Cyclosporiasis Diarrhea Outbreak: What Is It?

Cyclosporiasis Diarrhea Outbreak: What Is It? If you’ve been hearing about a stomach bug spreading across the country this summer, you’re not imagining things. Health officials in dozens of states are tracking a rise in cases of an intestinal illness called cyclosporiasis, and it’s worth taking a few minutes to understand what it is, where it comes from, and what to do if you or someone in your family starts feeling sick.

Cyclosporiasis Diarrhea Outbreak: What Is It?

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by a tiny parasite called Cyclospora cayetanensis. Cases are currently being reported in nearly three dozen states, and the most common symptom is watery diarrhea, sometimes with frequent and explosive bowel movements. More than 30 states have reported cases so far this year, with over 5,000 reported nationwide and dozens of hospitalizations. Keep in mind, these numbers will change daily. Check the CDC Cyclosporiasis for more information.

The parasite typically spreads through food or water contaminated with human feces. People become infected by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the parasite, and previous outbreaks have been traced back to fresh produce such as cilantro, basil, leafy greens, raspberries, and salad mixes, since these foods are commonly eaten raw with little or no cooking to destroy the parasite. Right now, health officials in several states are still working to pin down the exact food source behind this year’s rise in cases. This is a good reminder that food safety isn’t something we can fully control at the grocery store level. It starts all the way back with how food is grown, watered, harvested, and shipped.

Symptoms can include watery diarrhea, loss of appetite, cramping, nausea, fatigue, and weight loss over time, if the illness lingers. The time between exposure and symptoms is generally around 7 to 10 days, though it can vary widely. Because symptoms can take over a week to appear, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly which meal or ingredient caused the illness, which is part of why outbreak investigations take so long.

I want to be very clear here. I’m not a doctor, a nurse, or anyone in the medical field. I’m simply a mom who cares about her readers and wants to share trustworthy information. If you or anyone in your family has ongoing watery diarrhea, especially if it lasts more than a few days, please contact your doctor or healthcare provider. Health officials specifically recommend seeing your healthcare provider if you have symptoms of cyclosporiasis. Cyclosporiasis is generally treated with an oral antibiotic, most commonly Bactrim, Septra, or Cotrim, taken for about 10 days. A doctor can determine whether this or another treatment is right for your situation, especially if anyone in your home has allergies or other health conditions. While you wait to be seen, focus on staying hydrated and resting, as diarrheal illnesses can quickly cause dehydration, especially in young children and older family members.

None of us can control what happens at the farm level, but there are a few simple habits that can help lower risk at home. Wash all fresh produce thoroughly under running water, including herbs like cilantro and basil, even if you plan to peel it. Cut away any bruised or damaged parts of fruits and vegetables before eating. Refrigerate any pre-cut or pre-prepared produce promptly. Cooking produce is an effective way to reduce risk, since heating food to 158 degrees Fahrenheit or higher kills the parasite, though this isn’t practical for a fresh salad, so washing and careful handling become even more important for foods eaten raw. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water before and after handling raw fruits and vegetables.

I know reading about outbreaks can feel unsettling, especially when you’re the one responsible for feeding your family every single day. Please don’t let this steal your peace. There’s no reason to panic, but there is good reason to stay informed. Wash your produce, wash your hands, keep a close eye on how everyone in your home is feeling, and reach out to your doctor if something seems off. That’s really all any of us can do, and it’s enough.

This post is for general information only and is not medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider for any questions about symptoms, diagnosis, or treatment. When in doubt, contact your doctor.

Cyclosporiasis vs. Norovirus

Cyclosporiasis and norovirus are often confused because both cause stomach trouble, but they’re quite different illnesses. Cyclosporiasis is caused by a microscopic parasite that usually spreads through contaminated food or water, often fresh produce, and it tends to bring on watery diarrhea that can last for days or even weeks if untreated, along with loss of appetite and fatigue.

Norovirus, on the other hand, is a virus rather than a parasite, and it spreads very easily from person to person, via contaminated surfaces or food handled by someone who is sick. Norovirus usually hits fast and hard, with sudden vomiting and diarrhea, but it typically clears up within a day or two, whereas cyclosporiasis can linger much longer and generally requires antibiotics to fully resolve. Knowing the difference matters because norovirus often runs its course on its own, while cyclosporiasis usually calls for a visit to the doctor.

Proper Way To Wash Our Hands

Bars of Soap

Washing your hands with soap and water is still the gold standard, especially for conditions like cyclosporiasis and other foodborne illnesses. The proper method is to wet your hands, apply soap, and scrub every surface, including between your fingers, under your nails, and the backs of your hands, for at least twenty seconds before rinsing well and drying with a clean towel. Hand sanitizer is a helpful backup when soap and water aren’t available, but it’s not a perfect substitute. Sanitizer works well against many germs, yet it’s far less effective against certain parasites and viruses, and it doesn’t physically remove dirt, grease, or organic material the way washing does. For that reason, after handling raw produce, using the bathroom, or caring for someone who is sick, soap and water should always be your first choice, with hand sanitizer reserved for those moments in between when a sink simply isn’t nearby.

