Everyone is Stocking Up. Have You Considered... Not?

The hidden super skill.

Photo by Liana S on Unsplash

I almost can’t believe I wrote this, but I did.

It’s been a long time coming.

Every day, the internet dumps another bucket of survival slop on our heads. Lists of items we should buy before stores run out. Things we should start growing now. Various ways that billionaires are going to kill us off.

There’s something missing from it all.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first:

If you’re worried about starving, do you know what foods could feed most Americans that already grow in their back yards (if they would just stop dousing them in chemicals)? I’ve got a whole section on that here.

So, while everyone else is sprinting through stores and bodyslamming each other over the last pack of beef jerky, you can just walk into your yard and pick dandelions. Just let them grow. You can just transplant some kudzu stems and then do the bare minimum to keep them from dying.

If you live in the south, you know what’ll happen. Your neighbors will hate you, but civilization is going to collapse anyway, right? They’re all going to starve in a few weeks, so what does it matter? Let the kudzu grow.

Eat it.

Just don’t tell them that the ugly invasive vine taking over the subdivision is actually a super food. Or, if you want to build community, tell them that you just did everyone a big favor by rewilding the place.

Does that sound absurd?

It’s interesting, because what I find absurd are all the articles telling us to spend money we don’t have on more stuff, because the stuff is going to get more expensive, but they leave out the fact that it’s never going to get cheaper again, and maybe you don’t actually need some of that stuff…?

We don’t have to kill ourselves with homesteading. We could grow potatoes and beans, cultivate weeds, and that would just about do it. Yes, an experienced gardener will grow a wider variety, but you can just start there.

It’s fine.

There’s an idea here, and it runs against the American groupthink. Instead of thinking about all you have to buy, all you have to do, all you have to prepare, stop and take a step back. Think about what you could not do, what you could not buy, what you could make easier, just by adjusting your perspective.

Consider that dandelions and kudzu both pack more nutrients than most other greens we’re taught to see as “food.” I’m not saying don’t grow kale or spinach. I’m just saying, maybe you don’t have to do that.

Maybe learn to like weeds.

Isn’t that easier than clicking on all these articles about oncoming famines, and then feeling guilty for not starting your edible garden? If you didn’t mow your lawn this month, then odds are you have food.

I’m speaking in hyperbole, but you get the idea. If civilization is going to break down, if the rule of law is going to evaporate, then the first thing on my list isn’t going out and buying guns or stocking up on food. It’s not even planting a bunch of potatoes, although that’s a logical #2. It’s weeds. It’s planting weeds and ugly plants everywhere I can, plants that don’t require a lot of maintenance, plants that are, in fact, hard to kill, plants that 99 percent of everyone around me would never consider edible, unless I told them. Now, that’s a collapse plan. It makes as much sense as any other collapse plan I’ve seen out there.

And yes, of course, stock up on items. But also…

Consider not stocking up as the default move.

Start thinking about the day you simply won’t be able to get that thing anymore. Again, you’d be stunned at what plants have medicinal applications, backed by peer-reviewed research. I’m not going to list them all here, but they’re covered in the guide, and that’s just a starting point.

Every day, a dozen articles slide across my feed warning me about oncoming supply shocks. It happened during the early days of the war in Ukraine, and it happened during the bird flu crisis. It happened with tariffs.

Not one of them has asked the key question:

How do you live without that thing?

How do you live without beef? How do you live without eggs? How do you live without wheat? How do you live without milk?

How do you live without coffee?

That’s the real question.

Some things you can’t live without, but there’s another way to get them that doesn’t feed the machine. For example, the Open Insulin Foundation has been working on an open-source formula for years.

Maybe instead of trotting out “stock up on prescription meds” every time we get scared about supply chain shocks, we could actually make open-source insulin happen. Imagine if communities could produce their own insulin or blood pressure medication. Imagine localizing those supply chains.

Now, that’s community.

That’s prepping.

Instead, what do all the prepping channels promote? They plug Jase Medical, a company that will build you a personal stash of prescription meds. I’m not bashing them, but look, it’s a stopgap. That medication will run out. It will expire. The real solution to supply chain shocks, when it comes to medications like insulin, is to localize production and make it open source. I’ve seen practically every pro prepper plug Jase. I haven’t seen any talk about the Open Insulin Project.

Have you?

In 2009, Andrew Szasz came up with the idea of “inverted quarantine” to describe an attitude that’s now endemic to Americans and their response to disasters. His book Shopping Our Way to Safety focuses mostly on how corporations market protection to us through organic, greenwashed products. Instead of solving the problems that put us in danger, Americans and westerners in general try to buy their way out of them, insulating themselves from the world as it collapses. That attitude has taken an especially toxic turn among billionaires, like the ones Douglas Rushkoff described, who think they’ll sit out the apocalypse in bunkers with mercenaries, drones, and shock collars for their private guards.

Forget the Strait of Hormuz for a moment. Forget Ebola. For those who’ve paid attention in class, we’re just living the preface to the dystopian novels. We’re somewhere in the middle preface now, where the fascists take over, and the world devolves into constant warfare.

Simply stocking up on emergency food buckets and antibiotics won’t cut it. If you’re anything like me, you’ve done some deep dives into the notion of long-term food storage, and you learned something.

Guess what?

Yeah, dry goods like beans and pasta can last a decade or longer when they’re sealed and stored. They’ll stay safe to eat, but they still lose nutrition. The carbs and protein don’t degrade, but the vitamins do. The companies that sell the emergency food buckets don’t tell you that. Do they?

Once you’ve gotten the “stock up” out of your system, realize something. You’re not going to shop your way to safety.

We’re always going to be prepping for disasters, but that’s no longer sufficient to keep us safe. Not really. In some ways, it never was.

I don’t want to live in a bunker with years of stockpiled meds that go bad in a few years. I don’t want a slab of concrete filled with food buckets. I want to live in a world where a local nonprofit makes insulin and blood pressure medication for my neighbors in a high school science lab. I want to eat dandelions from my yard. I want to go for a walk through my neighborhood picking weeds for salad, without worrying what’s been sprayed on them. For me, that’s prepping.

That’s the super skill.

That’s survival.