This is, in a sense, a followup to the warning about the coming El Niño. If you haven’t already, you should start working on a food supply for emergencies, and you should start now. Further, you should look into how to do it properly, because it’s not hard to screw it up.

About 15 years ago, I helped form a “climate working group” intended to get Quakers in New England Yearly Meeting to take global warming more seriously. As a group, Quakers often pride themselves on their historical commitment to peace and justice, exemplified by their opposition to war, and their role in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. With that history, how could they not be doing more about this growing global crisis? So we focused on our region, and on having our community lead by example by using their resources as a mostly middle-class community to get themselves off of fossil fuels.

At the time, one of my contributions to our presentation was to encourage people to look into disaster prepping. The use of fossil fuels created a society with the capacity to be post-scarcity, or close to it, but in the process has set us on the path to a return to involuntary scarcity. As I’ve said many times, our entire civilization was built on a foundation of predictable weather patterns allowing reliable food production, and those patterns are breaking down. As the temperature rises, it has never been a question of if there will be food shortages, but when.

Well, the “when” seems to be sooner than I’d hoped. As I’ve said before, famine is often more a political issue of resource distribution and policy decisions, than it is an absolute scarcity of food. To that I want to add: those political considerations also affect the volume of food produced, which will be particularly relevant in the next couple years. We’re entering what is likely to be a severe El Niño, but while that’s often associated with worldwide crop failures, it’s not the only problem. The Republicans’ pointless war on Iran has not only caused a fuel shortage that has yet to reach its peak, it has also caused a fertilizer shortage, which is a serious problem for an agricultural system that depends heavily on imported inputs like fertilizer and pesticides to make things grow in over-worked soil and to mitigate the pest problem caused by monoculture. Throughout this northern-hemisphere growing season, farmers all over the world are trying to make do with far fewer resources than they normally have. Once again, America is “leading the free world” off a cliff.

I’ve been worried about my own situation, as our income is closely tied to the academic year, and we’re in the lean months now (sign up for my Patreon if you have the money and want to help me survive). That said, I think none of the world’s wealthy nations will suffer as much from this as will the US. Fascism is a death cult, and in their eagerness to punish powerless scapegoats for society’s problems, they have devastated the country’s population of migrant workers. Most of those who haven’t been rounded up by the GOP’s version of the SS are reluctant to go to work, lest they be put in a concentration camp, tortured, and possibly murdered.

So while the whole planet has to suffer because of the US slide into fascism, the US is facing problems that most of the rest of the world is not, because of that fascism. Of the crops that don’t fail, many will rot in the fields once again. I worry that this will be used as a chance to expand US use of slave labor, but even without that, hard times are coming.

Going back to my time as a Quaker climate activist, I don’t know whether anyone took my advice at the time (many seemed to think I was overreacting), but I maintain that it is something everyone should be doing, to whatever degree finances and time allow. I also advocate that people with the means account for their neighbors in said prepping.

Disaster prep gets a bad rap, I think, because it is primarily seen as the province of right-wing nutjobs who seem eager for civilization to collapse. The right-wing “prepper” mentality seems to be a power fantasy, in which the prepper will enjoy one of three scenarios. The first is that they will become the Lone Survivor archetype, in which their hoarded food and weaponry will allow them to survive in the wasteland, and fight off the savage raiders who will inevitably come for their supplies. The second is that they will become those raiders themselves, taking what they want from those with fewer weapons. The third is that either the food, or some other resource they’ve been hoarding will be their ticket to social power and acceptance. If I’m the only one around with a supply of iodine, everyone will owe me for protecting them from thyroid cancer in the irradiated aftermath of nuclear war.

I advocate for what I call “pro-social” prepping in which you are preparing to do what you can to care for your community in hard times, and intending to share what you have, rather than hoarding it, and/or using it as a source of power over others. I also maintain that I was right to start urging this all those years ago. It’s hard to predict when or how disaster will strike, and when it does, all you have is what you have.

If you have nothing stored up, then anything you get to fix that problem will be better than nothing. but as I’ve said before, having food stored for emergencies is not as simple as buying a bunch of rice and beans or MREs and forgetting about them until you need them. You can do that, of course, but it comes with risks. If you’re not regularly interacting with your food supply, how can you know if mice start getting at it, or if moisture got into your dried food to let it rot, or a bad batch of canned food is starting to swell? The only way to ensure you’re actually ready for hard times is to actively maintain that supply.

The best way to do that is to constantly use it. Make it a part of your normal diet, so that you’re always eating the oldest stuff, and replacing it with new. This also ensures that when hard times hit, you already know how to use the food you have, and you have what you need to prepare it. Hard times can be a little easier if the food is tasty, and I can say from (camping) experience that you don’t want to wait until all you have is canned food to discover that you don’t have a working can opener.

Five years ago, Tegan wrote an excellent post on how to build and maintain a pantry that goes into all of this, but I have a new factor to add in, and that’s food intolerance. I said earlier that anything is better than nothing, but that may not be true if the food you get is poisonous to you, specifically.

I’ve known I’m lactose intolerant for about a decade, but over just the last five years, I’ve lost the ability to safely eat a whole bunch of different foods. I had used garlic powder as a non-perishable source of flavor for most of my life, but now we have a decent-sized bag of it that I simply can’t eat. Canned baked beans are cheap and tasty around here, except that they’ve all got tomatoes in, and those cause problems for me. Likewise, we have a big jar of split peas that I can’t eat, another of red lentils that seem to cause problems. The scale of of the problem depends on the food in question. For lentils and wheat, the problems can be subtle, and less of a problem for a single meal. For garlic and peas, it’s severe intestinal pain, and other symptoms I’d rather not describe in detail. The list of foods I can’t eat is longer than that, but you get the idea. It’s also worth noting that if you are eating food that is damaging your digestive tract, there’s a good chance you’re getting less nutrition from the stuff you can digest.

It has taken me time to adjust my diet to remove most of my favorite foods, and learn to make tasty food from what I can eat. Thankfully, rice has yet to let me down, and beans do OK for me if I prepare them correctly, but hopefully you can see the issue. Tegan has been slowly eating through the pantry foods I can’t eat, and we can share them with neighbors if it comes to that, but what if I simply didn’t eat split peas in normal life? We’d hit a time of hardship, and discover that something in our pantry disagreed with me. Because few meals are made of just one ingredient, then we’d have to figure out what the problem was, and simply have less food available, at the worst possible time.

So my message is this: Hard times are coming for the world, and especially for the US. The best time to start stocking and maintaining your pantry was 15 years ago, but the second-best time is now.