There are people who don’t have three days of canned food? We could go a month, not because we’re survivalists, but because we shop at Costco. Maybe it’s a European thing?
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she had stocked up on canned food to last three days in the event of a possible Russian cyberattack.
— Clash Report (@clashreport) December 27, 2024
She urged all Danes to also follow the recommendations of the Danish Emergency Management Agency. pic.twitter.com/byFGvwcZhL
Around here if the stores are closed for one day (ie Christmas), there’s widespread concern over running out of one thing or another.
I live in a rural area. We have 3-months supply to fall back on. I figure if things get REALLY bad, the folks in town will kill each other off before then.
I don’t eat a lot of canned food, mainly stuff like chicken or tomato soup that I like for quick small meals. I have a lot of frozen and fresh on hand. I guess if it came down too it (power out for good, etc.) I’d last a couple of months on thawed frozen, canned, and stuff like pasta and rice. I’d die when my drugs ran out. I’d don’t know if my rural abutters would kill and eat me before that.
Three days is stocking up? Yipes.
I’ve seen this sort of mindset in Europe and the US. I can kind of understand it if somebody lives in a truly tiny apartment, or is very poor, but otherwise, I can’t.
Heck, even for convenience alone, I like having supplies (I don’t have any stores nearby, so I grocery shop about every two weeks, on average.). I’m also of the opinion that having critical supplies like food dependent on the Internet is nothing short of suicidal. The Internet went out for over a day here in northern Arizona due to ONE small fiber-optic cable being cut, and most stores closed due to it taking out their registers, even for cash (they, seriously, couldn’t operate without Internet connectivity, which is nothing less than stupid). Also taken out; cell phones, and far worse, most emergency-services communications.
As for critical meds, what I do for my mother (who needs them) is do her prescription orders on the first day they’re available for renewal, which is a few days less than the actual supply lasts. Long-term, this builds up her supply, to make sure she’s got at least three month’s reserve. This is a necessity for her, not just for safety, but because vacations happen; without that buffer, leaving the country for a couple of months is between a nightmare and impossible.
Small kitchens, limited storage, a tradition of shopping daily.
My late wife was a daily shopper. Drove me crazy. Me? I have a week or two of fresh food, a month of frozen (regular) food, a couple of months of freeze dried / MRE like foods, and we had a few years of long term storage dried foods in cans. Since I’m alone now, that is twice a few years worth of food and since some of that food is about halfway through it’s stated shelf life, I’m shopping for more.
My policy is to have an unopened package or jar or container in the basement pantry, with an open one in a kitchen cupboard or refrigerator. Some items like spices and condiments take months (or years) to be consumed. When a new one is brought up and opened, it gets immediately added to the shopping list, so I never worry about running out. (And if something suddenly becomes hard to find, I treat that as a signal to either start looking for a substitute, or stock up, or enjoy it while it lasts.)
Which was why the Great Toilet Paper Panic of early 2020 was so amusing to me. It takes us months to go through a Costco multi-pack, and people were buying several of those at a time. They are probably still working through their stockpile.
We try to maintain stocks of canned things that can be eaten right out of the can. We have varied tastes so we don’t tend to buy anything in cans bigger than one person can eat at a sitting.
Being in the middle of Greater L.A.’s near-coastal environs, long-term survival in the event of any genuinely large shoe dropping is problematical at best. I tend to be of the belief that on a value-per-mass basis, ammunition is a better bet than food anyway in such circumstances.
But in this part of the world the key item would be water. The pool-owning classes will have their hands full standing off thirsty proles – of which we will be some after a couple of days.
Bingo. I worked as an expat in Europe for a couple of years in the late 70s. Europeans eat a lot more fresh food than we do and don’t use U.S. levels of chemical preservatives, hence the daily shopping. Matters aren’t helped by European “white goods,” including refrigerators, being very dinky by U.S. standards.
My wife could easily survive six months on our supplies, because she eats practically nothing. I could easily survive six years eating nothing….because I have onboard reserves.