> Preppers, as the community of bunker builders and food hoarders is known, emerged during the Cold War as fears of nuclear holocaust drove some people to go to

> Preppers, as the community of bunker builders and food hoarders is known, emerged during the Cold War as fears of nuclear holocaust drove some people to go to great lengths to prepare for survival in a burned-out world. The mentality of storing supplies in case of an emergency, or simply as a matter of practicality, is older than the cold war. Long term storage of food for times of need has been the rule rather than the exception for all of human history, except for maybe those few, strange decades after WWII. Drying, pickling, burying, canning, and so on: your great grandparents were certainly "preppers", if they lived in a rural area, even if they didn't know the term. The framing of this practice as a paranoiac response to the cold war was something the media created, to have some group to deride, and through tidal processes it was inevitable they would reappropriate it eventually, to have some new trend to write an article about. But really, nothing has changed: the idea that the supply chain will always be there to provide anything we want, anywhere, at any time was what was crazy, not the precaution to store things against the day you might need them.