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That's how the world works.
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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Individual prepping is only meant to bridge the gap between distaster and community or national assistance/cooperation.
So have some emergency food, water, but prepping properly is actually things like learning to garden well, save seeds, learn to preserve, learn how to forage, build community connections.
Gardening and foraging won't get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).
The good news is that food production is a "solved" issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.
Those who'll get fucked by Trump's war are not Americans or Europeans, it'll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.
This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a "they live in a 'shithole country' and we won't care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now" kind of way.
I think this somewhat ignores the way markets kill people during times of famine - see the Late Victorian Holocausts or the Great Famine, in both of which there was plenty of food available, but the problem was the introduction of markets and artificial austerity measures that failed to distribute food to people dying of famine
so, food production might be a solved issue (I think that's a bit more debatable given soil degradation and the threats to supply chains necessary for the industrial inputs needed to keep those food production systems going in their current, post-Green-Revolution format), but the distribution issue has not been solved and will likely result in many of us dying due to lack of economic power to afford food that will simply expire and rot in storage and then be destroyed and disposed of in a way that denies us access to the waste
Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.
It's not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that's a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.
I guess my point was more that in both cases of the Great Famine and the Late Victorian Holocausts, there was sufficient food in storage to feed the people dying of starvation - it was the introduction of markets and the resulting false austerity that prevented the otherwise typical food distribution systems during times of famine from happening, and then lots of deaths occurring. In a sense markets are a policy choice to let the poor die. If you can't afford food, you do not deserve to live. That is the logic of capitalism.
So my point is that even if we see food production as "solved", we shouldn't forget the problems of food distribution - and sure, they're related, to your point over-production (through the development of fertilizer and other industrial methods of food production) under capitalism we can reduce prices and make distribution more accessible, ... but when production occasionally fails, it is the economic system that starves people first (not necessarily the lack of food, which can also happen as in the cases of many other famines).
In pre-capitalist societies when food production failed, stocks of food were usually released and distribution was ensured in ways that marketized & capitalist societies have not done (where for example in Syria around the time of the Arab Spring, we saw grocers dying from starvation because they couldn't make enough money selling food to afford to buy food for themselves).
And yes, starvation when food is abundant is a monumental policy failure - this is something we should be driving home more to people, that the US chooses to have starving and homeless people as a policy choice.
Completely agreed that social solutions are the only way to solve food insecurity, individual action like doomsday prepping is a distraction that primes us to victim-blame people who die for not "preparing" adequately.
A garden is never going to be a primary source of calories. I know someone who has a massive backyard garden with at least 10 pool-table sized raised beds and a bunch of other smaller areas with berries, etc. He loves gardening but he can't keep up on his own and hires help for it. And, even then, it's mostly just extra things for salads. Sometimes he dedicates a full weekend to preserving things, but even then, what he has is just a supplement to his grocery shopping.
Definitely not going to be a primary source of calories... but that's not the point. When you have no other options, are you going to wish you knew how to garden or not? What do you propose as a better way to prepare for food systems breaking down?
Why would you imagine there would be a situation where you had no other options? If you had no other options, are you going to wish you knew how to unicycle?
There is no way to prepare for a food system breaking down. People will die of starvation if that happens. People who have gardens will have those gardens raided by hungry neighbours, or seized by the authorities. Ultimately, the food system breaking down would probably mostly hurt poorer countries because the richer ones would divert any available food their way.