I grew up in a family that was poor but had a large pantry and think it as normal though and I guess times change..
I love your common sense approach to prepping.
@Carl
Carl,
Your family had a large pantry. I am likely a generation older than you are – my parents grew up on a farm in Arkansas and their food was what they grew, milk and butter from their cows, meat from their pigs, eggs from their chickens.
Then they married and moved to Texas where he worked for Sun Oil Company and I was born. We had a big garden, fruit trees, two pigs every year, and chickens. Eventually, the grocery stores had a lot of food and people began to buy food there and not have gardens. There is a sections of my book, “We Did It To Ourselves” that discusses how we got to where we are today. Today, if the grocery has no food, people have no food. Very few people grow a garden now and don’t know how to grow food. I suspect they think you buy an envelope of seeds and throw it on the ground and it grows. The first year I tried to grow food, I failed. The second year I had 150 containers with real food growing, all grown from seeds. I grew 10 types of tomatoes to see which tomatoes would grow better where I was. Wow, I had tomatoes of my own growing from seed. There is a Gardening section in the book explaining how to do this.
Right now on TV, I see people in Puerto Rico trying to cross a river where the bridge was taken out. That rushing river of water would be good water if it was put through a Big Berkey water filter. There is plenty of water there for everyone if they just had that Berkey. That one filter cartridge in it will last for months before it needs another one.
Remember that saying, give a person a fish or give him/her a fishing pole and bait and he/she has fish forever? It is the same with water. Give a person a bottle of water or give him/her a Big Berkey and extra filter cartridges and they have good water forever.
I am glad you have stored water and food – you are one of the few who has done this and your family will live whatever the emergency – if it is an EMP, there will be no power, no water, no food, no gasoline. People will start dying after 5-6-7 days without water. Patients in hospitals will start dying within a few days after an EMP. They will be the first to die.
Within less than one week after an EMP, it won’t be safe to go to any store as people desperate to stay alive will riot inside stores as they will have no money as ATM machines and banks will be closed. That is the situation right now in Puerto Rico, they have no cash money because ATM machines don’t work and banks are closed.
Store one dollar bills and quarters. There is a story in my book about my trying to get one dollar bills and quarters from a bank. That is in Chapter Twenty-Three, “MONEY – BARTER OR NOT”.
