"For Jones, the prospect of not having access to food is frightening. She said most people, herself included, only have food on hand for three or four days." Quoted from the article, "Grocery Industry Prepares for Bird Flu" In NewsMax.com Wires, Monday, Feb. 19, 2007.
This was one of the first articles that I chose to read that morning and it got me thinking back to a time in 1968 when the article went on further to state, " The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates a third of the population could fall ill if the H5N1 strain of the bird flu mutates into a form that spreads easily from person to person. It's not clear if that will ever happen"...
However, my thought dalliance into the past in relation to this quickly passed as so many things seem to do at my age, but then, as I later scanned thru The Daily Kos, the following head caught my eye. "Why We All Need To Store Food And Water" http://demfromct.dailykos.com/
Was it perhaps my Karma then to relate the following brief story?
Segue back to 1968 once again. It was then that I was a volunteer canverser to try to convince the few households on the rural ridge that I was living on to give up on their ‘from roof rain drainage into their cisterns’ water supply systems in favor of signing up for water supply from the rural water line that was soon to come down the ridge and that was how I first met Addison.
Addison was not his birth name and indeed parts of his past, I was to learn, were a mystery with some of it not coming to light, even to his wife, until after his death in 2006.
Addison was a man with multi talented hands. He was a professional photographer, a professional hypnotist, a man who had built his home with his own hands, and he started the first composting company in our area.
He owned & resided on a small farm, down the ridge from me, on which he and his wife raised goats, chickens and rabbits and an occasional cow. They had a small dug out pond with fish in it and a very large vegetable garden.
They did everything organically long before that became popular.
They canned what they grew and kept storable produce in a large root cellar dug out beneath their home. The cellar had access from within the house so that they did not have to leave the in winter wood heated home to access produce for dinner . I do not know how the occasional Copperhead snake managed to get into the root cellar however.
Their life style was novel enough for those times to get them a brief write up in the National Geographic magazine years ago.
Addison was definitely a one of a kind character. He was almost endlessly verbose on the many areas of his interests which included religion. While I suspected that deep, deep down he was a Christian, his ruminations about religion seemed to me to be more "New Age" in nature.
He believed in space aliens but at the same time could touch, at least lightly, on the topic of Quantum Mechanics.
He took me on my first visit to a functioning Commune and also introduced me to various friends of his who were allegedly mystics. He would use hypnosis to " put them into a trance state " and his wife would act as the "Facilitator" to conduct "Readings".
Such were my multiple experiences with him and such were the topics that flavored our talks.
Eventually, he persuaded me to start my own vegetable gardening at my home and even had me raising my own rabbits until I realized that I just didn’t have the heart to kill them for our table.
Maybe it might have been a deep down Christian preparing for the supposed "End Time" turbulence that many predict to come on his part, or maybe it was just that he was a product of the "Big Depression" era, I really don’t know the reason for it, but he also was want to preach "Gloom & Doom". As such he soon had me thinking about setting food aside for "The Hard times".
Coincidentally, the nurses aide assigned to work for me at the University Clinic, turned out to be a Mormon. She proved to be very affailable in helping me to acquire food items, through her church, suitable for storage .
Also, coincident with the foregoing, the University was selling off surplus and no longer needed used items. Included were a number of large metal cans that had seen use for water storage back when stocking "Bomb Shelters" was de rigueur. They had tightly sealing lids and I purchased a quantity of them.
Into the cans went sacks of Turkey Red wheat kernels, powdered milk and sugar. The cans along with gallon jugs of water were stored in space beneath my home and as time went on without a catastrophe... were all but forgotten.
My subsequent hard times in life proved to have nothing to do with a need for food.
Now, almost forty years later, my wife and I are getting ready to sell our home. A Google search tells me that my stored food is no longer edible though any good Mormon would have long since known that.
Given my past experience, but yet with a "Bird Flu" pandemic now a possibility and the food warning offered to be heeded, I find that I have had enough of living with "Gloom & Doom".
True, I have asked the contractor building our new much smaller home to put a small shelf in the garage and hang a "GrowLux" bulb over it, but for right now can anyone tell me how to get rid of all those cans of inedible stored food?