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How many of you are old enough to remember those old commercials I got the title from?

A long while back I started watching videos about shelf stable food. Generally ones about field rations for various armed forces. A lot of doomsday prep food comes from that sort of thing. My father, when he was in the army, ate rations from the second world war, because even though they weren’t great, they were still edible. Modern shelf stable food is even better than it was back then, obviously. A lot of things will last for an impressive amount of time, even though the companies that make it usually lowball the time you’ve got, so as to avoid lawsuits. 40 years is pushing it by every metric I know. I think 5 to 7 years is about as good as you can get barring things like sugar, honey, & other basic things that won’t ever spoil if stored properly. Clean water is the real issue. On some level doomsday prep is just an exercise in futility. In a real global thermonuclear war that truly devastated the planet all you’re doing is staving off the inevitable. It’s just something people do to try and take control back from chaos. Of course the public perception of what a person could survive as it applies to fallout wasn’t great even in the 60s. Even by the time I was in grade school the reality of what would happen wasn’t widely understood by a lot of people. My father always said if the bombs are coming it’s better to just go outside and get vaporized by the flash rather than suffer in a hellscape. My family, as you have probably guessed by now, if you’ve followed me for any length of time, is morbidly pragmatic.

That said, a shelter in the Midwest is actually very useful for the only common natural disaster: Tornados. In spite of this, many structures don’t have any shelter at all, because humans are short sighted and stupid. I remember when I lived in my apartment having to try and find someplace to go if there was a bad storm because it was essentially a box made of tissue against a tornado. There was no communal shelter. If the thing blew through we were just fucked & everyone would be like “there was nothing we could do” because, as I said, short sighted & stupid. It irritates me to this day.