Ask a Prepper

No. A standard renters insurance policy does not cover flood damage. This surprises a lot of renters, since renters insurance does cover many other types of water damage, like a burst pipe or an overflowing washing machine. Flooding caused by outside water, heavy rain, storm surge, or an overflowing river or lake is treated as a completely separate category of risk, and it is specifically excluded from nearly every standard renters policy sold in the United States.

There is a reason hot honey has taken over restaurant menus, farmers markets, and pantry shelves over the past several years. It is sweet, it is fiery, it is endlessly versatile, and best of all for anyone who values self-reliance, it is one of the simplest condiments you can make at home with almost no specialized equipment. For preppers and homesteaders, hot honey is more than a trendy drizzle for pizza.

Walk into your garage right now and look around. Somewhere in that clutter sits something capable of killing you, and it’s probably been sitting there for years without a second thought. It’s the gas can by the door. The propane tank behind the mower. The extinguisher you’ve never once checked. Ordinary items, hiding in plain sight, waiting for the one moment you’ll actually need them to work.

Most prepper content focuses on storms, blackouts, and supply chain breakdowns you can see coming. A cyber attack doesn’t work that way. There’s no forecast, no evacuation order, no countdown clock. One day your bank account, your medical records, your utility company, or the water treatment plant three miles from your house is compromised, and you find out after the fact, not before.

My third great-grandmother, my grandfather’s great-great-grandmother, was born in 1789, the same year George Washington took his first oath of office. She never saw an airplane or a refrigerator. She raised her children through cholera outbreaks and crop failures, buried more than one infant, and lived through winters where the difference between eating and starving came down to what she’d canned, dried, or smoked the season before. She’s been gone for over a century now.

Walk into any prepping forum and ask “what foods should I stockpile” and you’ll get a hundred different answers, half of them focused on obscure freeze-dried entrees and the other half insisting you only need rice and beans. Both are missing the real answer. A stockpile that actually works is layered by timeline, balanced for real nutrition, and built around food your family will actually eat when the power’s out and the stress is high. Here’s how to build one that holds up.

Search “Native American myths” and you’ll get a flood of results treating these stories like campfire horror content, monsters and spirits stripped of context and packaged for a scare. That’s a disservice to what these stories actually are. Long before survival manuals, weather apps, or bug-out bags, oral tradition was the delivery system for the knowledge that kept people alive in some of the harshest environments on this continent.

A grid-down event, a hurricane, a job loss, or a supply chain disruption like the 2022 formula shortage can cut you off from baby formula with almost no warning. Unlike most preps, this one has zero margin for error. An adult can skip a resupply run for a week and lose some weight. An infant fed the wrong substitute for even a few days can end up in the ER with low calcium, kidney strain, or severe malnutrition.

Oxygen absorbers work by pulling breathable air out of a sealed container, which slows the oxidation that turns fatty foods rancid and suffocates any insect eggs already hiding inside dry goods. They’re a smart tool, but they’re solving one specific problem, and plenty of pantry staples never had that problem to begin with.

If you’ve been at this a while, you already know how to dry meat and put up beans. So this isn’t another list of the obvious. These are the older, stranger, harder-won foods that carried this country across mountains and through wars and depressions, the ones that have mostly slipped out of living memory. Our great-grandparents fed armies and families on them with no refrigeration and no grocery store within a hundred miles.