Last week’s email about snow shoveling prompted a great question from a long time reader and friend. “It got me thinking how vulnerable cities can be to disaster given the reliance on energy to make everything run. I also realized how under-prepared I would be for something like this.”

Now, I’m not going to go full prepper on you, but this is a really great question and before I tackle it I want to justify why you should prepare for the unexpected.

This is going to sound ridiculous but the unexpected is going to become more and more unexpected. What I mean by that is the world is so complex and interconnected that some geopolitical or weather event happening on the other side of the world could actually disrupt your food or energy supply, something totally impossible and unheard of even a couple hundred years ago. To say nothing of the complexity in delivering things like water and energy to you on a daily basis. It’s not inconceivable for an entire city’s water supply to become poisoned – just ask people in Flint.

Ultimately though, it’s not about you. You are young and you’re healthy and you can probably go a day or two without food if the worst should happen, right?

Maybe so, but can your weak and elderly neighbor?

And that’s what being prepared is really about. If you are able to help out those who aren’t prepared at all then you’re an asset, otherwise you’re just another liability.

So what should you have to cover the basics?

The easiest way to think about it is to look at the hierarchy of needs.

Water is critical. You should have about 1 gallon per person per day you’re planning for. If you have pets, make sure to include them. I’ve got about 12 gallons of water in my stash at home, which should be good for 3-5 days without even having to stretch it out. I also keep a Lifestraw set aside as a cheap insurance policy.

Food isn’t nearly as critical, but because you can account for it very cheaply and easily I think it’s a good base to cover. Besides canned goods and food you might have around all the time (keep in mind your freezer food is unlikely to make it past 1 day of a major power outage – 50% of Puerto Rico hasn’t had power for over 12 weeks) I keep a 4-day emergency supply of essentially backpacking food that cost me about $50 when it was on sale at Amazon. It’s not going to be gourment, but it’s going to taste awesome on day three of the trucks not delivering and freezers not freezing.

Next, it may well be that your best bet is to get the hell out of Dodge. While it’s always best practice to keep your gas tank as full as possible, most people don’t do this. So if space and living conditions permit, keep five or ten gallons of gas in a safe container in a safe place. While this isn’t going to be enough for a cross-country evacuation, at least it should get you out of the major city or immediate vicinity of the disaster and far enough enough away that you’ll have more access to resources.

I promised not to go full prepper so those are, in my opinion, the most important bases you can cover that you probably haven’t given much thought to and would make weathering an unexpected extreme storm, natural disaster, or alien invasion much easier. Here are a few miscellaneous items it would be good to have, preferably all in one place so you know where everything is if you need it in a hurry:

-Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
-Flashlight
-First aid kit
-Extra batteries
-Whistle to signal for help
-Dust mask to help filter contaminated air and plastic sheeting and duct tape to shelter-in-place
-Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
-Wrench or pliers to turn off utilities
-Knife and or multi-tool
-Local maps
-Cell phone with charger
-Backup USB battery or three

Remember that the key to insurance is to insure losses or risks you can’t afford to absorb. Can you “afford” to ride out three days of no power, no trucks making deliveries, etc?  I’d argue that spending maybe a hundred dollars on supplies that could potentially help you or your neighbor survive the unexpected is the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy, and it might not even be you that reaps all the benefit from it.

To your preparedness,

 

Philly just got hit with what was supposed to be the winter storm of the century, but honestly I have to tell you I was pretty underwhelmed. It snowed six inches and it was cold. Maybe it’s the growing-up-Minnesotan, or maybe we ​just dodged the worst of it, but I don’t see the big deal.

Anyway, it got me thinking about something I always do when I’m shoveling snow, which is to do my neighbor’s walks as well. In fact, with some of the lighter snows we’ve gotten I do the entire block on my side. It really doesn’t take that much longer, and I’m already all bundled up out there doing it, a few minutes more isn’t going to make much of a difference to me. Plus, it’s even easier in the city. When I lived in suburbia and I had a big ass tank of a snowblower I would drive it over to the neighbor’s and do their driveway as well.

