Just evangelical Christians, which is even worse.
Jim Bakker has taken his apocalyptic Christian ministry to the next logical step. Since the world is going to end soon, with years and years of tribulation, his flock is going to need to eat, and with no more senior discounts at the Sizzler he’s going to have to provide for them. So after stirring up fear of doom for a while, he now tells his audience to hoard gold and silver and buy great big buckets of food to store away for Armageddon. Nice racket.
One little problem: somebody actually tasted the food in buckets. Their sole virtue is that they’re so loaded with preservatives that they should last for 20 years.
They taste, he says, like, “paper-mache,” “a bathroom at a bar at the end of the night in a college town,” and, simply, “one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten in my life.”
Religion poisons everything. Including, literally, food.
Fortunately, we atheists will always have food aplenty during those exciting days what with all those fat, juicy xtian babies just waiting to be roasted. Yum!
Wrong. They’ll all be fed on Bakker’s nasty food, so all the Christians will be thin, stringy, taste of preservatives, and induce vomiting.
I’m NOT defending Bakker and his ilk, but to be fair, I’ve yet to come across any camping/survival food product that I would call “good”. The best of them reach only “not completely repulsive”. I do the occasional “primitive survival camping” thing and bring along a few products like this as a backup. After three days of no food, they aren’t that bad. :)
Also, why do these Apocalyptics always act like ALL of the canned/dry goods in the world suddenly poof away. It’s like when the Rapture comes, gods gonna take all of the good Christians to heaven and also all of the Hamburger Helper.
Camping food has improved dramatically over the past 15 years, so that now it’s mostly vaguely palatable. Stick to the vegetarian stuff: I’m told the meat is still cardboard.
Then there’s the packs of Indian food. And good ol’fashioned cans. Or just dried beans and grains.
You should pack some seeds too by the way. You only need enough food to make it to your first harvest, maybe your second in case the first one fails.
True: one of the benefits of storing food in place versus camping is that you don’t have to haul it around. Cans and jars are good storage, albeit heavy. And you can cycle them out to your local food pantry*.
(This reminds me that while I think doomsday prep is silly, having a week or two’s supply of emergency food in case of natural disaster is not, and I should check that.)
* Before they expire; don’t be a jerk.
Actually regular canned goods last virtually forever and can taste just fine. Also, worth pointing out that when civilization collapses nobody is going to want gold or silver, which are useless.
All it needs is hot sauce.
buy great big buckets of food to store away for Armageddon
KFC totally needs to make the “armageddon bucket” – a great big vat of chicken that will last for 100 years!!
I’ve yet to come across any camping/survival food product that I would call “good”.
Kitchens of India and rice. I believe the stuff is indestructible, as is the rice (if packed sensibly) …. It’d get monotonous after a year or so. But you’d be well fed and nourished.
Wow, satire just died.
Reality wins.
The Mormons used to insist that its True Believers store barrels and barrels of raw wheat for the coming Tribulation. Maybe they still do. I know this because I helped a Mormon friend of mine move 2 or 3 times and the large, heavy wheat containers in her basement were always the least popular item to pick up and cart to the new place, even for the members of her Church (who probably had similar rations at their own homes.) When times got tight and she desperately needed to feed her children, it turned out that the wheat was full of bugs. She picked them out, made loaves of bread from it, and her kids absolutely hated the result, hungry as they were. Even she had to agree that the charming pioneer vision of the valiant homemaker baking nutritious and delicious natural bounty prudently laid up for emergencies wasn’t realistic. Not only did it taste terrible, but all the barrels which had gotten damp and moldy (maybe 6 or 7 of them?) had to be tossed.
I used to ask her about the coming Tribulation or apocalypse and her story, carefully culled from what she had been told, made no sense. Apparently there was going to be a world war with the majority of the population following Satan and the other side loving God and hiding in cellars, surviving on wheat till they could emerge into a world swept clean and pure. Who fought for God? I’m not sure. Angels, maybe — or perhaps brave Mormon men with God on their side. Either I no longer remember or she was deliberately and/or unavoidably vague.
I bet the LDS finally dropped the raw wheat idea. Talk about impractical. Bakker’s buckets look less old fashioned.
Our cupboards are full of Kitchens Of India products. We love them. In fact, there are a great number of various products who’s shelf life is extremely long (hence my remark above about hamburger helper.) The hawkers of “Survivalist” gear never mention those though.
And the whole hoarding gold and silver thing never made any sense to me. Think about it. You’re in an apocalyptic wasteland. Bands of rovers are crawling all over the place searching for resources that you also need/want. You come across a cache containing
1. Food
2. Fuel
3. Gold
4. A solar powered XBox
You’ve only got room for one of them. Which do you grab? Answer: Not gold.
