Care for a big thick juicy salted beef steak sandwich? Or do you want to carve a button?

I was sitting on the back porch drinking coffee and looking over the river into the island beyond, every time I sit there something happens. It generally has something to do with people or creatures in the act of surviving. This time of year the birds and the small furry animals are suspiciously absent. In April most of the animals are on their nest or dens birthing and guarding their young ones. I was looking through the guardrail watching a bird dive for fish when something caught my eye. A cord was draped across the top rail and between it and the top of the rail a tiny spider made a web. The spider was no larger than 1/16" from the tip of one leg to it's opposite member. This small spider caught a mosquito in this invisible trap, I could not see the fabric of the web. Now I'm bringing this up because the flying insect was easily 5 times larger than the spider. It would be like me catching a hippopotamus and wrapping it up in string, good luck with that. I'm sure the spider had to deal with the parts of the bug that were not edible. This brings me to what my problem with the Hippo would be.

OK, wrap it up!

Preservation, how in the world would I preserve a large amount of fresh meat in a survival situation? One way is salted meat. It's an acient method of preserving meats, make a wooden barrel, pour a layer of course grained salt on the bottom and begin layering meat and salt. It will keep the meat edible for a very long time, up to a year. This was the manner in which the tall sailing ships preserved meat for the crew. I was under the impression that salted meat was much like "corned beef", or "pastrami". One of my reading interest is books dealing with the history of the sailing ships before steam, I marvel at how they all survived. The Captains of the ships had it the best, then the officers conditions deteriorated the further below decks a sailor lived. It's a known fact they all suffered from the threat of scurvy, a lack of vitamin "C". They also suffered from another ailment, how in the heck to eat salted meat. A large chunk of meat would be pulled out of the barrel, then let to soak in water for a couple of hours or days to soften it up. The meat came out of the barrel the density, color and feel of thick tree bark. The sailors used some of the meat to carve buttons for their clothes. It was much like 4" thick beef jerky, boiled in a stew was the best way to eat it, the flavor was secondary. The salted beef (more info on salted meat here) was complimented with ships biscuits, "hard tack" is what landlubbers called it. The spoiled parts of meat were carved off and tossed away, the sailors had a lot of illnesses.
Salted meat was stored for what we would call survival in this day and age, in the days of yore it was food, they didn't care much for it but it was all they had. In the event of a major catastrophic event we could very easily have a food shortage.

This doesn't look to bad. 

It is not likely we would have to resort to salting our meat, however it could very well happen. But instead of keeping a few hundred pounds of salt on hand in case I may need it to preserve food in an emergency, I would prefer a year's supply of freeze dried main courses, they are very good to eat and easy to store until needed, many with a 25 year shelf life. Mankind has existed for thousands of years without a constant predictable way to preserve food, it may come to that again. If we lose electricity we will lose all modern conveniences, not just our TV and telephones.
I'd like to hear your input, if a catastrophic event lasted for over year how would you cope? What's the probability of that happening? Let me know, thanks for reading the blog.
jimandkate
emergencykitsplus.com