In which Hurricane Sandy changes everything
I’m as surprised as anybody. People like me don’t do things like this. Not for these reasons.
It’s okay to take up canning because you’re a foodie, but if you take it up because you expect national food distribution systems to break down periodically after natural disasters, that’s unseemly. (Is it?) Before Hurricane Sandy made a prepper of me, I remember hanging out in a friend’s kitchen while she set up to can homemade applesauce, with me trying and failing to comprehend this preoccupation. Wasn’t half the point of modernity that we could reclaim the time those tasks took and use it for something else?
After Hurricane Sandy, a lot of old skills that had once seemed futile to me were cast in a new light. The applesauce wasn’t the point. The point was the ability to preserve the harvest. There’s an aphorism you often see in prepper manuals, especially the ones about packing evacuation kits:
Knowledge weighs nothing.
Story is our species’ favorite way of preserving knowledge. It’s a lot less messy than canning, that’s for sure. So let me tell you a story.
We had months to spare before hurricane season when Barnes & Noble set up its display of emergency preparedness books. A big weather disaster, one with novelty, was in the news, and my extended family…