Powdered egg

When I think of The Age of Warlords Cook Book my meandering thoughts often end with powdered egg. Why? Because the egg is at the heart of so many western delicacies and when eggs are scarce there is very little to use as an alternative. As an amateur baker of 22 years I've found that nothing quite matches up to egg for fluffiness in a sponge, meringue, or macaroon.
But it's also because when we run out of eggs and chickens, and corn flour just isn't cutting it, and we've tried all the alternatives, and just want a delicate cake, powdered egg will be the only substitute.

I am one of many who have scorned powdered egg. I have in my ignorance, disregarded it because it imitates something that is in abundance. But not any more. I vow to learn to cook with powdered egg! I will report back and share with you some of the challenges and limitations. The first and greatest challenge will be creating stiff peaks with powdered egg white and water.

Check out this link to WW2 recipes with dried egg "they are just as good as fresh eggs", from the British Ministry for Food.
Also check out this faux-blog trying to steer gym junkies away from powdered egg with their liquid egg supplement "It’s an excellent product, whether you’re slamming a protein shake between meals or making a breakfast omelet — it’s a much better alternative to egg white powder".
And lastly have a look at these powdered egg recipes from this rapture inspired site that also features Ark Prep 101. Ark Prep 101 is a preparedness program that uses a fun family game with coloured lists of monthly preparedness tasks that sit in a colourful wall mounted ark. "Thanks for sharing Alisa!"

Contingencies are important in planning!

Which future are we making contingencies for? Hey Western World.....What's the plan?



I went and checked around and found a site called Life after the oil crash and checked out their Preparedness Store which featured Nitro-Pak freeze dried ration packs with a thirty year shelf life and battery powered and freeze dried everything including Organic Chili Beef. It was like a camping store for people who don't know if they'll be coming back.
The site has ad listings from online book sellers and search engine corps, you know the ones. There were a range of books with titles like Long term survival in the coming Dark Age which is released by Paladin Press who entered the publishing market with a book titled 150 Questions for a Guerrilla back in the seventies. There was even a cookbook, The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook which makes me wonder what kind of market profiling went on. I get the feeling this particular cook book is rather reliable.

Our troubled future. GeoMon on food, and diesel dependency!

Well the future of which I speak may well be closer than you think. The sage of rage against the ecocidal machine has alleged that the peak oil estimates we have been given may be dodgy. The point of peak oil is a crucial one, after that point oil prices will only go up. It is extremely important that we know with as much certainty as possible when peak oil will happen. Knowing how diesel dependent modern agriculture is Geo Mon (George Monbiot) asserts that the knock-on effects of the early onset of peak oil without a prior shift to non diesel dependent agriculture would be catastrophic.
He counters the prevailing myth of modern farming productivity saying "The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil."

This makes food an even more urgent element in our troubled future. The questions are: How soon will peak oil arrive if it hasn't already? and How quickly can we dramatically reduce our dependency on diesel for farming.

As we crumble

"Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact."
The Dark Mountain Project has as it's goal "uncivilisation". This does not involve a fixed set of objectives but the process of recognising and responding to our dramatically changing future. A future without the abundance that we in the west have come to expect and manifestly co-opt from the world.
Literature, art, and other expressions of culture commonly characterise modern times as "a struggle to reach the mountain top" or "standing on the shoulders of giants", or we contemplate "Oh how far we have come!". Somehow while we all admit to human frailty but seem to blindly accept the idea that as time moves on we inevitably become less brutish and more enlightened. We lionise the present but do we think with favour about our future? Do we truly comprehend what our present is predicated upon?
Larry Elliot of The Guardian contends that the fall of the Berlin wall represents the beginning of the pre-eminence of capitalism, a mere twenty years! He paints a picture of a veritable steeple chase of obstacles set before the globalised economy without getting into the likely constraints supplied by depleting resources like oil, coal, silicone, and the rare metals on which our affluence has come to depend.
We battle and poison religious, social, and political relations over oil and many say we will do the same over water. We destroy lives for food. What else? How will we respond to true constraints? Where will we who have known only unconstrained growth for sixty years find the resourcefulness we need to endure?