Ruff, "Famine and Survival in America"

Throughout history there have been innovators who have discovered important new knowledge or have propounded earth-shaking new theories, but with such poor public relations that they died in obscurity, their contributions generally unnoted. On the other hand, we have seen, time and again, someone with the right abilities pick up on and flashily promote these lost ideas so that the public finally becomes aware of them.

For example, if you polled students graduating from America’s “free” public school systems, I bet most of them would tell you that Columbus was the gent who first discovered the world was round, despite the fact that mathematicians and astronomers centuries earlier were calculating, with amazing precision, its diameter and circumference!

So it is with the book presently under scrutiny. This little paperback is doing more to shake up the mushrooming storable food industry and its customers than anything since the introduction of the freeze-drying process. And yet, nearly all of what it contains was previously scattered about in other widely distributed books.

What Ruff has done and done beautifully is take the ideas of Harry Browne and his predecessors concerning this country’s economic vulnerability, combine them with Paul Ehrlich and his colleague’s appraisals of the famine producing environmental problems we face, and use this knowledge to explain the need for food storage. He has also turned to Adelle Davis and the work of the many doctors and nutritionists whose findings she popularized and applied their conclusions to the storable food concepts and packages being marketed these days.

As a result of this synthesis, the so-called “year’s supply” programs being touted everywhere these days appear a bit more like expensive “fluff and fill” and less like the answer to future crisis than they had before. Not only does Ruff present refutory material about the “sacred four,” (wheat, powdered milk, honey, and salt) but he directs a frontal attack on that latter-day protein wonder product, texturized vegetable protein (soy meat-substitutes). Where he thinks he has substantial proof, he cites it, and where there are only untested assumptions, he points out the folly of risking blindly one’s future health because of the spiel of some smooth-talking salesperson with no background in nutrition.

Then he outlines what should be included in a good program, citing preferred sources and required quantities of proteins, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, and calories. He does this graphically, carefully explaining each step as he goes along. And in the end, he points out that if you go for a program without the supplements he recommends, you are taking a gamble you may not wish to chance losing. If he is right, you might one day end up half starved, while your body cannibalizes itself to create the hormones, enzymes, and digestive acids essential to prolonged life. If he’s wrong, he contends, you will have at worst spent a bit more than necessary and have the peace of mind that you have an overabundance of all the building blocks of good nutrition.

In order to view this book in the most objective light, it is worth remembering that Ruff is one of the super-distributors for the company that, at the time the book came into print, met his general criteria for a good food program, and that the food supplements and vitamins which this company produced long before it got into the storable food business are the main thing which make its program unique. So his purpose in writing the book may have had more to do with product royalties than those brought in by book sales.

But let’s give credit where it is due. He has raised some questions that needed raising; he has gotten some very lackadaisical food companies scrambling to reevaluate and update their products to make them competitive; and he has put out a clearly written little primer on the whys and hows of putting together a storable food program. I would not give all the ideas presented therein an unqualified endorsement, but I will say I consider this book must reading for all who are serious about their own long-term survival. Reviewed by Don Stephens / Survival (196 pages) / LR Price $3.95