Why are we doing this?

I find it hard to write about our motivations for taking on this challenge. When I was a child, people who built and stocked bomb shelters were a source of humor for sitcoms. After Jonestown I learned that religious groups have been predicting Armageddon throughout the ages, and believers have gathered on the fateful day, only to be disappointed. As I grew older, bomb shelters and religious nuts gave way to survivalists, holed up in Waco or Ruby Ridge with guns and ammunition stockpiled behind barbed wire fences. After that came Y2K, when people stockpiled supplies to prepare for a global technological meltdown. Peak Oil, the current going concern, is only the latest in a long series of focal points for a recurring fear of disaster.

After watching all these concerns come and go over the years, it's hard to shake the feeling that people who prepare for disaster are a bunch of kooks and nut cases. So I feel a bit like I'm coming out as a nut case myself, when I admit that preparedness is a concern of mine. But at the same time, I firmly believe that our exponential growth rate is unsustainable, and our situation is growing rapidly more precarious as we approach and overshoot global limits to growth in food production, cheap fuel, climate stability, and availability of fresh water (among other things.) Sooner or later, something's going to give. The only real questions are when and how.

Greg believes we might see a sudden global crash -- sixty to zero in 3.6 seconds -- whereas I think we're more likely to experience a sequence of local and regional disasters, each with a different impact on the world's economy, political stability, production capacity and supply chains. In either case, food security could become an issue, so we've agreed to create a food buffer in our pantry to protect against price spikes and supply disruptions. We've been working on this off & on for several years, and it seemed like a good time to give it a test run.

Here we go again...

Last September my family participated in NOFA-NY's Locavore Challenge, and ate only local foods for an entire month (with a handful of exceptions.) At the time, I kept thinking, "But this is the easiest time of the year to do this. We ought to try this in the dead of winter." So here it is, the dead of winter, and here we are preparing for another challenge.

March is the hardest time of year for local food. It's the one remaining month of the year in which the Ithaca Farmer's Market closes its doors entirely. Even the earliest of spring greens won't be available until April, fresh fruit won't appear again until June, and winter foods are feeling the stress of long-term storage. So it definitely makes for an interesting challenge to stay out of the imported-from-the-tropics and shipped-from-California produce aisles in the supermarket.

On the other hand, last fall's challenge upset the balance of our bulk stores, and we've had some problems recently with certain bulk foods going rancid before they reach our dinner plates. So cutting them out of our diet for another month seems like a bad plan right now.

After putting the two together, we decided to try a slightly different challenge this time. We're going to do a Preparedness Challenge, and use the opportunity to evaluate how resilient our food stores would be in the event of a major supply disruption. This challenge combines the most difficult part of a winter locavore challenge -- fruits and vegetables -- with a test of how effectively we've stocked the pantry. And it gives us the opportunity to experiment with workarounds for the short-term perishables that we're bound to run out of.

For the sake of sanity, we're going to limit ourselves to testing food preparedness, and continue to use water and energy as usual. (In the event of a real supply disruption that included water and energy as well as food, we wouldn't be expected to keep working and going to school...) And we're not allowing ourselves to stock up in advance, though we will go ahead and buy the things that are already on our February shopping list.

So, in brief, here are the rules we're setting for our Preparedness Challenge:

• No stocking up ahead of time
• No grocery runs in March
• Use water and energy as usual