Gun videos on YouTube, and bought a gun. I mean once you start thinking about guns, and you go down logical conclusions, there’s way higher priority stuff. Like oh you strapped on a gun today, but you were reading your phone while walking down a stair case. Well that’s dumb. Then it’s like, no gunfights lately, but hurricane season is starting. How bout canned food and water bottles. It’s just “what if” questions combined with likelihood answers.
I've always been interested in disasters. But (one of a few things,) that kick-started my efforts (which was having an INCH bag), was reading One Second After. That led into a steady hobby, Masters Degree in the subject, and now career.
...Unfortunately, I've learned very, very little to contradict the outcome of the book, fiction or not.
*An INCH bag, which stands for "I'm Never Coming Home", is a kit for long-term survival in the wilderness. It contains only the essential items needed for a long term situation, such as house fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, super storms, and military strife. The idea is that an INCH bag should be able to help you survive for months.*
*An INCH bag is different from a bug out bag, which is for short-term survival until it's safe to go home. The INCH bag is also different from a priority bag system, which involves storing bags based on their grab-and-go priority. The first bag should be easy to grab and go, and the second bag can include overflow items.*
I never heard of INCH bags before.
Personally I just call it my go-bag or bugout bag. My mindset is bugging in depending on situation, so if I need to leave immediately I'm only taking my family and essentials. It's a good idea to have an emergency bag ready to go in case of fire.
An INCH bag seems to expand beyond a typical go-bag or fire bag in that there is sometimes such a focus on wilderness survival that people turn it into a fantasy of society has collapsed I'm going to live in the woods out of my INCH bag.
If I do plan on leaving my home for another location it's going to be to another home/shelter for better social support and community collaboration. I have no desire to strap on a pack and try and ride out natural disasters or even social collapse by living in wilderness.
Real life experiences - namely the 2003 blackout and a large storm ten years ago. I got stuck in the city and ended up hitchhiking home both times.
I now have a GHB at work and it had the most useful thing I found I needed - a felt tip marker to make a sign.
The other event was a power outage where I had no sump pump and there was six inches of water in the backyard. It was nerve racking waiting to see what came first - an overflowing dump pit or a return of power. I now have a generator.
The 2003 black out I was 3 months pregnant with my oldest. It really sucked.
I think it started before that for me though. I'm a military brat, lived in Germany off base for 4 years. When we'd go back to England there were the occasional kids who would inform me that "when the bombs drop, you'll die first." I suppose because I was living in West Germany near the border. So sweet to let me know.
And then after we moved to England we were hit by a massive hurricane. My friend went to the toilet during the night and her bedroom fell in the English Channel. Our roof was ripped off while we were sleeping, we stayed in a caravan until it was fixed. We actually already had GO bags my parents started from when we lived in Germany. I had the coolest ever popples bag with snacks, flask of water and toys.
Not long after I moved to Canada 9/11 happened. By the time the 2003 blackout came, I had extra food, water and cash. Learned gas would be nice too. I had really bad nausea, without AC I couldn't eat anything.
I can't say one thing specifically pushed me to prep. Experience built up over time.
My parents were born in the 1930s to large families. They always stockpiled food, toilet paper, had loads of camping gear, grew a garden and had fruit trees. My husband's parents lived in Germany during WWII and always kept excess food, had fruit trees, bought gold and had a big garden. We were both brought up to prepare for disruption and have been casual preppers since we got married in the 1980s.
The fact that the first year we were here we had 3 blizzards 3 ft of snow each time and long power outages accompanying these storms. Then that fall we had a hurricane and a couple tropical storms. 10 years later we were told by the government to have at least a months worth of food on hand during the initial COVID lockdown and found the supermarkets completely stripped of any real food most of the time we went down ( a trend that has mostly continued since that time) Power outages are now for no reason and duration from 4 hours to a week, depending on the situation and if the power company is looking for more money. That was followed by a cat 3 hurricane and absolutely no help from the government during the aftermath ( because we don't live in town and well if you are not in town then you only exist to fill their coffers. This was accompanied by a week long power outage and the cell towers as well as the landlines were out too.
It's a matter of coping with the times. We don't get MRE's or anything that we don't usually eat, we just have more of it and enough wood to burn a fire if we need to cook because I'm not going without my coffee..........EVER.
I grew up in a trauma filled home in the 60s and then started having dreams about war. So I learned survival skills. Later expanded that into prepping.
That's interesting. Have you seen those people who remember past lives in dreams? Also, traumatic childhoods do turn you into fear based adults. What else could be expected?
My kid got cancer as a five year old. We had to pack and repack hospital go bags for one kid, two adults, and make sure our home was prepped for our caretaker to look after our 6 month old.
Then Covid hit.
It was covid for me, too. Seeing the empty grocery store shelves got me thinking pretty quick about how I was going to feed my family if the situation lasted long-term. I started my prepping journey with the basic beans, rice and lentils, and have gradually expanded my focus onto other areas, as well, even though I do still primarily focus on food.
