A Practical Tuesday

Or, how do I feed my kid when the lights go out?

Mar 26, 2026

There’s an old joke, dark in a very Mongoosian way. But when dark humor is the only joke you can find, that’s when you are most in need of a laugh.

What’s the minimalist basic survival kit? A rifle, a box of ammunition, and the local Mormon ward directory.

In the real world, I recommend against this. Most of the Mormons are armed, too.

I bring up the Mormons for a reason beyond the punchline. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been teaching home food storage for over a century. Every ward has a preparedness specialist. The Bishop’s Storehouse is a standing institution. Say what you will about the theology — and I have, extensively, as a man who left that church — but they understood something that secular America has mostly forgotten: the grocery store is a supply chain, not a guarantee.

I was thinking about this the other day when I found weevils in my third package of pasta.

Not the first. Not the second. The third. The first two, you shrug off. Things happen. The third time is a diagnostic signal. The third time means your system has a flaw, and the flaw is this: two people don’t eat enough dry pasta to rotate through it before the eggs that were always in the grain — they’re always in the grain, that’s the fun secret of dry goods — have time to hatch and throw a party in your pantry.

This got me thinking about S.M. Stirling.

If you haven’t read Dies the Fire, I’ll keep this brief. S.M. Stirling wrote a novel about what happens when the lights go out — not for a weekend, but forever. Electricity stops working. Internal combustion stops working. Gunpowder stops working. It’s a thought experiment with the safety catch off, and Stirling was honest enough to follow the logic where it led.

Where it led was a chapter I loved so much I translated it into Scottish Gaelic. For fun. Because I’m that kind of person.

It’s not the battle chapter. It’s not the dramatic one. It’s the chapter where Juniper Mackenzie — folk musician, single mother, Wiccan priestess, and precisely nobody’s idea of a survivalist — stands in the basement of a brewpub in Corvallis, Oregon, and does math.

How do I feed my kid?

The thought hits her like a fist in the gut. She’s been poor before. She knows what it’s like to live on pasta and day-old bread and whatever comes out of the garden. But this is different. This isn’t stretching a budget. This is the supply chain unraveling in real time, and she can see every link in the chain as it breaks: the farmer and his tractors, and the trucks. The packing plant, and the refrigerators, and the power line to the flour mill, and the baker, and the factory that made the mustard.

She looks at a pastrami sandwich and sees the entire industrial economy that had to function perfectly to put it in her hand.

So what does she do? She doesn’t panic. She doesn’t grab a gun, because guns aren’t working anyway. She starts working, and thinking, preparing to evacuate to her great-uncle’s summer cabin. Fortunately, it is well out of the city.

In the real world, shelter in place is the right answer nine times out of ten. The people who die in disasters are overwhelmingly the ones who get in their cars. Stirling's scenario is the exception — because the Change is permanent, the cities become a deathtrap not from the disaster itself but from the math. A million people, no supply chain, no refrigeration, no transport. Corvallis has maybe a week of food on its shelves at any given time. Juniper can count, and the numbers say get out.

But whether you're leaving or staying, the next problem is the same.

She sorts. Dried goods over canned, because canned food is mostly water and container — dead weight when you’re hauling supplies on a bicycle. Flour, soy, dried fruit, dark chocolate, honeyed dates. Calories per pound. And when her friend Dennis asks about the spice packets, she says throw them all in. They don’t weigh much, and they’re going to be worth more than gold in a while.

That’s the line that stuck with me. Not the swords and axes that come later. The spice packets.

Because Juniper understood something in that moment that most survival fantasies get exactly wrong. You’re not prepping for a story. You’re prepping for breakfast. Tuesday’s breakfast, and Wednesday’s, and the one after that, for months, and if every single one of those meals is plain white rice with nothing on it, your soul is going to break before your body does.

Now here’s where I stop talking about fiction. I am more knowledgeable than most people, about edible wild plants. I grew up learning from my mother, and I have a lot of books on the shelf myself. I led foraging hikes, for a while. Until life got too busy. I knew a guy once, who said ‘I bought a plant book, if SHTF I’ll just go out and forage.’

I said, ‘Friend … there is no cheeseburger tree.’ I know enough that I could add some fresh greens to a boring diet. And I have already tried a lot of those plants, cooked them and eaten them while there is still a working medical infrastructure available. The right time to try a wild plant (or, God Forbid! a mushroom!) is not when you’re twenty miles into the back country. Give yourself a chance to survive being wrong.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. Roughly twenty percent of the world’s oil passes through it every day. On February 28th, the United States and Israel struck Iran. Iran closed the Strait and started hitting tankers.

I’m not going to relitigate the geopolitics. I’ve written about that elsewhere, and you can find those pieces in the Canon. What I want to talk about is what it means for the trucks.

Because everything Juniper saw in that pastrami sandwich — the farmer, the tractors, the packing plant, the refrigerators, the power line, the flour mill — every single link in that chain runs on oil. Not all of it comes through Hormuz. But enough of it is priced against Hormuz that when the Strait closes, the cost of everything that moves goes up. And in America, everything moves. Your groceries traveled an average of fifteen hundred miles to reach your store. That distance runs on diesel, and diesel runs on a price that just got a lot less predictable.

