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Different traditional ways of preserving food have been around since ancient times and other modern methods have emerged as technology evolves.

If you want to prepare for an emergency, it’s worth knowing a food preservation method or two so you can keep your stockpile full of supplies.(h/t to IAmCountryside.com) Food preservation ensures a reliable food supply year-round

In the past, people encountered freezing winters or they wanted to live somewhere else but had to bring large amounts of food with them until they reached their destination.

Soon, the Industrial Revolution brought new ways of preserving food. But as the supermarket became more common, the knowledge of different food preservation methods waned.

This knowledge encountered a resurgence as humanity acknowledged that food preservation is still important. While there is little to no risk of starvation now, as a prepper knowing some of these methods can give you the freedom to eat quality food year-round and after a disaster. Canning

Nicolas Appert is credited for discovering howto preserve fruits in jars.

During the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers and sailors atesalt-preserved meats and whatever fresh fruits and vegetables they could find. Unfortunately, depending on the seasons and location, these items were often scarce.

Because Napoleon needed to feed his troops better, he offered 12,000 francs to whoever could develop a new and safe way of preserving food. He also wanted the food to be nutritious, portable and dependable.

Appert, who was a French confectioner, observed that food sealed in containers and then heated was safe to eat until the container opened.

During each economic recession in the U.S., home canning and commercially canned foods gain popularity because they give financially stressed households a chance to store food or spend less on their meals. Cold storage

The use of snow and ice to preserve food goesback to the Romans who dug snow pits and insulated them with grass. Persians also stored ice in pits called yakhchals.

In the U.S., ice houses were built on estates or small and separate buildings for storing food. The ice industry flourished in the early 1800s when inventions like the horse-drawn ice cutter and insulated ships ensured safer and more profitable harvesting.

Families used iceboxes to keep food cold. For a century, families received ice delivered to them from larger ice houses.

The first gas-powered refrigerator appeared in 1911, but households in America using electricity had to wait until 1927. Newer inventions and developments made refrigerators safer, more efficient and more affordable.

The followingyears saw more developments, such as refrigerated railroad cars, refrigerated trailers for semi trucks, small fridges in college dorms and room-sized units for restaurants and grocery stores. (Related: 4 Food preservation methods to avoid spoilage and 3 alternatives to refrigeration.) Dehydrating

Through dehydration, you can prevent the growth ofbacteria, mold and yeast that cause food spoilage.Removing moisture allows food to last months or years while also retaining many nutrients.

The earliest known food dehydration was practiced in 12,000 B.C. People in modern-day the Middle East and Asia laid food out under the sun, where desert air desiccated it before storage.

During the American Civil War, food was dehydrated for commercial use. However, its quality was poor and its popularity plummeted after the war.

In modern times, dehydration is once again a thriving industry not because of war, butin preparation for one. Preppers also dehydrated food to prepare for natural disasters, economic downturns or other emergencies. Freeze-drying

Freeze-drying might seem like one of the newest food preservation methods becauseArsene d’Arsonval developed the process of lyophilization in 1906. Thisprocess involves freezing the food and dropping the surrounding pressure so ice turns directly to vapor.

However,freeze-drying has existed as early as the Incan Empire.

Frost-resistant potato varieties are exposed to freezing nights in the Andes and then brought into the sunlight. Both sunlight and trampling by foot eliminate water and remove skins from the potatoes, which allows them to freeze again.

The process produces a dried, wrinkled, pelletized potato product that can last years. Chuno is then used as flour, in soups or desserts.

While you can use appliances to freeze-dry food at home, you can also purchase freeze-dried food for your stockpile to skip the hassle of the whole process. Freezing

Freezinghas been used for centuries. Freezing food for commercial transport started sometime in 1885 when sailors packed frozen chicken and geese into insulated containers before shipping from Russia to London. This occurred during winter months and the introduction of cold air freezing plants in Russia enabled the industry.

While it might seem redundant to learn about these different food preservation methods amid modern technology and the availability of different products, doing so can helpextend your garden harvests into the winter. Where to get freeze-dried food supplies for your prepping needs

The Health Ranger Store is committed to helping you prepare for any emergency andwe’re proud to introduce different items for your prepping stockpile.

TheRanger Bucket Set – Organic Emergency Storable Food Supplyis an emergency food supply that’s certified organic and laboratory verified. All the food items in the buckets are organic, non-GMO, laboratory-tested for heavy metals and free of chemical ingredients such as preservatives or MSG.

The buckets contain pantry essentials such as black beans, long-grain brown rice and rolled oats. These products can be stored for up to 10 to 15 years, depending on storage conditions.

The Health Ranger Store also offers our specialty Fair Trade Organic Freeze-Dried Coffee in a convenient and easy-to-prepare format.

With a much longer shelf life than regular coffee, Health Ranger Select Organic Freeze-Dried Instant Coffee delivers a bold and exquisite flavor of medium roast coffee that you can enjoy immediately.

Visit Health Ranger Store and Brighteon Storeand browse lab-verified food supplies for your prepping needs.To read more stories about food preservation and tips for building your survival stockpile, visitFoodStorage.news.

