The number of preppers has doubled in size to about 20 million since 2017, due to more people or color and progressives joining the community, experts say.
My grandmother had her own vegetable garden, and kept a full pantry, rotating out canned, preserved and dried food properly, had candles, water collection, all sorts of stuff.
What they call prepping nowadays was once simply common sense.
I feel this will become more mainstream in decades to come.
The mallninja knives and other such fluff are bizarre though.
That's because these people do not want to actually live this way. They are cosplayers. They want to buy $50 worth of freeze dried food and go to McDonald's.
Your grandmother learned to live like that because she had no choice. That's what growing up in the Depression will do to you. No grandma would ever have freeze dried ice cream. Better learn how to milk a cow! Free milk, cream, and butter every day. But it's not easy.
Obviously if you don't live somewhere where you can have a cow, freeze dried is required or else you'll die in around 96 hours. That's the average amount of time someone can survive without ice cream, which I'm sure you're aware
Living in Southern California, my mom always had a trash can outside filled with dried/canned goods and water that she periodically rotated. She called it our earthquake supplies.
It will become more mainstream as people in the west become poorer. Most rich people don't know how to preserve food because they can just buy it made for them.
You're living through it right now though. Increased disease, poverty, institutional break down, more conflict, more movement of peoples towards various social or environmental refugia. 'Collapse' is a process that takes decades.
Yeah but there are a couple downward steps that would be a lot larger and more obvious. I'm hanging out to see if they are in the near future. And also heck it might be fun for a minute in the more chaotic moments.
As someone who's actually learning how to do things to actually survive I appreciate them collecting supplies in one place so I can use them after they starve to death.
Ha! Here in Australia we don't 'prep'. But I reckon I could comfortably survive in the bush for a good year with what I could throw into my ute with 5 min warning.
I could do alright for a few months if I found a remote enough place with a nice stream. I've got a garden and my tackle box is already in the truck for reasons unrelated to the apocalypse. I'd be living off fish, a small variety of veggies, and garlic.
If I could reach back far enough in my memory I could make a bow, fletch some arrows, and go hunting. I have the woodworking tools and with a bit of trial and error could probably remember how to make a string from animal gut or hide. Bonus, more fish hooks.
I would really enjoy that until it stopped feeling like a vacation and started feeling like work. I love hunting and used to love making tools for it.
I’ve been thinking more and more about Australia as a safe haven, but I’ll have to learn to be an Australian to live there. Lots of things that will kill you there.
I think it's smart to have some emergency supplies on hand, but building a whole ass bunker like it's gonna be Fallout is where it gets crazy. I think for a lot of these people it just becomes a hobby lol.