Indeed. Gold is only valuable if there’s a surplus of resources available for trade. The whole premise of survivalist/end times thinking is that there will be scarcity. It simply makes no sense.
In all the post-apocolypse movies, there are always all those skulls along the sides of the roadways. And yet everyone assumes they’ll be one of the plucky, heroic survivors, rather than one of the skulls. Me, I’ll probably be one of the skulls.
What really bothers me about survivalists is that, after you’ve invested thousands of dollars in preparing for something, I’d think that you couldn’t help but subconsciously start hoping for the thing you had put so much thought and money into. Maybe even consciously.
I guess that could explain at least some of the Trump voters.
“These packets will be worth more than gold” but buy our sponsor’s gold anyway.
Ugh. Is there any way we can fix it for zombies?
The whole premise of survivalist/end times thinking is that there will be scarcity. It simply makes no sense.
The other premise of survivalist thinking is that they’re always going to be among the survivors. At the same time as they say “when 99% of the people die of…” they assume they’ll be in the 1%. When someone says something like that around me, I start snarking immediately: I accept the 99% premise, which means that there’s a 1% chance I’ll have tons of kitchens of india to eat and big trucks to drive and loads of gasoline to burn, etc. And a 99% chance I won’t have to worry about any of it. Most of the civilization-collapsing apocalypses that the survivalists worry about are the kind that more or less randomly hit, and survival is more or less random. It makes sense because the slow-moving disasters will be: survived by the rich and political elites. At the core of survivalism is a rather bizzare form of populism amounting to: “I wasn’t clever enough to be born in the 1% so instead I’m going to assume I’ll be lucky enough to be in the 1% of survivors.”
The stuff inside the bag is just packaging to keep the bag from crumpling up too much, which ruins the bag’s flavour.
Professional Tip: Before opening the bag to discard the packaging inside, wash off all the dirt, cooties, and peas. Then open and dispose of the packaging safely. Despite being for use in camping, that internal packaging rarely biodegrades. Well, actually, it does degrade… the environment.
I thought all the True Christians where going to be raptured to heaven, why would anyone plan on being the sinful Left Behind.
I think I’d rather learn to life off Radroaches and Mutfruit.
Ah…speaking as a Red Cross volunteer, please don’t confuse this with the common-sense recommendation to have three days’ worth of food and water on hand in case of a disaster.
Having said that, the stuff that you buy online with a long guaranteed shelf-life does taste like papier mache. For most of us, what you’ve got in the cupboards already will do (make sure that includes dried milk, Bisquick, peanut butter and cooking oil).
And pets. Don’t forget to keep your pets with you when the apocalypse happens.
There’s some good eat’n on a Pomeranian.*
.
.
.
*Not a true fact. Mine would only be good for soup and maybe one glove. Which I tell mine all the time.
The Honored First Wife and YOBling are not amused.
So eat them first. Feed any leftovers to the Pomeranian to fatten it up.
I live in earthquake country and the idea of being prepared for “The Big One” includes food, water, fuel for generator, first aid supplies and some cash, the banks may be off-line for a couple of weeks in a worse case.
but no buckets of majic survival food (crap) blessed by a TV religious huckster
uncle frogy
There are many denominations with conflicting interpretations of the end times. E.g. there are disagreements over the timing of the tribulations and at what point it’s too late to repent.
The bible, being notoriously vague and self-contradictory, does little to help the matter, although each denomination will claim that on a plain reading of the text, their particular version is the only possible conclusion. The fact that all the other denominations say the same thing doesn’t appear to bother them.
@Shay Simmons #21:
I spent three years as a student living off Pot Noodles. All you need is a small packet of industrial-strength soy sauce and papier mache becomes a true delight to the senses.
The wondrous Pot Noodle. Provides all the nutrients** that anyone needs to survive *tooth falls out*.
** Along with sufficient beer.
And was it just me, or did anyone else watch that chef’s video and see it automatically followed by one about how Russian bombers load and launch a cruise missile?
Oh, okay.
YOB @22
I feel better now…what with the fur-kid I’ve told for years he’s a perfect fuzzy slipper, and his hours-younger little brother who’s heard almost since birth what a lovely coat he’d make. (The boy is softer than mink, he’s lovely to pet.) :D
Their human sister…also not very amused.
Pfft, why hoard gold when I’ll really need to be hoarding bottlecaps anyway?
I’m with microraptor on the mutfruit, less certain about radroach meat though. Sugarbombs!
@ beardymcviking:
Radroach is surprisingly good once it’s been grilled. Besides, I figure that with my lack of combat skills it’s not going to be too long before I’m eaten by a Deathclaw or something anyway.