https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Z8NLGYT/
Emergency Food Prep and Nutrition looks like a helpful guide. Can you tell us a little about it?
This is from the INTRODUCTION:
In 2014, during Atlanta’s “Snowmageddon,” we realized that businesses like our own were ill-prepared to support employees during such emergencies and exponentially bigger disasters such as Katrina and Harvey in Louisiana and Texas that were forthcoming.
Since then, the annual number of disasters and their costs to business have gone up, way up. To make matters worse, what one can buy with a dollar is decreasing, making it harder for the workforce to make ends meet and afford good food.
Thus, we offer the reader a quick overview on the history of meals, nutrition, food variety around the world, and what it took for our ancestors to survive and what it will take for workers and families to survive today. This book includes ideas for how to augment emergency food with common ingredients and items in the pantry and perhaps growing in the garden. Foraging for edibles in the field across the street or in the woods is another resourceful way to add nutrition and flavor and extend the duration of emergency food kits.
This booklet is meant to support the delicious and nutritious variety of foods we make and sell to businesses, organizations, and communities every day to provide food insurance and peace of mind before disaster strikes.
Any plans to turn it into a series?
Not really a series, but, we are considering making updates to the book and time passes, as food insecurity increases and as families have a harder time putting food on the table.
How long did it take you to write Emergency Food Prep and Nutrition?
It took us about 6 months to write part time as most of our time has been spent developing our business that manufactures emergency food and distributes it worldwide.
What inspired you when writing Emergency Food Prep and Nutrition?
Sadly, over half of the citizen of the USA cannot afford a $400 emergency. That means that when disaster strikes an area of the country with floods, or fires, or hurricanes that essential workers, especially those in high-reliability organizations (HROs) such as nuclear power plants, water treatment facilities, hospitals and the like, the workforce can’t afford the extra money to help themselves. They are, essentially, paralyzed, unable to get their own needs met and unable to move to someplace safe. They will end up in FEMA camp lines. So, the book aims at helping people to understand nutrition on basic terms so they can meet the own food needs, to get creative about where to find the nutrition, and then to consider how to augment nutrition with long-term, shelf-stable foods.
What will readers get out of your book?
We hope readers, especially those who truly are in the workforce and in need of support from the companies they work with, if they feel it would benefit them and their families, go to their employers and ask for them to have food for them on standby, as a form of food insurance.
How did you come up with the ideas in Emergency Food Prep and Nutrition? We were looking to see what was going to be needed in the world to help solve food insecurity issues that have been brought on by government reaction to the pandemic, and now made worse by a Russian war with Ukraine. The book and a whole business was formed around this idea; How to have emergency food available to the American workforce when they can’t afford it and we need them?
Did anything stick out as particularly challenging when writing Emergency Food Prep and Nutrition? Yes, learning about and becoming experts in nutrition ourselves as we took on the challenge.
Can you tell us a little about your background?
Short Biography
Husband and wife team, Kwiyoung Baumgarten, David Baumgarten are the founders of Secure Foods LLC, an emergency food supply and distribution company based in Highlands, NC.
It is our wish to help High-Reliability Organization with food insurance solution for their disaster planning goals in area of the country that are hardest it by natural disasters.
Where can readers find out more about your work?