierra Club used to call the “Ten Essentials“, which has now been expanded into the “Ten Essential Systems”. We’ll go into each of these systems in greater detail in the next ten posts. To start off here is the Sierra Club’s Ten Essential Systems list with our brief annotations:

1. Navigation
This includes a compass and a map of the area you are traveling to.

2. Sun Protection
It gets hot and sunny here in the Southwest so you’ll need sunglasses and sunscreen.

3. Insulation (extra clothing)
Even though it never gets that cold in Los Angeles it’s important to remember that hypothermia can occur when temperatures are above ten degrees Celsius, (that’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit for you backwards non-metric American types) especially if it’s windy or if your clothes get wet.

4. Illumination
We have multiple headlamps and flashlights with extra batteries.

5. First-aid supplies
We’ll give the full list of the contents of our first aid kit in a subsequent post.

6. Fire
Our fire making kit includes waterproof matches and kindling material made with dryer lint and candle wax

7. Repair kit and tools
We wear a Leatherman multi-tool at all times on our belt.

8. Nutrition
Our grab and go bags contain an array of Cliff bars and other items with a long shelf life.

9. Hydration
We have both extra water and a ceramic water filter.

10. Emergency shelter
We have a very lightweight backpacking tent.

This ain’t about paranoia – while our grab and go bags contain modern tools, we appreciate the ancient, and almost lost art of travel by foot. Remember kids, back in the days before SUVs people used to walk long distances without the benefit of convenience stores and fast food joints.

Stay tuned for a detailed explanation of each of the Ten Essential Systems and some adaptations for urban situations.

SurviveLA Food Review: Mary Jane’s Farm Organic Buttery Herb Pasta

This guest review from one of the SurviveLA compound sistas, is the first in a look at long term food storage options. Freeze dried food like this is marketed both towards backpackers and holed-up-in-the-bunker paranoid types. Exceptionally long shelf life makes freeze dried food a good, though expensive, option for your emergency pantry.

Field Tested July 22, 2006 on Mt. Silliman

The name of this dehydrated entree is somewhat misleading. It is in fact a form of your classic boxed mac n’ cheese: elbow pasta in cheesy powder sauce, only sans the bright orange coloring. It is good, being similar to the upscale Annie’s Mac & Cheese. Maybe Annie and Mary Jane smoke pot together somewhere in OrganicVille?

I did not notice the herb flavoring, and did not miss it, because I find when you are exhausted and camping at 10,000 feet your palette is not as adventurous as it might be ordinarily. This is comfort food, and works very well in that capacity.

That said, it is ripe for doctoring, because it is so very basic. I brought along a handful of chopped sun-dried tomatoes from the SurviveLA gardens (and dehydrated in the compound’s solar dehydrator – more on that in a future post), and that added the perfect amount of interest. Nuts, canned tuna, fresh veggies if you wanted to carry them, all would work well too.

You cook this entree in its own bag (a paper bag instead of a foil pouch, which is nice). All you do is add 3/4 cup of boiling water, reseal the bag and wait for ten minutes. I used a Pepsi can stove to boil the water, incidentally. It cooked well, with only a couple of the elbow noodles escaping hydrating and ending as crunchy surprises on my fork.

The pouch claims that it holds 1.5 servings: a Mary Jane’s Organics eccentricity. I scarfed the whole thing down without difficulty and I’m a girl. I think Mary Jane intends us to buy more than one dish and share them on plates like civilized beings, rather than selfishly wolfing them out of the bag. Oh well.