I’m not telling you the world is ending. I’m telling you the trucks might slow down.

So last Tuesday, I went to Costco.

Twenty-five pounds of pinto beans. Fourteen fifty-nine. Twenty-five pounds of white rice. Ten ninety-nine. Four kilos of semolina spaghetti. Twelve ninety-nine. Total: thirty-eight dollars and fifty-seven cents.

That’s roughly ninety-three thousand calories. At two thousand calories per day for two people, that’s twenty-three days of baseline survival. Not comfort. Not cuisine. Survival — the foundation you build meals on top of.

I brought it home and told Lady T what I was planning. Her response was immediate, clear, and entirely fair: “If Jamie is taking on a project, Jamie is going to do the work.” She handles food in this house. She’s good at it. But this isn’t her project — this is the mongoose seeing weather on the horizon and deciding to do something about it on a Tuesday afternoon instead of waiting for the storm to hit.

The rice goes in one-gallon mylar bags. The beans go in mylar bags. The pasta goes in mylar bags. All of it protected with oxygen absorbers. A flat iron seals them shut. The oxygen absorbers do the real work — they kill the weevil eggs that are already in the grain, because they are always already in the grain, and they create an anaerobic environment where nothing grows, nothing hatches, nothing rots. Sealed properly, white rice lasts twenty-five to thirty years. Beans, the same. Pasta, a decade or more.

The bags go on shelves in the crawl space under our house. The same crawl space where, last fall, I built a cinderblock retaining wall and poured concrete to protect a new furnace from the moisture that had rusted the old one into a heap over thirty years. I didn’t build that wall for food storage. I built it because the furnace needed protecting. But the infrastructure you build for one reason has a way of becoming useful for another, if you’re paying attention. One more wall, some simple shelving, and the mechanical room becomes a pantry that nobody knows is there.

The temperature down there stays in the sixties year round. The earth buffers the swings. It’s not a sun room hitting ninety in July or a garage dropping to thirty in January. For long-term dry storage, every ten degrees cooler roughly doubles shelf life. The crawl space isn’t glamorous. It wasn’t designed for this. But it works, for the same reason Juniper’s brewpub basement worked — because it was there, and she was smart enough to use what she had.

Here’s the system, because a system matters more than a pile of stuff:

Tier one: sealed for the long haul. Rice, beans, pasta, flour. The staples that are dirt cheap, calorically dense, and damned hard to grow or forage yourself in northern Utah. These go in mylar because a two-person household doesn’t eat through them fast enough to rely on rotation. We’re not planning to open a bag a week. We’re not planning to open them at all, unless we need to.

Tier two: rotation stock. Canned goods — spaghetti sauce, tuna fish, mandarin oranges. Cream of Mushroom soup. Lady T buys these in the normal course of feeding us. We just buy a little extra and rotate. First in, first out. The cans last years on a shelf without any special treatment, and they’re the difference between survival and a meal. Rice and beans with Mushroom Soup and a can of tuna is dinner. Rice and beans alone is hard grift and penance.

Tier three: the immortals. Salt and sugar. They go in old coffee cans because they don’t need oxygen absorbers. They don’t need anything. Sugar is inhospitable to microbial life. Salt is a mineral. Moisture is their only enemy, and a decent lid handles that. Without them, everything in tier one is functionally miserable to eat.

Tier four: morale. Coffee, in the big cans, rotated steadily, because we can live without it but a mongoose has to ask — why would we want to? And tucked in the back of the pantry, a double handful of freeze-dried #10 cans from the last time we got nervous, back in 2008. Dried strawberries. Dried green beans. Others. It’s not baseline calories — these provide nutrition and variety and the psychological reminder that food can be something other than grim.

The target is six months. Two people, two thousand calories each, a hundred and eighty days. Seven hundred and twenty thousand calories. At the price point I’m hitting at Costco, the whole thing costs maybe three hundred dollars. That’s less than a month of groceries. That’s less than a car payment. That’s what it costs to avoid being the person who, a year from now, says I wish I’d spent less money on silly shit I didn’t need.

I know that’s the potential outcome, because I said exactly that, in a note on somebody else’s Substack post last week. Fifteen people liked it within eleven minutes. Someone restacked it. Not because I said anything brilliant. Because people already feel this, in their bones, and most of them don’t have anyone in their feed giving them permission to act on it.

So here’s your permission. Go to Costco. Buy rice. Buy beans. Buy a box of mylar bags and a box of oxygen absorbers from Wallaby. Seal them on a Tuesday afternoon. Put them somewhere cool and dark and boring. Tell your partner what you’re doing. Do the work yourself.

You don’t need a rifle and a ward directory. You need a fifty-pound bag of rice and a flat iron and a Tuesday afternoon with nothing better to do.

The Mormons have known this for a hundred years. Juniper Mackenzie figured it out in a basement in Corvallis. I figured it out when the weevils got my pasta for the third time, and the Strait of Hormuz was on fire, and I realized that the distance between fiction and Tuesday is shorter than I thought.

Consider sharing this with someone who needs a practical Tuesday today. 🐸