Reading about your experience this March (hope you folks are okay now!) and your grandparents reminded me that we each have a personal responsibility to be prep

Reading about your experience this March (hope you folks are okay now!) and your grandparents reminded me that we each have a personal responsibility to be prepared and resilient. There are political and practical dimensions to this. Not every family can prepare itself; many are severely resource constrained. I volunteer at the Utah Food Bank, which functions as the central distributor of donated food in Utah, supplying many, many smaller food banks in the state. One of the warehouse workers recently mentioned that the facility was turning over more food each week than was normally distributed in months. There is great need for shelf stable foods here, even with relatively low unemployment. For those of us that can afford to prepare, though, it’s imperative that we do so. We cannot and should not expect the government to have the capacity to come to our rescue in every crisis. And the benefit of being prepared means constrained resources can be directed to the neediest when those crises inevitably come. Bonus of having lots of canned goods on reserve: you can donate anything unused to your local food bank if there’s sufficient shelf life!