Lost Skills

“Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter,” – Bible, Proverbs 30:33

If you’ve been reading this blog the past few days, you may be tired of rhetoric and politics and the economy. When will Gary ever go back to traditional preparedness advice? How about now?

I was looking at the blog article Storing Food Without Refrigeration and noticing the many items that could be kept for weeks or months at room temperature if you lose power: Condiments & Spreads, some Dairy products, some meat & eggs, bread & yeast. I had to do a double take - Dairy, meat? What gives here? Even inside my fridge I’ve had milk spoil.

Taking a closer look at the products I noticed the dairy items were cheese, butter and yogurt; the meat products were mostly salami and other dried meats. Then a light bulb lit over my head. Ah ha! Our medieval and pioneer ancestors invented these very products because they lacked refrigerators. Cheese, butter, salami, etc, (in addition to being tasty) were invented to extend the life of milk & meat.

Today we take these room-temperature products for granted and sometimes abuse them (hmm…yummy). Cheese & butter are concentrated milk fat. Many sausages are packed with salt or other preservatives that should not be overindulged in. However if you treat them as treats, part of food storage to treasure and dole out in limited quantities, your body will be thankful.

Speaking of food storage, would you know how to preserve meat and milk if faced with a long-term power outage? You could be like friends of ours who, after a hurricane in Puerto Rico, hosted a giant BBQ for the neighborhood; sharing their frozen steaks before they went bad. Or you could practice pioneer recipes.

Let’s start with butter. Nothing is easier.

1. Put heavy cream inside a clean jar. (Sorry skim milk won’t do. You need the milk fats)
2. Close the lid tightly.
3. Shake.

That’s it. Now you may get sore arms (or a great workout) before all the milk converts to butter but it will happen. Keep shaking, rolling, etc. An alternative to shaking is using a butter churn. These devices use a paddle with fins to agitate the milk as you move the handle up and down.

If you’d like to try something more ambitious, here is a site for making yogurt:
http://hubpages.com/hub/How_to_make_your_own_yogurt_-_An_illustrated_guide

Bottom Line

Most of us were never taught the many skills that kept our ancestors alive.
In Why a Depression Today Would be worse than in the 1930s, the author, a museum curator, notes that rural Depression era families could make butter, smoke meat, grow a garden, raise chickens, pull a tooth, draw well water, do basic medicine, ride a horse or bike, etc. They had the skills to survive independently with little to no money. Today we are like the fat space-cruiser passengers in the movie Wall*E. Totally dependent on others (like technology or government) to fulfill our basic needs.