corn

CORN
Sometime around the Great Depression the Federales did a study on why so many Southern children were suffering from malnutrition. The culprit turned out to be in their use of corn. It was ground into meal and then used as flour. So standards were set where millers were told to add nutrients to their meal to avoid the problem of a corn heavy diet lacking certain nutrients. Alas, rather than forcing this practice on businesses they could have accomplished the same thing by educating the people about the traditional Mexican way of preparation which frees up the niacin and other needed nutrients.
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Just as potatoes need to be cooked to free up some of its nutrients, so corn must be processed with limestone or wood ash to make it more than an inferior grain. The Mexican peasants have been doing it this way for untold years. If in the future you plan on relying heavily on corn for your emergency diet ( and you should due to its low cost ) you need to learn how to properly prepare corn so it will not cause a nutrient deficiency.
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Take two pounds of corn to one half cup of calcium carbonate. This is also known as slaked lime. To that is added three quarts of water. Adjust to fit the amount of corn meal used. You also need a stainless steel or copper pan and a colander. In your kettle add the water and slowly stir in your calcium carbonate ( “cal carb” ) in the unheated water. Add corn and bring to a boil. After three minutes reduce heat and simmer for twenty minutes. Let cool and then soak overnight about ten hours. In the morning put the corn in the colander and rinse at least twice ( rinse while rubbing the corn ) to wash the lime away. Otherwise you will get a bitter taste. Grind into flour and use quickly as the corn oils can now spoil.
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I couldn’t find a recipe using wood ash, but to use lime you can buy the cal carb in powdered form at a Mexican food source. In a collapse situation the following have a good source. Seashells. Snail shells. Agricultural lime. And egg shells are 95% cal carb. If you go to the mineral source you can use chalk, limestone or marble. In a really desperate situation some types of antacids have a high content of cal carb.
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If you decide to make corn a large portion of your food storage, you are in luck. It presently sells for $5 for fifty pounds at the feed store. Almost half the cost of wheat. You can use feed corn or deer corn. Anything except seed corn which is coated with a fungicide. Corn is corn. Kelloggs cereal uses the same stuff as is feed to the chickens. And, yes, buying at the feed store you are going to encounter little rocks and bits of stalks and other grains. So what. Get over it. I remember eating my mothers home made refried beans and biting into stones that got through the packaging process. I survived without permanent harm.
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Think about it. You can grow corn and beans and potatoes for a good diet. Wheat is a little harder. The others will grow in a garden. Wheat will too but might not be enough in a small space. Stocking up on corn is half the price of wheat. You can stock as much wheat as you want but then supplement that with almost twice the corn for the same price. Four hundred pounds of wheat is $60. It is $40 for corn. Not a big deal if you are comfortable with a year supply of food. But if you think five to ten years is better you are looking at a difference of $100 to $200, enough to buy a surplus rifle and some ammo. The cost of two years worth of corn is just slightly more than a mere paltry twelve MRE meals. Two years verses twelve days.
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Take advantage of our petroleum powered farms churning out super low price food. No, not California produce. Midwest grain. Or grain from wherever as we experience a drought. It will not last forever, do it while you can. The whole point of storing food is that either the water or the petroleum can become scarce and endanger our food supply. And a lot of us are living in areas not suitable for agriculture. I’m in a desert. Most of California can’t grow crops without importing water from out of state. The entire southwest. The Rocky mountain region. There is a reason most of the population stayed back east. That is where the food is produced. And even if you live there all the farmland might be paved over. Store food. Our ability to become food self sufficient will not happen overnight. It will take a lot of famine to relearn to farm in Post-Petroleum America.
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As I have written about before it takes a mere $1,000 to stock a ten years supply of food per person if you use half wheat and half corn. Of course storage is extra, but this is less than what most survivalists spend on one friggin lousy assault rifle with magazines ( ammo extra ). After that is done you can relax. You can survive almost anything now, at least food wise. What if Yellowstone blew and we went into a “nuclear winter” from all the ash in the atmosphere. It wouldn’t matter if you had farm land. But it would if you had a good food storage. Not the perfect food storage to be sure. But better than one year of canned goods or freeze dried slop. It would keep you alive in reasonable good health.
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Or just go and buy that new assault rifle. Then you can kill and eat your fellow man. That sounds just yummy, doesn’t it?
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