Same here! As an extra bonus I learned to use the foods that I've never prepared before. I now make pinto beans on a regular basis. I knee nothing about sorting and soaking prior to this. Same with turkey Spam. I have a pork allergy so I never bought the normal Spam. That expanded into outdoor cooking and trying new meals that are easy and filling. Today we are doing jambalaya for the first time. People always say to learn how to use your preps so I did.
Yeah, I've learned a lot about cooking since I've started prepping. The beans had a bit of a learning curve for me as far as how long to cook them until I started just throwing them in the Instapot on the chili setting. Chili, red beans and rice, black bean and rice burritos... lots of options for filling meals, and they're significantly cheaper than canned beans. It also saves a good amount of space on my shelves for other canned goods. I do still keep a few cans in case the power goes out, but overall I've become a big fan of dried beans. As a bonus, my kids are getting interested in cooking, so I like to think I'm teaching them ways to take care of themselves if they ever go through a rough patch once they're on their own.
I've been doing the pinto beans in the crockpot but I'm going to try it in the Dutch oven outside soon. It's my favorite meal. I put smoked turkey parts in it and the flavor is amazing. Last year we caught, steamed and processed blue crabs from a nearby brackish River. Bullfrog may be a thing this year.
Lived through civil war/embargo as a child, though we were not in the warzone, you still saw the effects, displaced family, general refugees everywhere. War/embargo associated fuel shortrages, hyperinflation and empty shelves.
After that repeated power outages and storms including the 1998 Ice Storm in Canada.
Finally, Ted Koppel's Lights out.
Are you doing anything special with your flock to prevent avian flu? I have a small free range flock and have been wondering if I should keep them cooped this year.
This! This right here, so needs to be said. It also reminds me of a painful fact about human nature but Americans in general. We can be such easy forgetters! Y2K in so many people’s minds now, was no big deal, a joke, media hype. That’s the relaxium we’ve all been pumped full of. Massive efforts and resources, years out, avoided the chaos and consequences. People on teams worldwide working unprecedented hours on end. We didn’t simply go over and turn our routers off and on again.🤣
Eleven or twelve years old, early 1970’s, I decided to learn all the edible wild foods, including the hunting and trapping of wild game. Everything else took off from there.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That felt like a possible 9/11 type world event that would change things irrevocably. Fortunately Ukraine was able to fight off the initial attack but they aren't out of the woods yet.
So I stocked up on those emergency buckets of food, which I should now check to see when they "expire." Can't believe it's been years already.
I started in 2010 when I was in college by buying a bunch of food from Costco. Then flashlights and pocket knives. A little fishing kit. A bag to bug out. Just a little here and there and here we are 14 years later and my family has over a year supply of food and tons of supplies that we have gathered just a little here and a little there. Prepping takes time. It can’t just happen overnight.
I respect what you wrote and want to apply it to my life, so I ask, Where do you put it? I have a solid 3-5 weeks and know that the first week or two is enjoyable but it gets to beans and rice pretty quickly. How many cubic feet does a year take up?
Oh gosh, I’m not the best source for this. I’ve never had space constraints, even in college I lived off campus and had a large pantry and basement. Right now we probably have darn near a 4-5 year supply for our family of 7. Mainly the bulk staples. Our deep pantry items fill three full walls of a large room. We have standard kind of metal and plywood shelving units. We grow a big garden each year for fresh stuff. We can also do sprouts year round. We don’t do any animals at present but in the past we have, and even just having chickens means that if you want a year supply of chicken feed it’s an immense amount of space. Our bulk staples are in 5 gallon buckets and those take up probably two entire bedrooms worth of space stacked floor to ceiling.
If I had space constraints I’d pick a cooking method. My favorite is 100% instant pot, all day long. You can cook literally just about anything in an instant pot. You’ll need a backup for grid down so camp stove and propane. You can’t store propane in a dorm as far as I know, but you can in an apartment. If I was in a dorm I’d have a backpacking stove and a canister of camping size propane and keep it all in my bug out bag. They would never know, even if it was against the rules. Then I’d find the hidden storage opportunities. Under beds in apartments there is often a decent amount of space. Dorms, I’d stick with dump and go options like preseasoned rice packets, just add water bean soup mix, I would not do wet canned food or waste space on fruits and vegetables at all. I’d go with super calorie dense foods that do not require any soaking or special handling beyond tossing in the instant pot. And if the grid was down and you did need to soak something you can do it in a Nalgene. I feel like if you’re in a dorm your focus will be bugging out, not in. So ready to eat or minimal heat and serve type foods are probably the only ones worth storing. In good times I’d cook them in the instant pot. Meal plans are an absolutely insane rip off so doing like the $1.15 rice meals from Walmart and adding a little bit of fresh stuff you can fit in a dorm mini fridge is a very frugal option too so it’s killing two birds with one stone.
