I too have found that rendering certain meats is very hard due to the "leaner" nature of that meat. Beef, muskrat, bison, and goat meat fall into that category. I would grind those meats too.

Pig, beaver, racoon or bear will have sufficient fat to render more easily (although I wouldn't render coon, muskrat or possum for food, only for candle tallow).

Seals or whales would be the easiest of all to render.

Eventually we got our tallow and moulded our candles. Some of the remaining tallow, however went into our soapmaking project. We made a few classic fails like pouring the molten soap into an aluminum baking pan to cool. (that was the end of that pan--the lye ate up the aluminum surface horrifically) And we had one batch that we just couldn't get to set up and harden, so we threw it out. Only to be told, when we described the lack of success to a fellow reenactor, that "soft soap" is highly prized and a valuable camp cleaning material. D'oh!

For those of you who know, this link won't tell you anything new but for those of us who didn't know, or only had a "sorta idea" of rendering fat, this link is really useful (particularly when you read some of the comments as well)
http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2...ef-tallow.html

So I think we've covered the basics for food once the MREs run out, but what about before hand? Here lately I've been binge watching YouTube videos about MREs, specifically older ones, and its crazy to see what holds up and what doesn't. Ive seen Korean war b2 units be perfect, and 1989 MREs be totally ruined. And I'd imagine after things have gone quite far down hill, the last few shipments of supplies will have whatever rations are available, on the off chance there's still something edible. Just as the gear and weapons issued would also start coming from the bottom of the barrel (ei Vietnam era). So any rations you find would be a gamble, anywhere from being nauseous, having diarrhea, to straight up food poisoning and botulism. One more avenue for illness. I'm thinking about a table for rations, both pact and NATO, for likelihood of expiration and severity of spoilage, based on age and menu contents.

I agree. We need a Food Contamination Table. I'll put together a list of poisons and illnesses common to spoiled food like my Water Contamination Table.

Excited!

Any progress?

One of my hobbies is visiting Native American archeological sites, and quite a few of them have books on what was eaten, with some including recipes. As long as there's someone to identify the plants, that sort of book would be useful.

Sorry man, between work and my own campaign, I got distracted. I have some handwritten house rules I'll put up as soon as I get more time to type them. I've covered:
-Spoilage checks (1D20) based on time, temperature, and storage method (canning, sun drying, smoking, salting, etc...)
-Chemical/radiological contamination.
-And a chart listing the possible illnesses and side effects of spoiled foods.

It is similar to the one I posted for water purification.

No rush at all, just didn't want to let a good idea fade.

Hello, this thread finally pushed me to stop browsing and make an account!

Anyways we have come up with a lot of great uses for salt, but how were global supplies of salt in 1997? And I've heard there are some primitive ways people can extract salt, but would it be enough to preserve their own meats?
And would mass production of salt be possible? I've heard that for a decently long time in human history salt was almost as precious as gold. Would we go back to those times?

Thanks for any helpful information, this thread has been great.

It takes around 1 bushel of salt (55 pounds) to preserve 500 pounds of pork, and 1.25 bushels to preserve 500 pounds of beef.

There's a very good map of salt deposits in the United States at the Salt Institute.

During the Civil War, one of the major Confederate sources of salt was Saltville, Virginia. In a complex of 300 buildings with 38 furnaces and 2,600 kettles to boil briny water, it produced 4 million bushels of salt in 1864. In Florida, Apalachee and St. Andrews Bay were major salt producers; when the Union raided the latter, they recorded destroying 198 saltworks in just 7 miles of beach.

My mother and stepfather established and are now on the board of directors of a commercial salt field.

Kinda makes Israel with the Dead Sea valuable to their neighbors.. Ironically, I suppose. The Morton Salt complex is off of Interstate 80 west of Salt Lake City, Utah and can be seen in Google Earth. Might be a bit radioactive. Salt mines are still thriving world wide in the U.S., Peru, and some others.

Salt, Vinegar, and smoke along with canning jars and canning lids would have be a regular habit.

Lucky for the Portuguese that Bacaloa (salt cod) has been a staple for centuries.

Not especially. The Dead Sea's salt is only about 30% sodium chloride, and it has a lot of bromide salts, which are toxic (in small doses, it's an anti-epileptic. In large doses, it causes hallucination, seizures, and coma).

