How to make your own flour, sugar, oil, salt?

Question

i want to be self reliant. is their a book (or books) that teaches these basic necessities, for healthy long living?

and if you just going to google my question, then please click here first

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AtFE8nhpBZ3Ts3A6YJ.zQWTsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20080629130819AAlxgB0

Answer 1

I admire being self-reliant, but you are in for a lifetime of work.  Of the four things you mention, only one is reasonably easy to make yourself -- salt.  But, you need to live near the ocean.  You just put seawater in a large tray, and let it evaporate.  They used to do it on Cape Cod for years.

It would take a clever homeowner about 30 hours to make a 5 pound bag of flour.  Probably the same for sugar, and you'd need your own sugar cane field.  Vegetable oil is probably not far behind in terms of time and space needed.  All these things are made on a humongous scale, making them inexpensive and practical.  Consider this:  making salt is so difficult for regular people, that people used to be paid in salt instead of money.  "Sal", spanish for salt, is at the root of "salary".

Answer 2

The only one on that list I can think of readily is flour. I have a friend who buys wheat and grinds it into flour at home.

If you live near the beach, you could theoretically make salt from the sea water. You need a fairly sizable chunk of beach for that though. I saw them doing it on Food Network. They had these big plastic sheets with sea water pumped into them. When the water evaporates you sweep the salt up off of the plastic.

OH! I just thought of it. You need the Foxfire set of books. They've been making them since before I was born. They have a ton of books on different subjects all geared around Natural or Primitive Living. Basically living off the land with an axe and a knife sort of stuff.

Here's a link to one I found on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Foxfire-Book-Dress...

There are a whole series maybe you can find what you need there.

Good luck.

Answer 3

None of our forefathers, even the most resourceful and self-reliant, made salt.  It's mined from the ground or boiled from the sea.  The two elements that salt is made of are a green gas that will kill you, and a metal so unstable that if water touches it, it spontaneously will combust into a white-hot flame that you cannot extinguish.  Salt is cheap, and keeps forever.  If you are worried about running out, just stock up.

Sugar; another rarity that our ancestors used not very much of.  The easiest way to make your own sweet stuff is through bees.  Sugar cane doesn't grow in the US very well, and sugar beets are hard to process.  You really don't need much sugar, better off to live without it.  Once again, you can stock up.  So long as it's kept dry & away from vermin, sugar keeps a long time.

You only need a little for bread baking.

For oil, the best source for self-reliance is hogs.  Pork fat can keep for a very long time if properly preserved.  Making vegetable oil is beyond the scope of the primitive homesteader.  Good luck with this one; I couldn't do it unless I was starving.

Flour is one of the oldest cultivated foodstuffs.  It just takes a lot of land to grow the grain, and a low-tech method of grinding it.  

The downside to all of these is, of course, they take a ton of land, time, and manpower.   There is a reason they have been left in the past, but they're not bad things to have a little knowledge of; just in case!

Also... if you are really looking at self-reliance?  You had better get yourself some firearms, too.  You cannot live the primitive life without them, and expect to survive very long.

There are a lot of books out there...  it's a widely written about subject.  Look for texts on survival-ism.  They'll often have them at your local military surplus store.

Good luck!