The thing is, especially in a city, even if just one person on a block goes out of their way to do a few extra houses it has a non-linear effect on how easy it is to get around a snowed-in city. Most people don’t even bother to shovel their sideways to begin with, much less do more than their share of sidewalk.

When you go out of your way to do a little extra while you’re already there​, it changes everything for everyone.

Not everyone lives in a snowy climate, and it may only snow meaningfully a few times a year, but maybe you see where I’m going with this.

– Pick up an extra dog poop when you pick up your dogs’.
– Put away some weights that are strewn about the gym, that you didn’t take out.
– Make a double batch of chili or bread and give it to someone you know needs it (someone you know is invariably very ill, grieving, or going through a hard time – food always helps.)

And so on.

I don’t mean to be too preachy, and this might sound like an obvious thing, but are you actually taking the extra time to do it? Listen I’m no saint by any means, but this is something I make an active attempt to do as often as possible that makes my community better.

​I started baking bread over the holidays. Growing up I don’t even know that I was aware you could buy bread, because we never had anything in our house other than fresh bread my mom baked every couple weeks. In the winter, she’d tweak her recipe a little bit and make julekake​ which is a Norwegian bread that is slightly sweeter and has candied fruit in it, which is weird because we have zero point zero Norwegian heritage in our family, but I digress.

I had watched Michael Pollan’s incredible Cooked series for the third or fourth time, and I decided I was finally going to undertake sourdough bread baking. That entire series is fantastic by the way, if you haven’t seen it. My good friend the gentleman butcher and guest writer of the recent hunting article, Aron, is a co-owner of the butcher shop featured in the Fire episode. Anyway, I digress again.

So for the past week it’s been sourdough starters and flour explosions in the kitchen almost every day. And I’ll tell you what it’s damn good bread already, even if there is room for improvement. Easily better than anything you could buy at the store.

If it seems weird that a fitness guy would be so hype on bread, I’d like you to consider the following:

One of my overarching nutrition principles for figuring out what is best for you is to look at your genetic heritage AND your environmental circumstances for the previous generation or two. Lots of bread in both those for me.

Next, I think it’s important to look at what historically has been an important staple. Aside from eastern and southeastern parts of Asia, it’s pretty difficult to find a place or time in human history where bread hasn’t been an absolutely critical component of sustenance. It’s literally called the staff of life because it’s so important.

You can tell me that we’re all gluten intolerant now and we have wheat brain, but I’ll tell you that for some five thousand plus years humans have been thriving on bread so the logical conclusion is not that bread is bad but as they say YOUR bread is bad.

Modern commercial bread is a monoculture that suffers from the same deficiencies that monoculture organics like plants suffer from.

Did you know that the banana, as we know it, is probably going extinct? Because we thought it would be a good idea to reduce and control the variability in the organism down to what is now an unsurvivable species. But I digress, again.

The first iterations of modern bread were so devoid of nutrition that they actually made people sick on an epidemiological scale. Hence the advent of fortified and enriched bread – with nutrients added back in. Keep in mind this was supposed to be an “improvement” over technology that provided sustenance for over five thousand years, and it required spackle to fix the problem that the improvement created.

Bread can be a major source of calcium, but most modern bread is completely devoid of it. Chances are you’re not getting enough calcium as it.

So, bread produced in the old way using wild yeast and however much time is necessary for the process to complete without adulteration passes my second test.

Ultimately having passed two of the other principle tests the most important test is how does this actually work for me? I can’t point to any noteworthy ill effects when I eat bread, so it definitely passes.

Beyond the nutrition side of things, this is another way to develop a useful skill that further improves my family’s autonomy – which is never, ever a bad thing. People think making bread is hard and complicated, and it’s really not, just follow the steps. But that’s another topic for another day.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. If you’re interested in pursuing sourdough bread, I found this post very helpful as a starting point.