Speaking of coastal nations and salt fish, seawater's a decent way to get salt. A gallon of seawater evaporating will provide around 4.5 ounces of salt, so around 196 gallons of water will provide a bushel of salt. That sounds like a lot, but if you can set up evaporative pools, it's not too hard to mass produce. If it needs to be done quicker, it can be actively boiled, but that's likely to be prohibitively fuel-intensive for a post-apoc group. Although I could see coastal groups placing a pot of seawater over the fire whenever they're warming themselves in the winter, to harvest the salt.

Setting up moveable plastic sheeting over the pools, weighted in the center to make a depression, with a collection bucket under the drip point would harvest pure, evaporated water as a byproduct of salt evaporation. It would probably also enhance the evaporative process, speeding it along.

True, a solar still would make for a useful secondary product. It won't produce much, relatively speaking, but having distilled water available can be useful. It might also help if mirrors could be set up to reflect additional sunlight on the pools to increase temperature. Another option for desert areas near the sea is a seawater greenhouse.

Welcome aboard sir! You should surf the forum thread map and add your own thoughts to the threads there.

There is a very large salt mine that actually travels under lake Erie. In fact, I was just there a couple of days ago getting "replenishment salt" for a PA municipality that burned up it's supply salting the roads during our last storm.

The access to it is under Cleveland, right? Another probable storage facility, like the salt cave in Kansas (Missouri?) that was a strategic storage point for years.

Fairport Harbor, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. There was a nucleon decay detector located there 1982-1991 that was momentarily famous in 1987 for detecting 8 neutrinos from Supernova 1987A.

According to this website... those bromide salts are kind of valuable. http://www.perekopbromine.com/en/products/bromide-salt

Antiepileptics, as you stated, going mostly to veterinary medicine. Though in T2K there may be a shortage or no manufacturing of antiepileptics medications that replaced them.

Disinfectant. Admittedly for swimming pools, though in T2K with water sources being compromised this can go to cleaning water treatment plants, "shock" polluted wells, and clean ship board distilling plants. Also lowers chlorine levels if you have to go nuclear on water tank.

That and petroleum uses it..... sending thousands of pounds to Saudi Arabia to get those refineries operating for the RDF seems lucrative too.

And silver bromide is used in photography, but also Xray film too. If you want to get your hospital out of the civil war (1860s) tech level again.

Silver linings?

Thanks for all the detailed info on salt production, I'm actually running a game that's heading near Salt Lake City so this is great! Another thing I was thinking about was spices, some would be pretty easy to find and grow like Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. But I imagine some might require more resources than they're worth, or might even take too long to grow. I've heard black pepper takes forever to grow and it needs extremely good conditions to survive.

That's an awful lot of carbon tetrachloride. Should be great for cleaning up soiled uniforms post-whoops.

Black pepper needs tropical conditions. About 90% of the world's supply is grown in Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Brazil, and China. Mexico grows some (between 600 and 2000 tons, out of ~475,000 tons produced annually), but it will be scarce.

Chili peppers have a much broader growth area, with large quantities raised in the United States and even up to Canada.

There's a great page at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization that can show where various crops are grown, with data going back to 1961.

There's at least one crop that I know of that isn't grown in the US, but could be - my mother has raised vanilla orchids, but getting beans is difficult enough that commercial production might not be viable (it requires hand pollination outside of Mexico due to the lack of Melipona bees). The only production in the Western hemisphere is Mexico (roughly 200 tons per year) and Guadeloupe (about 5 tons per year).

Just saw this, I wonder if this kind of thing would come back after coffee got scarce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuZS61SezE

That and chicory. One of the Hornblower books described using burnt bread as a coffee substitute.

As a non-coffee drinker, and most of the coffee drinker I know only drink it for the caffeine (as they say it tastes bad, unless you put enough milk and sugar) I wounder would this fill that fix?

Ok Draq,

Check out my posting to the food storage thread in the forum thread map.

While not actually a food, growing nightshade and/or belladonna might be useful if nerve agents were prevalent in the theatre. The aconite derived from them could be used as a cholinesterase booster to counter the effects.

I don't know about fish but sticking an electrified rod into the ground _will_ make the earthworms come sliding out--my brother used to do this to get worms for fishing.

Has anyone made a table for randomly foraged food in the European theatre? What kind of edible food grows in the wilderness?