Preppers used to be ridiculed – but we’re all stockpiling now | Zoe Williams

The UK government urging households to prepare for unknown threats with a three-day supply of food and water doesn’t feel like an overreaction. But is there a bigger plan to go with it?

There is no national food stockpile and there hasn’t been since it was wound up in the 1990s. It feels like a metaphor for the delusions of that era: nothing bad can possibly happen again; no two countries with a McDonald’s have gone to war with each other (according to the journalist Thomas L Friedman, also in the 90s). Now, we all have a McDonald’s and wars regularly disrupt food supplies. The problem with metaphors is you can’t eat them – not even satisfying ones.

For people who remember the second world war, or feel as if they do, there is always enough muscle memory to do topical household stockpiling. My mum kept a trunk of food that was mainly filled with condensed milk in case of a nuclear war, all the way through the 80s. When the Berlin Wall came down, we should have had a ceremonial toffee-sauce-making event where we ate it all, but we didn’t; in 1990, she was stockpiling again, to mark the Gulf war.

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