Being a prepper I guess some people already would think i'm a bit of an alarmist. I mean we talk about the fragility of our social and economic systems, the extreme reliance on the electrical grid, the lack of self sufficiency that our "just in time", fast food, and microwave society has created. But it really hit me today.
Even though i'm well stocked, I did manage to run low on Lactaid milk. So after blowing the snow and cleaning and warming up all the cars, I decided to venture to my local grocery store for 2 half gallons so I could have a nice hot cup of hot chocolate. I saw the news reports Saturday and Sunday about there being runs on staples and shelves being empty but I didn't think too much of it. So, when I'm grabbing my Lactaid, I notice there is very little regular milk on the racks in the cooler. Not only that, but there were none of the usual racks filled with dairy products in the back of the cooler to restock.
I asked the stock guy, and his response was "yeah, we missed a bunch of our trucks today because of the storm. We're out of eggs, almost out of dairy, and a bunch of other stuff if you look close". I looked around. Things like no "ready to bake" cookies, low on ice cream, no bread, no ground beef, a few packs of chicken... A chill went up my spine. I had not noticed because they repositioned inventory like lunch meat in the cooler to fill the space. This is just a snow storm. The roads will get plowed and the trucks will eventually show up. But what if it didn't? What if the trucks weren't coming? We aren't talking weeks, or even days, literally 24 hours and the wheels had begun to come off of society. The cracks in the damn began to leak.
In studying the fragility of Great Britain's food chain, Lord Cameron of Dillington, the first head of the countryside agency, told Tony Blair that They were "Nine meals away from anarchy". He was right, we are really that close to the edge.
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