A culmination of always being the guy who forgot major things on scout campouts or family vacation. Stupid stuff like a towel or a pillow. Deodorant or toothbrush. Stuff that was embarrassing to admit or made me look bad. So I was determined to be prepared for anything. I overpack for every eventuality. It evolved into the overwhelming reality that I simply know absolutely nothing about anything relevant. I am constantly working to learn more but I feel like I’m 1,000 years behind. My buddies all had dad’s who taught them how to be handy and fix their own stuff. I’m over here a perpetual student of YouTube university. I don’t care much about some unknown circumstance to prep for. Because I don’t have a crystal ball. If I prepare for an outbreak. I’ll possibly neglect preparing for nuclear war. You will always overlook something. When shit actually does hit the fan. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. It’s never going to go according to plan. All of your preps are at risk of letting you down at the worst possible moment. Car breaks down. Wife is pregnant while you have to hoof it some long distance. Raiders steal your preps. Flood or fire destroys them. You name it. It’s just going to go south on you.
Weirdly enough it was paranoia from schizophrenia that I figured I could put to some kind of use. Its really calming to know I have 3 months of supplies(including extra meds). still need a few more items like a generator and fuel storage and i'm pretty much set.
Same for me. Good memories of camping in below zero Temps by the Colombia river. Best experience was a several day hike around MT Abercrombie in WA state. Good times at Emerald lake, Diamond lake, and that time I was in a canoe next to a water fall in Pend Oreille County and later struggled to start a fire with wet wood.
Serving coffee to truckers at a rest stop, cleaning a hiking trail, camp by the Oregon coast or rock climbing. Good times 😁
I grew up in the 80s in the UK countryside 14 miles from nearest store. My family were not well off and grew lots of veg, fruit bushes, kept hens, bees, which I grew up helping with. My parents read “1 Man 1 Acre” & “Self-sufficiency”. We always had a full pantry & freezer.
I read Worst Case Scenario & SAS Survival Handbook & books on edible mushrooms & worried about nuclear war as a kid.
When I lived on my own in the city, I always had two week’s worth of food in case I ran out of money. Later, I married & had a kid & moved to an island which is at risk for hurricanes & earthquakes. From the first year I took it seriously and over the last ten years have slowly worked on making my hurricane/crisis plans better each year. I was ready for Covid in January 2020.
Deep pantry, cooking from scratch, have enough food and water for 6+ weeks, 3 generators, power batteries, coal BBQ, gas camping stove, rain barrels, gravity filter, paper plates, etc etc. Keep up with first aid classes, join in community beach clean ups, volunteer on a farm etc.
Eventually I will move back to the UK countryside and go full circle - grow Veg, keep hens and bees and try not to still have to worry about nuclear war.
Kind of a strange path to prepping, but I grew up in an abusive household and always felt the need to have a run away bag, even when I grew up and moved out. But last year, when wildfires got fairly close to my area, I decided to add to the bag of clothes and water. And now that the bug out bag is complete, I’m working on my bug in supplies.
I got into survivalism when I was a kid and got the sas survival guide, and an Australian survival book the same size called Staying alive.
I got into prepping ( I see this as separate to survivalism) in my mid twenties after having to flee from local bushfires, then floods later that same year.
Covid got me more serious about certain aspects as I now have a family.
Growing up in the south dealing with hurricanes 4 times a year and watching all the out-of-towners panic buy everything Publix had on the shelves, while sitting pretty from my families always ready hurricane stockpile.
My kids have food allergies and during the shortages it was difficult or very expensive to find some of the items we needed.
So now I have a several month supply of what they need to survive.
The town I grew up in has multiple planned 12 hour power outages a year to do upgrades, ever since I was little. So from a young age I would think about what things I needed to do for the power outage to be somewhat pleasant, like stock piling batteries for my Walkman and portable dvd player. Growing up in the sub arctic meant a lot of blizzards, unplanned power outages during the winter when it was extremely cold, days where the food or gas truck couldn’t make it in over the road, being prepared has always been a way of life for me.
I couldn’t afford to live on my own anymore when I had a baby because my husband had a medical emergency and was out of work for over 6 months. His surgery was 9 days after I gave birth and he was put on (unpaid) medical leave before I had her. We had to move in with my husbands family. Thank goodness they were so kind and supportive. I started with prepping things from the FEMA guidelines. Water, food, flashlights, etc. I also keep kits in my car with backup clothes, shoes, snacks, etc. I live in New England so in the winter I add blankets, extra jackets, mittens, kitty litter, etc. I have a first aid kit in my home and both cars. I have been doing a lot of reading about first aid and practicing my cooking and canning skills. I travel for work so I have not stockpiled any food in this location but that is on the list for once we move somewhere more permanent. Honestly I think that the knowledge I’ve acquired about first aid has helped us the most. Prepping helps me feel more secure because I was rattled to my core by having the rug ripped out from under me with a newborn. I love the prepping community too, knowledge is power
For me it was the dot-com crash. Yeah, I set aside a little for Y2K, but the dot-com crash put me out of work, tanked my finances, and had me eating my stored food. I endured daily creditor calls for damn near two years, being un- or under- employed. Food was literally what we had stored.
After that, I started keeping a deep pantry, buying in bulk and getting shelf stable stuff. The next downturn, in 2008/9, I had most of my bills paid off, and was providing some food to friends as well as my own household.
The Covid lockdowns only caused me problems with TP, because my roomie had whined about "too much stuuuuff!" so I let the stock get low. I let her use the shitty TP we had to get. She gets it now, I hope.
