Baked beans...

[sethorly]

Ah thank you Brambles, I'll edit my last post to reflect this. By "balanced diet" I meant a diet with all the food groups in the correct proportion, regardless of the total amount of food.

[Brambles]

I'm sorry, Sethorly but I simply don't understand your obsession with calories, what am I missing? As stated in my last post if you are eating a balanced diet, by that very fact, you are consuming sufficient calories and would not be in a position of starvation. If, however you only concentrate on calories, you could well end up forsaking some of the more important vitamins and minerals needed by the body to maintain health and wellbeing, including digestion, a lot of which are not in high calorie foods in sufficient quantity to be of any use.
Example; The Brambling has a very physical job, before this he was in a shop environment. His food intake has approximately doubled to accommodate this change in his lifestyle. He has not just increased his calorie intake, but he eats more of everything, to provide his need for more of all the other nutrients.

[Deeps]

My point is not that anyone would eat just beans or just pork'n'beans. My point is not that anyone would not try to eat a diet with the correct percentage of the different food groups. The points I was trying (not very well evidently) to draw out and discuss were:

1) Calories are vital. Without them you will lose energy, muscle mass, weight, and suffer psychological problems, and eventually die. It's true that not just calories that count, but a diet with the correct % of the different food groups is not an alternative to eating enough calories where lack of calories leads to starvation. It kinda looks to me that when some preppers store food they haven't counted the daily calories stored and so may suffer the effects of lack of calories - it won't matter whether the food groups are eaten in the correct proportion.

2) I had no idea how to get a decent amount of calories other than from predominantly meat-based foods. Thank you to those who gave alternative suggestions to meat in obtaining necessary calories. My desire is to find out how, as preppers, we can ensure that the food we are storing contains enough calories to avoid starvation; so far I think we've got peanut butter, chocolate, cheese, meat (incl. fish), and an oily diet. Furthermore, I've got a vegan mate who is trying to put on muscle mass; he eats huge amounts of chick peas, avocado, eggs and buckets of quorn, along with whey protein shakes - so I guess those can be added to the calorie-rich list.

edit/ thanks Brambles - changed "balanced diet" to "diet with the correct % of food groups".

Not trying to be pedantic but is your mate a vegan or a vegetarian ? There is a difference, vegans don't eat (or sometimes use) ANY animal products usually.

[Jamesey1981]

Not trying to be pedantic but is your mate a vegan or a vegetarian ? There is a difference, vegans don't eat (or sometimes use) ANY animal products usually.

Not really pedantic, you can't be a vegan and still eat milk and/or eggs, that's a vegetarian, and if you used milk or eggs in something and called it vegan then the actual vegans would want you burned at the stake!
There's actually a vegetarian shoe shop in Brighton, (where else?!), no animal products at all.

While we're on the subject of vegans watch this video, so funny, I worked in the catering industry for a long time, he's bang on.....https://youtu.be/z0O_VYcsIk8

[Deeps]

Not trying to be pedantic but is your mate a vegan or a vegetarian ? There is a difference, vegans don't eat (or sometimes use) ANY animal products usually.

Not really pedantic, you can't be a vegan and still eat milk and/or eggs, that's a vegetarian, and if you used milk or eggs in something and called it vegan then the actual vegans would want you burned at the stake!
There's actually a vegetarian shoe shop in Brighton, (where else?!), no animal products at all.

While we're on the subject of vegans watch this video, so funny, I worked in the catering industry for a long time, he's bang on.....https://youtu.be/z0O_VYcsIk8

Found the link funnier than I thought I would, I've seen plenty people get irrationally upset by veggies, being married to one (well thankfully a 'pescy' now). For every arsehole 'holier than thou' veggie there's a militant meat eater, most are surprised that I'm not and I sometimes play up my own willingness to miss meat in some meals. It's just something else for folk to get nippy about and categorise themselves.

I keep forgetting to say I love your avatar mate, brilliant.

