Your friends will make fun of you. The neighbors will be talking about you and watching to see if you start wearing your gas mask and tin foil hat outside. Your family members will be worried about you and try to get you to seek help from a mental health professional.

What has happened with programming like Doomsday Prepper, is the degradation of anyone who does anything (no matter how small) to be responsible for themselves in the case of unusual circumstances. Just like the pejorative ‘survivalist’ in the late ’80s, early ’90s, the mainstream media demonizes any preparedness behavior, they paint a picture of near lunacy then mix in normal folks who are doing what they have done for generations to cause the masses to consider ANY common sense behavior to be abhorrent. The same thing happened in 1999 with Y2K preparations, show the extremes, mix in the farmer, make everybody who gardens and cans look like an extremist. The Modus Operandi is always the same, the goal is to keep people from being personally responsible.

Suppose you fall into ‘hard times’ such as unemployment, underemployment, a loss of investment, a serious accident or illness in the family, a tornado, hurricane, severe snow or ice, flood or fire that causes financial hardship or puts your employer temporarily out of business. Wouldn’t it be comforting to know you could get by for several months with the food you have in the cupboard? So, tell me, what is wrong with buying 2 or 3 of the items you normally purchase each time you go to the grocery store and slowly fill your cupboard with ‘extra’? You don’t have to tell anyone what you are doing because it’s not really out of the ordinary. What’s wrong with having something to eat when a heavy snowstorm prevents deliveries to the grocery stores and you from driving there? What’s wrong with having a little more of something on hand in case of unexpected company? What’s wrong with NOT having to run to the store if you haven’t planned dinner ahead of time?

While we firmly believe in and encourage others to have enough provisions to get through to the next harvest, what if you need to eat from the pantry for merely a month? If you have a long term storage, you start opening cans that have been packed to last 25 years and are now obligated to finish them within a year or two. Your long term or really serious situation plan has been compromised!

Be rational, food storage should be handled first for next week, then next month. From there, if you want to get your long term food storage tucked away while it’s still affordable and then go back to the ‘next year’ step, that’s fine. 

Some things people do to get ready for a ‘doomsday’ event are amusing, some of the ‘what if’ scenarios are pretty drastic, some scenarios even seem to come from a SciFi flick. But you know that being prepared with an adequate amount of food for your family is logical and responsible. Remember, your pantry is your business and if you don’t talk to the people who can’t grasp the intelligence of your decision to make provisions; they won’t know to think any differently than they do now.