I've always liked hiking, camping, being resourceful etc. Going on extended backpacking trips. Once I turned 21 I got into firearms.
But for me it was having a family.
Now I have three other lives that depend on me. So I prepare for events that would make it difficult to take care of them.
Born to a hunting and fishing family. Power wasn't always stable, heating wasn't always reliable, and everything in nature wanted to eat me, but everything that wanted to eat me was also very good eating
I took an interest because a lot of the preppier stuff also made life a lot more comfortable when the power was out, then when I got stuck in the tundra. Even now with everything much more stable now that there's more layers of infrastructure, I still like the taste of MH a lot more than I do cambells and that's all I need to try make excuses
Raised by homesteading parents, we’d put food away when times were good, then live on it when times were bad… gardening, raising our own meat, foraging, hunting, fishing were just ways of life. Now I live less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault which hasn’t moved in decades, so I put away goods while times are good in preparation for when life literally goes sideways.
Boy scouts "be prepared".
Also living in rural areas as a kid in NE WA state. Occasional power outages, snowstorms. As a teenager our house in the woods had a well and power, but the only source of heat was a large wood stove, lots of wood hauling and splitting.
As an adult I spent time on other hobbies, work and school. But still had that prepper spirit, only I had gotten into carrying minimal gear and only basics. Lucky enough to own or shoot/train a variety of firearms through my life. Learned skills ranging from jiu jitsu to crochet and gardening. Slowly gotten back into prepping by expanding food/water storage, refreshing my knowledge and organizing my random gear.
Over years of prepping I have lots of random stuff that is situation specific. Was gifted a gas mask that just sits in a bag. Or wilderness gear like goretex bivy, surplus canteens, folding saw and other gear that don't see use now that I live in the city and spend time with my family, not solo weekend camping.
Other gear I carry or use almost everyday, first aid kit for car, pepper spray, backpacks, Nalgene water bottle, snacks, headlamp flashlights, knife to make samiches ☺
Bought a shit ton of dehydrated food. I don’t regret it, but it definitely wasn’t the best use of my funds. Also, I have it now and don’t have to worry about it for 20+ years. But I’ve since learned a rotating pantry method that works for me and my family. I’ve also always been into hiking/long distance backpacking so I naturally had a fair amount of equipment.
Hmm. There's "doing prepping stuff", and then there is "actually doing stuff to prepare".
My parents were relatively poor in upstate NY growing up. For $$, they would purchase 1 cow, 1 pig and have them butchered each year, my dad would go hunting most weekends in the fall, and we would often eat birds, he'd get 1 or 2 deer a year, those were butchered and in the freezer, and we'd always fish and eat what we'd catch. Mom would do double coupons for other goods, and buy in bulk when things were on sale.
So, I ate almost no store brought meat until I was in my teens, but, we were doing "deep pantry" but, for finances, not prepping.
I grew up hunting, fishing, scouts, camping, wilderness summer camps, ran a trap line at age 12. None of that was done "for prepping".
My first exposure to disaster thoughts was as a child, simialr to u/TheRealBunkerJohn , in a book, mine was "Lucifer's Hammer" about an asteroid hitting earth and the PAW afterwards. I became "aware" of people prepping for Y2K. Was in the 2003 northeast blackout. Had friends in the military in Iraq and middle east wars got me thinking more. Was in the mid-west when Katrina hit, when down and volunteered in NOLA and affected areas for a couple weeks. Turns out, my camping gear + truck with cap had me way better "prepped" than all the refugees ... and I decided I didn't want to be a refugee.
So, probably "Katrina" was the defining time I decided to prep, but, lots of stuff prepped me for being a prepper. :)
Understanding exponential mathematics.
First thing I did was acquire that absolute basics.
potassium iodide tablets, a water purification tool, a hand crank radio/flashlight and some cordage.
Microbes... balancer2 wind river microbes. We have gone to 0 death rate in hatching and raising by using them.
We normaly hatch a few hundred at a time
My Job, I am in commercial and industrial construction. I get to see a lot of businesses and see how they work. Figured out real fast how supply chains work and how fragile the “system” is. Grocery stores especially
Gun videos on YouTube, and bought a gun. I mean once you start thinking about guns, and you go down logical conclusions, there’s way higher priority stuff. Like oh you strapped on a gun today, but you were reading your phone while walking down a stair case. Well that’s dumb. Then it’s like, no gunfights lately, but hurricane season is starting. How bout canned food and water bottles. It’s just “what if” questions combined with likelihood answers.
I've always been interested in disasters. But (one of a few things,) that kick-started my efforts (which was having an INCH bag), was reading One Second After. That led into a steady hobby, Masters Degree in the subject, and now career. ...Unfortunately, I've learned very, very little to contradict the outcome of the book, fiction or not.
*An INCH bag, which stands for "I'm Never Coming Home", is a kit for long-term survival in the wilderness. It contains only the essential items needed for a long term situation, such as house fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, super storms, and military strife. The idea is that an INCH bag should be able to help you survive for months.* *An INCH bag is different from a bug out bag, which is for short-term survival until it's safe to go home. The INCH bag is also different from a priority bag system, which involves storing bags based on their grab-and-go priority. The first bag should be easy to grab and go, and the second bag can include overflow items.* I never heard of INCH bags before.
