When my co-worker’s husband wanted to go to the store to stock up for Hurricane Irene, she replied “get the essentials: Doritos, Vodka and frozen pizza.”
Years of supplying last-minute stockers has taught Walmart what’s in demand, and the report might surprise you. The top food item – strawberry poptarts.
Hurricane Irene came and went this weekend, and the best summary I’ve seen for it is “Wet, deadly and expensive, but no monster” Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Glenn Beck had a different take on it. His radio show Friday warned listeners that they need to listen to his warnings to stock up and store food, and for those who haven’t, Hurricane Irene is “a blessing.”
How many warnings do you think you’re going to get, and how many warnings do you deserve? This hurricane that is coming thorough the East Coast, for anyone who’s in the East Coast and has been listening to me say ‘Food storage!’ ‘Be prepared!’
I don’t believe for a second that Beck actually thinks the hurricane is a blessing, particularly for the families of the 22 people who lost their lives. But the hurricane did play into his fear-based paradigm shared with anxious listeners daily.
CNN tied the warning to his Mormon background and any one who’s sat through an emergency preparedness lesson at church will catch the familiar ring of his words (minus the blessing part).
My own history with food storage has been a bit of a roller coaster. My second child was born a week before Y2K, we had just moved and I felt a real need as a mother to not let my kids starve. I stocked up on water and some basics, but had neither the time nor the money to do much more.
Later, when I moved to a home with a basement and plenty of room, I began to pay more attention to the lessons on storage. We typically eat fresh food, so it was difficult to conceptualize meals we would eat that we stored. We bought a 30 day supply of MREs and then I began to buy extras of what our family might like: cereal, mac’n cheese, Diet Coke, etc. But I never felt we had enough. And my mind always went to the idea that what if we didn’t have electricity, what if we had to leave our home, what would we do. It always led to more panic, because there was more we needed.
It was exhausting trying to remember what we had and fearing what we didn’t. It took up not only a decent amount of money, but also the managing of it required more energy than I had suspected. The lessons at church began to get more extreme, once with a stake visitor telling us we needed a little pen light so we could go out in the middle of nowhere to eat our food and people wouldn’t find us by the flashlight/fire and steal it and kill us. Yikes!
After about 2 years of this, my husband and I decided we would approach provident living differently. We no longer store food for disaster. Instead, we try not to run out of anything. We upped our insurance coverages and increased our savings.
Some have issues with the waste involved, but I don’t. There are lots of precautions I take that are wasteful — I hope the money I pour into life, disability and car insurance is a total waste. But for me, they are easier to manage and don’t drain my energy and hope.
The food storage idea was a brilliant and revolutionary idea in its day. More than 100 years later, it needs a major overhaul in addition to moving from 12 months to 3 or 4. If you look at the disasters that have struck families the most over the last 50 years, they are health and financial related. Yet I never hear a lesson in church about making sure my insurances are up to date, my savings account has 4 months of living expenses, etc. Where I live, loss of power is the biggest natural threat, yet most of the food we would store would need cooking. No one mentions those provisions either.
Beck did say something I agree with Friday:
It is God reminding you, as was the earthquake last week, you’re not in control.
This is a profoundly moving and potentially frightening thought, and one I think goes against his ideas of stocking up. No matter how much we have prepared, we are still not in charge. We don’t get to pick our personal disasters and for some, no amount of food storage will comfort us. I find comfort in faith and in community, it is there I want to invest my resources.
I guess you could say that I believe in first aid kits, insurance, CPR training and full pantries. And my stock up of choice is not strawberry poptarts, but peanut M&Ms and mascara. What’s your take on emergency preparedness? What’s your guilty pleasure in the stock up items?
I think our culture often goes for a “More is More” approach when dealing with uncertainty. The 12 year old boy in me gets kind of excited when we talk about emergency preparedness, like that scene in “Commando” where Arnold Schwartzenegger’s character is gearing up to attack the bad guy’s hideout. If having extra food on hand is good, then storing rocket launchers under the stairs is clearly better.
It sounds like you are taking rational and sane precautions, but having a little extra food on hand is never a bad choice, if for no other reason than sometimes you won’t make it to the store over a busy weekend. We can’t control what kind of emergencies will come, but we can make our circumstances during those emergencies as comfortable as possible.
I wonder how many fully stocked basement pantries were flooded in Vermont over the last 24 hours.
I’ve never been a food storage fan, but we did make one attempt at organizing 72-hour kits when we moved to Louisiana and sat through a couple lessons on emergency preparedness from people who had lived through some serious hurricanes. And we lived through both Hurricane Katrina and Rita in Baton Rouge and did just fine.
We also have plenty o’ insurance and recently completed a will (after that task lingered on our to-do list for nearly 15 years).
Our biggest nod towards “preparedness” involved me getting first a BA, then a MA, and finally a Ph.D. And it’s hard for me to even articulate how huge that is in terms of giving me peace in the face of future uncertainty. I am prepared to support my family. I have benefits and health insurance for me and the kids through my work.
So no, we don’t stock up on cans of wheat that we’ll never use.
I’ve often pondered the necessity of food storage must less a 12 month supply. How many hard labor and man hours have been spend shifting #10 cans from one basement to another when people move?
Food storage seems to be geared to save us from 3 possible events: 1) personal economic downturn or 2) natural disaster or 3) Armageddon.
If we’re talking about personal economic downturn, 6 months of cash will do a lot more for you than 6 months of food. Plus its a heck of a lot easier to move when you decide to relocate…
In the case of Natural disasters a 72 hour kit will probably be just as effective as 6 months of food, in the sense that back supplies will be available within days.
In the case of Armageddon, do we really need a 50 year advance warning? How many people have died with a year supply waiting for the second coming? Seems like all that money and effort could have been better spent.
I can’t help but think that the year supply schtick wasn’t a way to drive home the “us against them” / “end of the world” rhetoric that really gets people motivated to get involved.
On a positive note it does seem that the church is moving away from that and to a more realistic 3-4 month supply.
http://hsredzone.com/members/marino