[Jamesey1981]

Found the link funnier than I thought I would, I've seen plenty people get irrationally upset by veggies, being married to one (well thankfully a 'pescy' now). For every arsehole 'holier than thou' veggie there's a militant meat eater, most are surprised that I'm not and I sometimes play up my own willingness to miss meat in some meals. It's just something else for folk to get nippy about and categorise themselves.

I keep forgetting to say I love your avatar mate, brilliant.

Some of that guy's other videos are pretty funny as well, I've known a lot of new age types over the years and he sends them up pretty well.
Of course it doesn't apply to all veggies or vegans, I have a few friends that are one or the other, or even a lot weirder, I even cook for them sometimes and tempting as it is I never inject lard into any the vegetables.

Forget where the avatar came from, remembered the login to my photobucket account a while ago and it was on there, had forgotten all about it, I probably pinched it from someone on a forum years ago!

[Deeps]

My brother's a prick for it, I mind a few years back down at his and he took us to some gastro pub (lovely by the way) and when we'd decided what we were getting ordered the blah blah blah and "whatever veggie crap she's eating", nothing guaranteed to get your meal spat in or at least the fear of it which amounts to the same thing.

Haters gonna hate an' all that. I can't be arse with people pushing an agenda but when someone's 'idiosyncrasies' don't affect you then who cares.

[sethorly]

Two interesting takes on this issue with regards to being mindful of calories.

Caloric density: http://besthiking.net/how-to-choose-foo ... king-trip/
For prepping storage or carrying food whilst hiking, caloric density is a factor to take into account.
This page also makes the distinction between balanced nutrition (I mean food types in the correct proportion, not necessarily the correct amount for the consumer) and calories I've been trying to make.
As an example (given on the page), to get enough calories for a hypothetical day's hike, 25 kilos of apples could be eaten, or 1.8 kilos of butter. (Part of my original argument was about the implication of this on storage space.)

Cost per calorie: https://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/preppi ... ies-silly/
Yet another angle - trying to get the most bang for your buck whilst prepping. It's worth reading the comment section too as there are clearly differing views.

[Jamesey1981]

The thing is sethorly, we know all this.

No one ever said don't store high calorie foods, the only person that said not to store something was you back on the last thread where we had this exact same discussion when you said we shouldn't be storing canned beans.

The first link you've posted is a fair point, but it's completely irrelevant, what you carry for a short trip has no bearing on what you should store for long term survival, and the second link has dried pinto beans as the writer's second best rated food so completely contradicts what you're trying to say when you're insisting that beans are no good.

You're refusing to listen to what is being said to you, a balanced diet has enough calories in it, otherwise it wouldn't be a balanced diet, stop with this whole nonsense about balanced nutrition but with not enough calories, those two things are mutually exclusive.

You go ahead and store whatever you want, but we are not going to agree with you on this.

Let's take my stores as an example, I currently store 1 years worth of a reasonably balanced diet, (and a year's worth of liferaft rations but I'll ignore those for now.) I could probably change that easily enough and get 3 years (or more, but we'll call it 3 years) worth of raw calories in the same space with no regard for actual nutrition, should I?
No, of course not, I'll have scurvy and who knows what else long before that first year ends.
If I eat my years worth of food and there is no more food to be had anywhere then I'm in trouble, but if I eat my 3 years worth of pure calories then I'm in just as much trouble, and a lot less likely to be fit enough to solve my problem, I might have lived for two years longer, but those two years won't have been pleasant and if I can't find food then I'm still going to die, am I that much better off?

No matter how much food you have stored, unless you have a huge bunker, eventually it's going to run out, the whole point is to give you time for either the crisis to be over or until you've made other arrangements such as growing your own food, you're very unlikely to be able to store enough for the rest of your life, if you are then space or cost isn't going to be a problem so this whole discussion is completely irrelevant, and the healthier you can keep yourself the higher your chances of survival are when your preps run out.

[Brambles]

^^zactly! wish we had a like button. You've pretty much summed up my feelings and what I've been (badly ) trying to convey, Jamesey