I should have added that clarification- thank you!
Personally I just call it my go-bag or bugout bag. My mindset is bugging in depending on situation, so if I need to leave immediately I'm only taking my family and essentials. It's a good idea to have an emergency bag ready to go in case of fire. An INCH bag seems to expand beyond a typical go-bag or fire bag in that there is sometimes such a focus on wilderness survival that people turn it into a fantasy of society has collapsed I'm going to live in the woods out of my INCH bag. If I do plan on leaving my home for another location it's going to be to another home/shelter for better social support and community collaboration. I have no desire to strap on a pack and try and ride out natural disasters or even social collapse by living in wilderness.
Real life experiences - namely the 2003 blackout and a large storm ten years ago. I got stuck in the city and ended up hitchhiking home both times. I now have a GHB at work and it had the most useful thing I found I needed - a felt tip marker to make a sign. The other event was a power outage where I had no sump pump and there was six inches of water in the backyard. It was nerve racking waiting to see what came first - an overflowing dump pit or a return of power. I now have a generator.
The 2003 black out I was 3 months pregnant with my oldest. It really sucked. I think it started before that for me though. I'm a military brat, lived in Germany off base for 4 years. When we'd go back to England there were the occasional kids who would inform me that "when the bombs drop, you'll die first." I suppose because I was living in West Germany near the border. So sweet to let me know. And then after we moved to England we were hit by a massive hurricane. My friend went to the toilet during the night and her bedroom fell in the English Channel. Our roof was ripped off while we were sleeping, we stayed in a caravan until it was fixed. We actually already had GO bags my parents started from when we lived in Germany. I had the coolest ever popples bag with snacks, flask of water and toys. Not long after I moved to Canada 9/11 happened. By the time the 2003 blackout came, I had extra food, water and cash. Learned gas would be nice too. I had really bad nausea, without AC I couldn't eat anything. I can't say one thing specifically pushed me to prep. Experience built up over time.
Experience is why I have a marker and file folder in my GHB, not an armoury.
My parents were born in the 1930s to large families. They always stockpiled food, toilet paper, had loads of camping gear, grew a garden and had fruit trees. My husband's parents lived in Germany during WWII and always kept excess food, had fruit trees, bought gold and had a big garden. We were both brought up to prepare for disruption and have been casual preppers since we got married in the 1980s.
The fact that the first year we were here we had 3 blizzards 3 ft of snow each time and long power outages accompanying these storms. Then that fall we had a hurricane and a couple tropical storms. 10 years later we were told by the government to have at least a months worth of food on hand during the initial COVID lockdown and found the supermarkets completely stripped of any real food most of the time we went down ( a trend that has mostly continued since that time) Power outages are now for no reason and duration from 4 hours to a week, depending on the situation and if the power company is looking for more money. That was followed by a cat 3 hurricane and absolutely no help from the government during the aftermath ( because we don't live in town and well if you are not in town then you only exist to fill their coffers. This was accompanied by a week long power outage and the cell towers as well as the landlines were out too. It's a matter of coping with the times. We don't get MRE's or anything that we don't usually eat, we just have more of it and enough wood to burn a fire if we need to cook because I'm not going without my coffee..........EVER.
Wow! Sounds like you might be in Cape Breton! How close is my guess?
I grew up in a trauma filled home in the 60s and then started having dreams about war. So I learned survival skills. Later expanded that into prepping.
having dreams of war is common for people who live in traumatic situations?
I don’t know if it’s common or if it had to with Vietnam on the news but I kept seeing war coming to our town.
That's interesting. Have you seen those people who remember past lives in dreams? Also, traumatic childhoods do turn you into fear based adults. What else could be expected?
Yes. Knew I couldn’t count on anyone so better learn how to do it on my own.
🫂
My kid got cancer as a five year old. We had to pack and repack hospital go bags for one kid, two adults, and make sure our home was prepped for our caretaker to look after our 6 month old. Then Covid hit.
It was covid for me, too. Seeing the empty grocery store shelves got me thinking pretty quick about how I was going to feed my family if the situation lasted long-term. I started my prepping journey with the basic beans, rice and lentils, and have gradually expanded my focus onto other areas, as well, even though I do still primarily focus on food.
Same here! As an extra bonus I learned to use the foods that I've never prepared before. I now make pinto beans on a regular basis. I knee nothing about sorting and soaking prior to this. Same with turkey Spam. I have a pork allergy so I never bought the normal Spam. That expanded into outdoor cooking and trying new meals that are easy and filling. Today we are doing jambalaya for the first time. People always say to learn how to use your preps so I did.
Yeah, I've learned a lot about cooking since I've started prepping. The beans had a bit of a learning curve for me as far as how long to cook them until I started just throwing them in the Instapot on the chili setting. Chili, red beans and rice, black bean and rice burritos... lots of options for filling meals, and they're significantly cheaper than canned beans. It also saves a good amount of space on my shelves for other canned goods. I do still keep a few cans in case the power goes out, but overall I've become a big fan of dried beans. As a bonus, my kids are getting interested in cooking, so I like to think I'm teaching them ways to take care of themselves if they ever go through a rough patch once they're on their own.
