Food Insurance, I can now tell you, is a Utah-based company that advertises on world-is-ending-plus-your-hair-is-on-fire talk radio, and sells palletloads of freeze-dried, packaged food to the suburban survivalist market. “Do you need more food insurance?’’ the company asks. If so, it will be happy to sell you a One Month Food Kit for $300. That gets you 28 freeze-dried “breakfast servings,’’ 56 lunch and dinner servings, 28 rice servings, and 84 orange power electrolyte drink servings.
For $9,800, Food Insurance will ship you its 3792 Entree Package, “enough food to provide three entrees a day for a family of 5 (2 adults and 3 children) for 12 months.’’ Whew! That would allow you to cower in your panic room until Fox News sounded the all-clear sign, meaning that Michele Bachmann had been elected president.
I make fun of these people, but consider this: Not so long ago, I was at a dinner party with four other families from my “leafy suburb,’’ as Newsweek once called it. They had respectable jobs, they were living the bourgeois life - and everyone at the table had emergency rations stashed in their basements. One family had hundreds of gallons of water. Another had a generator and Costco-like quantities of canned food. Except me, of course. I couldn’t believe my ears.
I haven’t hoarded gold, I failed to prepare for the Rapture, and my kitchen has about four days’ worth of food and drink in it. Does Negra Modelo have the required electrolytes? Never mind. Pace, Ms. Ingraham, Mr. Savage, and Food Insurance flack extraordinaire Mr. Glenn Beck, I just don’t believe American civilization is coming to an end. Indeed I’d be interested to know what the indicators are. Other than the declining quality of Chinese food in North Beach, that is.
I hear you asking: What does “25-year worry-free’’ freeze-dried beef stroganoff taste like? Not so bad. I dined in, as it were, on Food Insurance’s stroganoff and on the lasagna with meat sauce. Just add one cup of boiling water (Wait! I thought the Chinese invaders cut off the water supply?), relax for 10 minutes, and eat the swill right out of the foil package.
