This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some people spend more time than others imagining what they’ll do when the world ends. Survivalist movements have long urged adherents to focus on the details: How much food and water will you need if the power goes out? Where are the flashlights and extra batteries? What’s in your go bag? For years, this kind of forward thinking was the object of ridicule. Preppers were cast as paranoid, fixated on worst-case scenarios that would never come to pass—remember Y2K?

But six years ago, the Covid pandemic made prepping go mainstream. Suddenly, everyone at the grocery store was calculating how much toilet paper, Lysol, and canned tomatoes they’d need to get through lockdown. These moments revealed the difficulty of knowing yourself in a crisis: I remember a trip to Trader Joe’s with my roommate, the day New York City’s own lockdown was announced, where I instinctively grabbed a bag of frozen meatballs despite never really liking meatballs in the first place. I bought them, and they sat untouched in my freezer for the next 12 months—when I finally made them it was out of guilt, not out of necessity.

“If you eat the same thing, over and over, you will get burnt out on it.”

The world is no longer in lockdown mode, but the appeal of prepping has arguably only grown. In 2024, in a national household survey, 83 percent of respondents told FEMA they had recently taken at least three disaster preparedness actions, up from 57 percent of participants the year prior. A disaster impacting one’s self or family ranked third in participants’ top worries, behind health concerns and being able to pay their bills.

It isn’t hard to understand why. News alerts now arrive daily with stories about declarations of war (sanctioned and otherwise), political and economic instabilities, and other breakdowns of public life—all against the backdrop of the worsening climate crisis. Indeed, many of us are already living through some form of disruption, in big ways or small.

In a disaster, having enough food and water for yourself and your family is essential; that’s why grocery stores stayed open during lockdown, and why restaurant workers were tasked with fulfilling GrubHub orders before vaccines were available. But food is about more than survival. The ways it sustains us are personal, layered, and hard to untangle. Even FEMA agrees: “Familiar foods are important,” a 1994 preparedness manual from the agency reads. “They lift morale and give a feeling of security in times of stress.” Readers are told to prioritize foods their family “will enjoy” that are also nutritious and non-perishable.

Building a bunker pantry—or better yet, learning to grow your own food—might come in handy even if a full-scale disaster never appears. Rising temperatures are already changing how crops are grown. Becoming even slightly more self-sufficient is useful at a time when global food supply........

© Mother Jones