Note: This article is part of a series on personal preparation to help you answer the question, "What should I do?" Our goal is to provide a safe, rational, relatively comfortable experience for those who are just coming to the realization that it would be prudent to take precautionary steps against an uncertain future. Those who have already taken these basic steps (and more) are invited to help us improve what is offered here by contributing comments, as this content is meant to be dynamic and improve over time.
Storing Food
Everyone should have a minimum of three months' worth of food stored. It's cheap; it's easy; it's a no-brainer.
Three good reasons for storing food are:
- Because it's cheap
- Because it's prudent
- Because your great-grandparents would yell at you for not doing it
Once upon a time, there was a person in every community whose job it was to ensure that sufficient food stocks existed in their town to carry the people through the winter. Their job was to travel to all the farms and granaries, total up all the food, divide by the number of people in town, and assess whether the community would be able to make it through the winter. In fact, it is only very recently that we have lost this function, and today most people think it rather odd to even wonder about food security.
But for all of human history, and even up until about a hundred years ago in the United States, this was not odd at all. In fact, the reverse—going into winter without ensuring a local store of food sufficient to feed the community—would have been considered incomprehensible.
