Thank you. I was trying to find that for a link in my post. Bookmarked!
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just to give you all some additional comfort: his wife is part of the group who helps select the textbooks texas buys every year, just in case you’re wondering about the kind of people that make those decisions.
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Came here to say this, and you already have. So now all I can say is: Yep! I saw these in the late 1990s, maybe aiming at Y2K worriers (of which I was one).
Not a bad idea. The bucked pictured is 125 servings. So more like a month for a family of four. Although if someone decides this is the right thing to stock pile please please please make sure you lay in supply of water. I don’t think that bucket has any room for water once you fit 125 servings of likely dehydrated & salt preserved food…
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Sounds like a plan.
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So much this! I was into the prepper culture for a time, until I realized that they were not in fact interested in being prepared, just in hoarding lots of guns. We had a derecho here years ago that convinced me that being able to go it without stores or anything for a couple weeks (or more) is very much worthwhile. TEOTWAWKI, not so much, but as Beryl recently demonstrated, you don’t have to have “the mother of all storms” to make your life hell for a time. It doesn’t have to be your whole identity, but it is a very good idea to be able to survive when things go sideways.
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Yeah if you really are trying to come up with a long-term plan for the collapse of society you should be spending more time learning how to garden and raise chickens and purify water and whatnot than learning how to shoot an assault rifle.
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And of course, getting along with your neighbours for purposes of mutual aid, two things which your typical rugged individualist prepper are particularly bad at.
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A buffer stock of essentials to tide you over for a couple of weeks, say in case of another pandemic, blizzard or bushfire is a good idea. And you don’t need to plan around kits or MREs. Have you heard of the food lifeboat?
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Plus you can spread the education load for taking up hobbies that have specific use-cases for “the apocalypse” e.g. smithing, leatherwork, sewing, etc.
I have only dabbled in watching prepper videos (mostly for a laugh) and I sometimes see some very questionable hot takes. like a prepper’ish person stating that you didn’t have to stock up on footwear (“as there loads of new shoes in the big box stores at the mall” or something like that).
As a suburban person I would not want to walk even 5km on the footpath outside barefoot trying to reach a nearby mall right now (and if there was some massive disaster or fall of society level event the footpath is going have bits of broken car and glass on it).
If someone is ~50km out of the city in their “tactical hidey-hole” and they ruin a boot (without spare footwear)… that’d suck.
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Yeah, it’s not like we will ever be told that we should stay home for a couple of weeks, like they did way back in the olden times of…2020. /s
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A lot of preppers’ plans for surviving the collapse of society seem to be less about being part of the solution than about being part of the problem (i.e., surviving through looting and violence).
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Previously on Boing Boing:
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“You have some purty shoes on there Mr City-Slicker — how about you slide them slowly off and hand them over. Real nice and slow. Now wiggle them toes!!!”
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Here in the upper Thames valley, I’ve suffered 3 water outages, two electricity outages and a gas outage in the past 30 months, plus ongoing mysterious disappearances of everyday groceries from supermarket shelves. Some of it is Brexit and some of it is sheer incompetence and corruption from privatised utilities.
Therefore I always hold a stock of 40+ litres of drinking water, 100+ of rain water for flushing loos, and a variety of dried, tinned and dehydrated foodstuffs, plus emergency lighting and cooking equipment. This is not disaster preparedness, it is just readiness for life in modern Britain.
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I would buy this so on my bad days I don’t forget to eat “properly” 
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A few cans of Cram and boxes of Instamash and I’m good. That stuff lasts forever.
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Mormons are supposed to keep three to five years of food on hand. 3-5 years! Of bland, tasteless Mormon food!
They are the Lord’s preppers. They buy this stuff:
In 2010 after a flood destroyed my everything, the Red Cross dropped off some MRE packages. Believe me, you do not want to have to eat that crap. 
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Thank you. I came to the comments section to make this exact point. I generally enjoy BB’s brand of ironic, snarky humor and I suppose that’s their primary reason for tying these emergency food products to those zany, gun-toting, zombie-fearing doomsday nutcases. But it’s disappointing that BB uses that kind of lazy, shorthand butt-of-the-joke way of dismissing all the sensible, reasonable reasons prudent people prepare for real-life emergencies. People choose dehydrated food with a long shelf life not because they think they’ll be eating it 25 years into some barren, post-apocalyptic future. They buy these products so they’ll be available to be grabbed quickly at any time in an era where disasters, natural or otherwise, are occuring with increasing frequency and scale. After getting their yucks and poking fun at the more extreme elements of the prepper culture, it would have been nice if BoingBoing editoral staff at least acknowledged the legitimate reasons why people by these products.
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