Food Buckets, Survivalism vs Prepping and Rifles Addendum

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about prepping and got some great questions so let’s just jump right in:

What Are Your Thoughts On Food Buckets? Food buckets, like the Readywise products, are designed for people to have a supply of food with a 25 year plus shelf life they don’t have to think about. In that respect they’re kind of for beginner preppers, in that you buy this container and just forget about it until you need it. You don’t need to rotate it like you do if you have a prepper pantry where you store things like rice and flour which you’re eating so you slowly replace it.

The benefits are very obvious and there’s a Black Friday sale on some Readywise Whey powder (I’m a bro as well as a prepper) that I’m grabbing but the downsides are more subtle and some only apply to older people like me. They are as follows:

1. Sodium levels on these sort of products are off the charts. They are in general not exactly a healthy food. As you get older and further along on your prepping journey health considerations of what you eat play a big factor in choices you’re making. Food buckets, MREs and camping food are not designed with health in mind. If you have high blood pressure for example don’t eat them.

2. Dollar per calorie you get much less than if you just plan out a pantry. Some of these are several dollars per serving, even now me and the Mrs. are putting together meals for a buck a serving.

But like I said I actually have some whey in a cart because after a long hike or when I lift weights I devolve into a bro scientist and “need” protein or I’’ “go catabolic” etc.

The happy medium for me is to buy things in this format I can’t store long term that I can get at reasonable prices. For me this is any sort of dairy and the holy grail – powdered eggs. Otherwise I’m a traditional cans o’ beans and snares for meat survivalist.

I met a survivalist who hates preppers, what gives? It’s tough to explain and has to do with culture, age etc. But let me give you a example of the difference between the two.

I was on r/preppers when they were flooded with panicked lefties who thought Trump was going to put them in camps (this was real, it was a thing they were preparing for) and later in a discussion about power outages a member told us that his plan was to buy a Tesla because the tesla could power his house. This devolved into an argument among preppers about solar panels, homemade hydroelectric and lots of other fantasy level cope for what they would do to keep posting on Reddit if a solar storm hit us. I made the mistake of chiming in that you should just buy candles and oil lamps and you don’t need electricity to live.

This was my first experience of seeing literal “rheee”-ing online. I was told in no uncertain terms that not only could no one survive without electricity but that the theory you could was basically Nazism. It did devolve into that.

So when you meet a survivalist who hates preppers that’s what the survivalist is thinking – that preppers are Redditors who are unwilling to learn to put it nicely. It’s a kind of reverse gatekeeping because in the 90s and 2000s “Survivalist” became such a toxic term (thanks to the media) the industry stopped using it and forced us to call ourselves preppers. On occasion I meet people who want to reclaim the term.

What rifles do you recommend? Don’t tell any gun people this but the only rifle I fired extensively was a M-16 A2 in the 90s. That was when I had 20/20 vision. I now have 20/75 vision in my shooting eye so all my long guns and gun purchases in general are partly based around understanding my realistic capabilities. This includes the fact that if I had optics that broke I can’t use back up sites particularly well without glasses which I might not have on me when I need to throw down with a rifle.

I also don’t like to wear glasses to the range, so…

I have a 410/45 that I use as a rifle for distances out to about 50 yards (with a Tru-glo front site) and do OK with .45 Colt. But I don’t fire rifles enough to recommend any brand or model. If I bought a rifle today it would probably be a pistol caliber lever action.

However as a long time survivalist I can tell you all the theories or anecdotal stories of rifle performance in survival situations. For example most “woodsbums” will tell you that a carbine .22 LR is their favorite gun, combat vets sometimes complain about how many rounds it takes to drop a enemy with 5.56, or that people in the Balkans war were ecstatic to have a bolt action rifle. I can’t in good conscience tell you what to buy though because I just don’t have the experience and this is a significant purchase for most people since for ARs you’re looking at $1000 plus.

My advice though is to not only talk to “tactical” people but shoot the shit with some hunters in your area to see what they use. Also if you are by a range that rents guns test some out and see what you like.

I just want to clarify when I talk about rifles it’s from a general survivalist perspective not because I’m an expert rifleman.

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