Bacon in Every Survival Kit

I was recently in a class of like-minded individuals, who all had various reasons for feeling it necessary to always having a survival plan - even if you hoped to never have to use that plan.

While we were discussing various things to put in your survival kit, the conversation took an interesting and slightly strange, but definitely logical turn - towards Bacon.

Before you run away laughing at the title and opening of this article, let me go into a bit more detail so that you can see just where I'm coming from.

The idea came to me while we were discussing various fuels that you can find or make to use for fires when you're in a survival situation. One of those fuels that can be very useful for it's flammability, storage and portability was - Cooking Grease & Fats.

Ordinary cooking grease and oils that we would normally just chuck aside, could easily be saved and stored in case you ever needed to use them for starting a well needed fire in a survival situation. It can be stored just about forever in a sterile glass jar. It's fairly light weight and a little can go a long way, meaning that you can through even just a cat-food-can full of it in your survival kit, and in worst case scenario's, you can even eat the grease for necessary calories.

That got me to thinking... What kinds of foods produce the most grease, are easy to procure and preserve? There are plenty, but one really stuck out in my mind.

BACON.

Well, it's simple really...

• Bacon is one of the cheapest meat products you can buy, and for a survival situation you really want the cheapest kind you can get, because it is often full of more fat that higher quality sources.
• When cooked, bacon makes plenty of grease without having to cook much of it, which means it is nearly self-sustaining. As long as you have bacon, you can have fire, and with fire you always have a way to cook bacon.
• Bacon is edible. It's best when cooked, but in a worst case scenario you can eat it raw. Most bacon comes precooked anyways, so as long as it isn't rotten, you can eat it.
• Bacon is preservable. Even if you can't freeze it, you can salt and smoke it into a sort of jerky that can be stored for a very long time.
• The grease from bacon is very flammable and can be rubbed on just about anything to start a fire, or even burnt by itself if necessary. Any chef who's had a grease fire can attest to this.

Bacon also has the added convenience of being very compact in it's packaging, so there is no reason every person could store up to ten packages (or more) of bacon in their freezer, just in case.