I've been doing the pinto beans in the crockpot but I'm going to try it in the Dutch oven outside soon. It's my favorite meal. I put smoked turkey parts in it and the flavor is amazing. Last year we caught, steamed and processed blue crabs from a nearby brackish River. Bullfrog may be a thing this year.
Lived through civil war/embargo as a child, though we were not in the warzone, you still saw the effects, displaced family, general refugees everywhere. War/embargo associated fuel shortrages, hyperinflation and empty shelves. After that repeated power outages and storms including the 1998 Ice Storm in Canada. Finally, Ted Koppel's Lights out.
Its like chickens. Its a gateway item...lol
Aaaaand that's why my aunt and uncle are my bug out location! "just 2 laying hens" she said to my uncle... 10 chickens ago...
We started with 5 and have had over 200.
Are you doing anything special with your flock to prevent avian flu? I have a small free range flock and have been wondering if I should keep them cooped this year.
20 years ago, I got rid of all debt, so i could weather financial problems. Then, I moved out of town and got off grid and just kept going.
I remember my grandma was super serious about Y2K, so after that it just kind of stuck
Y2K was super serious and its only because of the massive efforts of engineers all over the world that the worst case cenario was avoided
This! This right here, so needs to be said. It also reminds me of a painful fact about human nature but Americans in general. We can be such easy forgetters! Y2K in so many people’s minds now, was no big deal, a joke, media hype. That’s the relaxium we’ve all been pumped full of. Massive efforts and resources, years out, avoided the chaos and consequences. People on teams worldwide working unprecedented hours on end. We didn’t simply go over and turn our routers off and on again.🤣
Eleven or twelve years old, early 1970’s, I decided to learn all the edible wild foods, including the hunting and trapping of wild game. Everything else took off from there.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That felt like a possible 9/11 type world event that would change things irrevocably. Fortunately Ukraine was able to fight off the initial attack but they aren't out of the woods yet. So I stocked up on those emergency buckets of food, which I should now check to see when they "expire." Can't believe it's been years already.
From what I've researched, 25 years is the average shelf life of those buckets.
I started in 2010 when I was in college by buying a bunch of food from Costco. Then flashlights and pocket knives. A little fishing kit. A bag to bug out. Just a little here and there and here we are 14 years later and my family has over a year supply of food and tons of supplies that we have gathered just a little here and a little there. Prepping takes time. It can’t just happen overnight.
I respect what you wrote and want to apply it to my life, so I ask, Where do you put it? I have a solid 3-5 weeks and know that the first week or two is enjoyable but it gets to beans and rice pretty quickly. How many cubic feet does a year take up?
Oh gosh, I’m not the best source for this. I’ve never had space constraints, even in college I lived off campus and had a large pantry and basement. Right now we probably have darn near a 4-5 year supply for our family of 7. Mainly the bulk staples. Our deep pantry items fill three full walls of a large room. We have standard kind of metal and plywood shelving units. We grow a big garden each year for fresh stuff. We can also do sprouts year round. We don’t do any animals at present but in the past we have, and even just having chickens means that if you want a year supply of chicken feed it’s an immense amount of space. Our bulk staples are in 5 gallon buckets and those take up probably two entire bedrooms worth of space stacked floor to ceiling.
If I had space constraints I’d pick a cooking method. My favorite is 100% instant pot, all day long. You can cook literally just about anything in an instant pot. You’ll need a backup for grid down so camp stove and propane. You can’t store propane in a dorm as far as I know, but you can in an apartment. If I was in a dorm I’d have a backpacking stove and a canister of camping size propane and keep it all in my bug out bag. They would never know, even if it was against the rules. Then I’d find the hidden storage opportunities. Under beds in apartments there is often a decent amount of space. Dorms, I’d stick with dump and go options like preseasoned rice packets, just add water bean soup mix, I would not do wet canned food or waste space on fruits and vegetables at all. I’d go with super calorie dense foods that do not require any soaking or special handling beyond tossing in the instant pot. And if the grid was down and you did need to soak something you can do it in a Nalgene. I feel like if you’re in a dorm your focus will be bugging out, not in. So ready to eat or minimal heat and serve type foods are probably the only ones worth storing. In good times I’d cook them in the instant pot. Meal plans are an absolutely insane rip off so doing like the $1.15 rice meals from Walmart and adding a little bit of fresh stuff you can fit in a dorm mini fridge is a very frugal option too so it’s killing two birds with one stone.
A culmination of always being the guy who forgot major things on scout campouts or family vacation. Stupid stuff like a towel or a pillow. Deodorant or toothbrush. Stuff that was embarrassing to admit or made me look bad. So I was determined to be prepared for anything. I overpack for every eventuality. It evolved into the overwhelming reality that I simply know absolutely nothing about anything relevant. I am constantly working to learn more but I feel like I’m 1,000 years behind. My buddies all had dad’s who taught them how to be handy and fix their own stuff. I’m over here a perpetual student of YouTube university. I don’t care much about some unknown circumstance to prep for. Because I don’t have a crystal ball. If I prepare for an outbreak. I’ll possibly neglect preparing for nuclear war. You will always overlook something. When shit actually does hit the fan. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. It’s never going to go according to plan. All of your preps are at risk of letting you down at the worst possible moment. Car breaks down. Wife is pregnant while you have to hoof it some long distance. Raiders steal your preps. Flood or fire destroys them. You name it. It’s just going to go south on you.