Watch this clip about the health benefits of drinking organic coffee.

This video is from theHealth Ranger Store channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories:

An essential guide to storing organic foods for survival.

Powdered cheese: A versatile, shelf-stable food to add to your survival stockpile.

HIDDEN DANGER: Beware of arsenic contamination in rice.

Sources include:

IAmCountryside.com

HealthRangerStore.com 1

HealthRangerStore.com 2

HealthRangerStore.com 3

Brighteon.com
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Ofwat could be scrapped in water reforms

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Ofwat could be scrapped in water reforms

An independent review of the water industry is to recommend sweeping changes to the way the sector is managed, including the potential replacement of Ofwat with a strengthened body combining economic and environmental regulation.

Former Bank of England governor Sir Jon Cunliffe will publish the findings of the Independent Water Commission on Monday, with stakeholders across the industry expecting significant changes to regulation to be at its heart.

The existing regulator Ofwat has been under fire from all sides in recent years amid rising public anger at levels of pollution and the financial management of water companies.

Read more:
Serious water pollution incidents in England up 60% last year

Why has there been a surge in water pollution?

Campaigners and politicians have accused Ofwat of failing to hold water operators to account, while the companies complain that its focus on keeping bills down has prevented appropriate investment in infrastructure.

In an interim report, published in June, Sir Jon identified the presence of multiple regulators with overlapping responsibilities as a key issue facing the industry.

While Ofwat is the economic regulator, the Environment Agency has responsibility for setting pollution standards, alongside the Drinking Water Inspectorate.

More on Environment

Sir Jon’s final report is expected to include a recommendation that the government consider a new regulator that combines Ofwat’s economic regulatory powers with the water-facing responsibilities currently managed by the EA.

In his interim report, Sir Jon said options for reform ranged from “rationalising” existing regulation to “fundamental, structural options for integrating regulatory remits and functions”.

He is understood to have discussed the implications of fundamental reform with senior figures in industry and government in the last week as he finalised his report.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed is expected to launch a consultation on the proposals following publication of the commission report.

The commission is also expected to recommend a “major shift” in the model of economic regulation, which currently relies on econometric modelling, to a supervisory approach that takes more account of individual company circumstances.

Read more from Sky News:
Police taking no further action over Kneecap’s Glastonbury show
New fee for Britons travelling to EU will cost more than expected

How water can teach Labour a much-needed lesson


Liz Bates

Liz Bates

Political correspondent

@wizbates

On Monday, the government’s long-awaited review into the UK’s water industry will finally report.

The expectation is that it will recommend sweeping changes – including the abolition of the regulator, Ofwat.

But frustrated customers of the water companies could rightly complain that the process of taking on this failing sector and its regulator has been slow and ineffective.

They may be forgiven for going further and suggesting that how Labour has dealt with water is symbolic of their inability to make an impact across many areas of public life, leaving many of their voters disappointed.

This is an industry that has been visibly and rapidly declining for decades, with the illegal sewage dumping and rotting pipes in stark contrast with the vast salaries and bonuses paid out to their executives.

It doesn’t take a review to see what’s gone wrong. Most informed members of the public could explain what has happened in a matter of minutes.

And yet, despite 14 years in opposition with plenty of time to put together a radical plan, a review is exactly what the government decided on before taking on Ofwat.

Month after month, they were asked if they believed the water industry regulator was fit for purpose despite the obvious disintegration on their watch. Every time the answer was ‘yes’.

As in so many areas of government, Labour, instead of acting, needed someone else to make the decision for them, meaning that it has taken over a year to come to the simple conclusion that the regulator is in fact, not fit for purpose.

As they enter their second year in office, maybe this can provide a lesson they desperately need to learn if they want to turn around their fortunes.

That bold decisions do not require months of review, endless consultations, or outside experts to endlessly analyse the problem.

They just need to get on with it. Voters will thank them.

Sir Jon has said the water industry requires long-term strategic planning and stability in order to make it attractive to “low-risk, low-return investors”.

The water industry has long complained that the current model, in which companies are benchmarked against a notional model operator, and penalised for failing to hit financial and environmental standards, risks a “doom loop”.

Thames Water, currently battling to complete an equity process to avoid falling into special administration, has said the imposition of huge fines for failing to meet pollution standards is one of the reasons it is in financial distress.

Publication of the Independent Commission report comes after the Environment Agency published figures showing that serious pollution incidents increased by 60% in 2024, and as Thames Water imposes a hosepipe ban on 15m customers.

Ofwat, Water UK and the Department for the Environment all declined to comment.

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Bitcoin becomes 5th global asset ahead of “Crypto Week,” flips Amazon: Finance Redefined

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Bitcoin becomes 5th global asset ahead of “Crypto Week,” flips Amazon: Finance Redefined

Bitcoin becomes 5th global asset ahead of “Crypto Week,” flips Amazon: Finance Redefined

Bitcoin adoption has been soaring, leading up to the optimistic regulatory expectations related to “Crypto Week” in Washington.

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The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund

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The investor behind Opendoor's 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Courtesy: Opendoor

On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya

When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

‘Epic comeback’

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Banking on growth

Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.

Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

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