My boss asked me that question because he had a relative call from a small town in central Utah saying that there was no flour to buy in the entire town and they were starting to panic. I told him that I wouldn’t worry too much because you can only do what you can do. He agreed.
I have been watching the news just like the rest of you and the newscasters are constantly repeating over and over and over about how high the gas prices are climbing, the higher price of food and how the economy is “failing”. You would think that everyone is on the street because of all the houses that are being repossessed, people are losing their jobs, and gloom and more doom. Myself, I’m thinking – first, don’t believe everything you hear because there is the news agenda – the shock and fear factor. And second, if you are concerned, and probably rightly so, then let’s go about the current situation reasonably.
Please, I’m begging you – don’t go out and panic buy everything on the shelves! As I have said all along, sit down with your family and make a plan to build your food supply. Think about what you eat, dissect the recipes and figure out how much food you need for three months, six months and then a year. Next, buy a variety of food. Don’t just buy one whole years worth of one item at a time. Buy a variety of items because if you haven’t completed building your food storage, and you end up having to live off of it, then eating that one item for a week, let alone three months or longer, is going to get really tiresome – not to mention unhealthy.
Make sure that you use what you are buying and make sure that it gets rotated. We consciously eat because we get pleasure from it (some of us more than others), but the real purpose of eating is to give your bodies the proper nutrition that it needs to stay healthy. If the food that you are eating is so old that it is nutritionally devoid, it might fill your belly, but you will be malnourished.
We have been talking on this site about building your food storage and being prepared for about two years now. I am really hoping that you have been, slowly but surely, building your food storage, thinking about what you need in a crisis, learning what your needs are versus your wants, and thinking about the health and safety of your families future.
I feel bad when people get scared because they haven’t prepared their food storage and then they let the news people whip them into a frenzy, and then they go on an expensive food buying trip. The last time the “world-as-we-know-it-is-going-to-end” episode happened, people ran out and bought massive amounts of preparedness “stuff”, putting themselves into debt. The funny thing was that after the crisis went away, I saw ads in the paper of people trying to sell their pre-packaged food – probably so they could pay their debt from purchasing it to begin with.
Hard times are going to come – we know this. We have been warned, and warned, and warned. Get serious about preparing, but please, I beg of you – DON’T GET PANICKY! And get your water stored.