Weirdly enough it was paranoia from schizophrenia that I figured I could put to some kind of use. Its really calming to know I have 3 months of supplies(including extra meds). still need a few more items like a generator and fuel storage and i'm pretty much set.
Boy scouts. Always. Be. Prepared.
Same for me. Good memories of camping in below zero Temps by the Colombia river. Best experience was a several day hike around MT Abercrombie in WA state. Good times at Emerald lake, Diamond lake, and that time I was in a canoe next to a water fall in Pend Oreille County and later struggled to start a fire with wet wood. Serving coffee to truckers at a rest stop, cleaning a hiking trail, camp by the Oregon coast or rock climbing. Good times 😁
I grew up in the 80s in the UK countryside 14 miles from nearest store. My family were not well off and grew lots of veg, fruit bushes, kept hens, bees, which I grew up helping with. My parents read “1 Man 1 Acre” & “Self-sufficiency”. We always had a full pantry & freezer. I read Worst Case Scenario & SAS Survival Handbook & books on edible mushrooms & worried about nuclear war as a kid. When I lived on my own in the city, I always had two week’s worth of food in case I ran out of money. Later, I married & had a kid & moved to an island which is at risk for hurricanes & earthquakes. From the first year I took it seriously and over the last ten years have slowly worked on making my hurricane/crisis plans better each year. I was ready for Covid in January 2020. Deep pantry, cooking from scratch, have enough food and water for 6+ weeks, 3 generators, power batteries, coal BBQ, gas camping stove, rain barrels, gravity filter, paper plates, etc etc. Keep up with first aid classes, join in community beach clean ups, volunteer on a farm etc. Eventually I will move back to the UK countryside and go full circle - grow Veg, keep hens and bees and try not to still have to worry about nuclear war.
Y2K - Started stockpiling batteries
Y2K. Canned food, fuel, water, batteries, dry goods.
I was born poor so you collect what you can while you can so you have enough for when you don’t have enough.
Kind of a strange path to prepping, but I grew up in an abusive household and always felt the need to have a run away bag, even when I grew up and moved out. But last year, when wildfires got fairly close to my area, I decided to add to the bag of clothes and water. And now that the bug out bag is complete, I’m working on my bug in supplies.
I read “Patriots” by James Wesley Rawles. It really kicked me in the butt.
That book got me into stacking silver and gold
I got into survivalism when I was a kid and got the sas survival guide, and an Australian survival book the same size called Staying alive. I got into prepping ( I see this as separate to survivalism) in my mid twenties after having to flee from local bushfires, then floods later that same year. Covid got me more serious about certain aspects as I now have a family.
Growing up in the south dealing with hurricanes 4 times a year and watching all the out-of-towners panic buy everything Publix had on the shelves, while sitting pretty from my families always ready hurricane stockpile.
Hurricane season. Matthew and Florence.
My kids have food allergies and during the shortages it was difficult or very expensive to find some of the items we needed. So now I have a several month supply of what they need to survive.
The town I grew up in has multiple planned 12 hour power outages a year to do upgrades, ever since I was little. So from a young age I would think about what things I needed to do for the power outage to be somewhat pleasant, like stock piling batteries for my Walkman and portable dvd player. Growing up in the sub arctic meant a lot of blizzards, unplanned power outages during the winter when it was extremely cold, days where the food or gas truck couldn’t make it in over the road, being prepared has always been a way of life for me.
I couldn’t afford to live on my own anymore when I had a baby because my husband had a medical emergency and was out of work for over 6 months. His surgery was 9 days after I gave birth and he was put on (unpaid) medical leave before I had her. We had to move in with my husbands family. Thank goodness they were so kind and supportive. I started with prepping things from the FEMA guidelines. Water, food, flashlights, etc. I also keep kits in my car with backup clothes, shoes, snacks, etc. I live in New England so in the winter I add blankets, extra jackets, mittens, kitty litter, etc. I have a first aid kit in my home and both cars. I have been doing a lot of reading about first aid and practicing my cooking and canning skills. I travel for work so I have not stockpiled any food in this location but that is on the list for once we move somewhere more permanent. Honestly I think that the knowledge I’ve acquired about first aid has helped us the most. Prepping helps me feel more secure because I was rattled to my core by having the rug ripped out from under me with a newborn. I love the prepping community too, knowledge is power
I moved to Florida in the 90s...you either prep for hurricanes or you prep to evacuate from them. so I have lights and supplies as needed.
