There are a lot of things that can impact your access to food, but one of the scariest and most viable disasters doesn’t come from a volcano or earthquake or even a terrorist. The most possible disaster that could impact your food is an economic collapse. Without the economy to support and regulate business and the nation as a whole, food as we know it will disappear.
So what can you do to protect yourself from this scary giant looming over your grocery store? How can you make sure you and your family have an uninterrupted food supply for the foreseeable future? The short answer is emergency food storage, but there’s more to it than just that.
SEE ALSO: Bug Out Vehicle Tips
The Types of Economic Collapse
Economic collapse can come in a number of ways. First, there’s the smaller, personal type where you lose your job to industry collapse, company collapse, or simple layoffs or firings.
Next comes the much more scary type of collapse; the one where everyone is out of money and jobs. For example, take the rampant inflation in Germany that came after WWI and WWII. Known as “hyperinflation,” this type of radical change in prices can destroy the value of paper money. For example, food prices in Germany from 1913-1923 rose 43%. Hyperinflation comes along with major social upheaval and is usually spurred along by governments trying to fix the issue by injecting more money into the economy. Less tax revenue and more money in the market makes hyperinflation gain speed and destroy economies.
Scarily enough, just about every instance of hyperinflation throughout history was preceded by large government budget deficits and increasing debt. Sound familiar?
The last type of economic collapse is the most absolute. What if all the debt our nation has was called in? The major concern in most people’s minds is a foreign nation like China, which we do owe quite a bit of our debt to, will call in their markers and require repayment, which we could not do. Also, China only holds around 7.6% of our total debt, which is fairly low, but China is still our largest overseas creditor.
While this is a concern, the scariest scenario is an internal collapse. Around 28% of the entirety of our national debt is owed to other arms of the federal government itself. For example, Social Security has loaned the federal government $2.76 trillion in securities. The Federal Reserve System is in for nearly $2.1 trillion. This means that if there was a major issue in one of these areas of the government, it could easily collapse because the fed itself couldn’t pay back the debt.
RELATED: 7 Emergency Food Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Your Emergency Food Supply
So now that you’re nice and worried about the economy blowing up like a semi-truck tire on the highway, it’s time to think about preparing for some bad times that could come sooner than later.
When most people think of prepping, they think of the TV shows and their focus on guns, bug out bags, and bunkers. While you shouldn’t downplay the importance of these, the less sexy side of this is the need for emergency food storage. You can save all the money you want, but if the price of bread goes up to $10,000, the money you saved won’t be worth much.
What will always be valuable however is food. Properly stored and cared for emergency food will keep you afloat in bad times and keep you alive in EOTWAWKI times. So what should you store?
RELATED: 12 Common Emergency Food Storage Mistakes
First off, you need to keep at the extreme least one week of food for you and your family. This should be a mix of canned, preserved, and freeze-dried foods. The easiest way to do this is to buy freeze-dried food kits like these, as they’re already packaged safely and stack and store better than anything you can do yourself.
The ideal situation for emergency food is a one-year store of food for you and everyone in your family. At least one meal each day should be a high calorie, well-balanced meal. You can skimp a little on the other meals, but at least one needs to be solid for you to keep your energy up.
Wrap-Up
When you get right down to it, the economy is far shakier than anyone involved with it would ever admit. While there are safeguards in place for stock market crashes, there are few protections to stop rampant inflation or the loss of your job.
Start your emergency food storage now and no matter the disaster that strikes, you’ll be prepared with one of the most valuable things around: food.