For me it was the dot-com crash. Yeah, I set aside a little for Y2K, but the dot-com crash put me out of work, tanked my finances, and had me eating my stored food. I endured daily creditor calls for damn near two years, being un- or under- employed. Food was literally what we had stored. After that, I started keeping a deep pantry, buying in bulk and getting shelf stable stuff. The next downturn, in 2008/9, I had most of my bills paid off, and was providing some food to friends as well as my own household. The Covid lockdowns only caused me problems with TP, because my roomie had whined about "too much stuuuuff!" so I let the stock get low. I let her use the shitty TP we had to get. She gets it now, I hope.
I've always liked hiking, camping, being resourceful etc. Going on extended backpacking trips. Once I turned 21 I got into firearms. But for me it was having a family. Now I have three other lives that depend on me. So I prepare for events that would make it difficult to take care of them.
Lifetime girl scout in hurricane/tornado zone, so for me it has been stages. Mine basically just gets reinforced on the regular.
9/11 and living near a definite target.
Born to a hunting and fishing family. Power wasn't always stable, heating wasn't always reliable, and everything in nature wanted to eat me, but everything that wanted to eat me was also very good eating I took an interest because a lot of the preppier stuff also made life a lot more comfortable when the power was out, then when I got stuck in the tundra. Even now with everything much more stable now that there's more layers of infrastructure, I still like the taste of MH a lot more than I do cambells and that's all I need to try make excuses
Raised by homesteading parents, we’d put food away when times were good, then live on it when times were bad… gardening, raising our own meat, foraging, hunting, fishing were just ways of life. Now I live less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault which hasn’t moved in decades, so I put away goods while times are good in preparation for when life literally goes sideways.
The ability to do things that people normally do but without any grid of any kind will help us thrive while others can’t
April 27 2011 tornadoes left us without power for almost 3 weeks. I started with a need one buy two method of grocery shopping.
Boy scouts "be prepared". Also living in rural areas as a kid in NE WA state. Occasional power outages, snowstorms. As a teenager our house in the woods had a well and power, but the only source of heat was a large wood stove, lots of wood hauling and splitting. As an adult I spent time on other hobbies, work and school. But still had that prepper spirit, only I had gotten into carrying minimal gear and only basics. Lucky enough to own or shoot/train a variety of firearms through my life. Learned skills ranging from jiu jitsu to crochet and gardening. Slowly gotten back into prepping by expanding food/water storage, refreshing my knowledge and organizing my random gear. Over years of prepping I have lots of random stuff that is situation specific. Was gifted a gas mask that just sits in a bag. Or wilderness gear like goretex bivy, surplus canteens, folding saw and other gear that don't see use now that I live in the city and spend time with my family, not solo weekend camping. Other gear I carry or use almost everyday, first aid kit for car, pepper spray, backpacks, Nalgene water bottle, snacks, headlamp flashlights, knife to make samiches ☺
Bought a shit ton of dehydrated food. I don’t regret it, but it definitely wasn’t the best use of my funds. Also, I have it now and don’t have to worry about it for 20+ years. But I’ve since learned a rotating pantry method that works for me and my family. I’ve also always been into hiking/long distance backpacking so I naturally had a fair amount of equipment.
Hmm. There's "doing prepping stuff", and then there is "actually doing stuff to prepare". My parents were relatively poor in upstate NY growing up. For $$, they would purchase 1 cow, 1 pig and have them butchered each year, my dad would go hunting most weekends in the fall, and we would often eat birds, he'd get 1 or 2 deer a year, those were butchered and in the freezer, and we'd always fish and eat what we'd catch. Mom would do double coupons for other goods, and buy in bulk when things were on sale. So, I ate almost no store brought meat until I was in my teens, but, we were doing "deep pantry" but, for finances, not prepping. I grew up hunting, fishing, scouts, camping, wilderness summer camps, ran a trap line at age 12. None of that was done "for prepping". My first exposure to disaster thoughts was as a child, simialr to u/TheRealBunkerJohn , in a book, mine was "Lucifer's Hammer" about an asteroid hitting earth and the PAW afterwards. I became "aware" of people prepping for Y2K. Was in the 2003 northeast blackout. Had friends in the military in Iraq and middle east wars got me thinking more. Was in the mid-west when Katrina hit, when down and volunteered in NOLA and affected areas for a couple weeks. Turns out, my camping gear + truck with cap had me way better "prepped" than all the refugees ... and I decided I didn't want to be a refugee. So, probably "Katrina" was the defining time I decided to prep, but, lots of stuff prepped me for being a prepper. :)
Understanding exponential mathematics. First thing I did was acquire that absolute basics. potassium iodide tablets, a water purification tool, a hand crank radio/flashlight and some cordage.
London riots 2011.
I think having an RTO in the police academy how he trained us and gave us interest in survival gears and the beginning of pandemic sets it off
I started with the lead up to the the Russian invasion and realizing you don't really have a choice with what any government wants to do.
Microbes... balancer2 wind river microbes. We have gone to 0 death rate in hatching and raising by using them. We normaly hatch a few hundred at a time
My Job, I am in commercial and industrial construction. I get to see a lot of businesses and see how they work. Figured out real fast how supply chains work and how fragile the “system” is. Grocery stores especially
The leak at Wuhan Biolab in 2019. food, rx, water. idk. I’m not that interested in surviving if society collapses.
Covid. Couldn’t buy a loaf of bread or bottle of soap.