Final Word

Friends, food safety is something we think about often here, and this summer it feels especially close to home. Wash your produce well, keep an eye on how your family is feeling, and never hesitate to call your doctor if something seems off. A little care in the kitchen goes a long way toward keeping the people you love healthy. May God bless this world, Linda

Copyright Images: Health Care Concept Cyclosporiasis Depositphotos_421650378_S, Diarrhea Photo Sign Depositphotos_43647805_S

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from Food Storage Moms

How to Prepare for a Cyber Attack – A Prepper’s Complete Guide

Most prepper content focuses on storms, blackouts, and supply chain breakdowns you can see coming. A cyber attack doesn’t work that way. There’s no forecast, no evacuation order, no countdown clock. One day your bank account, your medical records, your utility company, or the water treatment plant three miles from your house is compromised, and you find out after the fact, not before. CISA and the FBI have publicly confirmed that state-affiliated hackers are actively probing power grid operations, water systems, and government facilities right now, not as a future hypothetical. This guide covers both halves of the problem: locking down your own digital life so you’re not an easy target, and building the physical, offline resilience that protects you when the systems around you get hit instead.

Lock Down Your Own Accounts First

Before worrying about grid-scale attacks, handle the threat that’s statistically far more likely to hit your household directly: personal account compromise. More than 90 percent of successful cyber attacks start with a phishing email, according to CISA’s guidance for families, which means the single highest-leverage thing you can do costs nothing and takes an afternoon.

• Use a password manager. Every account should have a long, randomly generated password that exists nowhere else. Reused passwords are the most common foothold attackers use to break into household accounts.
• Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) everywhere it’s offered, especially on email, banking, and cloud storage. Email deserves the highest priority since it’s the recovery mechanism for almost every other account you own. If an attacker gets into your inbox, they can reset the passwords for everything else.
• Prefer an authenticator app over SMS codes when you have the choice. SIM-swapping attacks can intercept text-based verification codes, so an app like Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator closes that gap.
• Turn on automatic updates for your operating systems and apps. Most successful attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that already had a patch available, just never installed.
• Think before you click. If a link or attachment looks even slightly off, trust that instinct. Phishing pages are built to imitate real login screens closely enough to fool a fast glance.
• Inventory every device in your household, phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and smart home gadgets, so you actually know what needs securing instead of guessing

Protect Your Financial Identity Specifically

Financial accounts are the most common target because they’re the most directly profitable. A few extra steps here go a long way.

• Use a dedicated email address exclusively for banking and financial accounts. If your primary email gets phished, your financial accounts stay isolated from that exposure.
• Place a security freeze on your credit at all three major bureaus. It’s free, it blocks new credit from being opened in your name without your explicit unlock, and it’s one of the most effective anti-fraud tools available to individuals.
• Set up fraud alerts as an added layer, which require creditors to verify your identity before extending new credit in your name.
• Review your Social Security earnings record annually at ssa.gov, which can catch fraudulent employment using your Social Security number before it becomes a bigger problem.
• Know your account numbers and your bank’s emergency contact information from memory or on paper, not just saved in an app on a phone that might not have signal or charge when you need it

Build a Real Data Backup Habit

Ransomware doesn’t just threaten businesses. Personal photos, financial records, and documents get encrypted and held hostage in home ransomware incidents too, and paying the ransom is never a guaranteed fix.

• Follow the 3-2-1 rule: keep at least three copies of anything irreplaceable, on two different types of storage media, with at least one copy stored somewhere physically separate from your home.
• Back up photos, financial documents, and anything irreplaceable to both an external drive and a cloud service, not just one or the other
• Disconnect external backup drives from your computer when not actively backing up; a drive that’s always connected can be encrypted right alongside your main system in a ransomware attack
• CISA and federal law enforcement do not recommend paying ransom demands, since it doesn’t guarantee your data gets decrypted and can mark you as a future target willing to pay.

Prepare for Critical Infrastructure Getting Hit, Not Just Your Own Accounts

This is the part most personal cybersecurity checklists skip entirely, and it’s the part that actually matters for prepping. Federal agencies issued a joint advisory in 2026 warning that state-affiliated cyber actors are actively exploiting programmable logic controllers in water treatment and wastewater systems specifically. A successful attack at that level doesn’t send you a warning. It just shows up as no water, no power, or contaminated water with zero notice.

• Store water and have backup filtration ready. A quality water filtration system matters here specifically because a compromised treatment plant can mean contaminated water reaching your tap, not just an outage.
• Treat a grid-down cyber event exactly like any other extended power outage in your planning. Backup power (a generator or solar setup), stored food that doesn’t require refrigeration, and manual tools for anything you normally rely on electricity for all apply here directly.
• Build a communication plan that doesn’t depend on cell service. Cell towers and internet infrastructure are themselves attack targets. A ham radio, a set of family radio service (FRS) radios, and a physical, printed contact list with everyone’s information cover you when phones simply don’t work.
• Keep a battery or hand-crank weather radio on hand to receive emergency broadcast information even if internet and cell networks are down

Don’t Neglect the Basics That Feel Unrelated to Cyber

• Maintain a 30 to 90 day supply of prescription medications, worked out with your doctor ahead of time. A cyberattack on a pharmacy chain’s systems or a hospital network can disrupt prescription fulfillment exactly like a natural disaster would.
• For medications requiring refrigeration, have a backup cooling plan, a cooler with ice packs or a small solar generator, in case a grid-related cyber event knocks out power for an extended stretch.
• Keep a basic first aid kit and over-the-counter medications stocked independent of any digital system, since you can’t assume pharmacy point-of-sale or inventory systems will be functioning normally during a major incident.

Keep Physical, Offline Copies of Anything You Can’t Afford to Lose

Digitizing your important documents is smart. Relying on digital-only copies during a crisis where the systems holding them might be compromised is not. Keep both.

• Physical or offline copies of ID documents, insurance policies, medical records, property deeds, and financial account information, stored somewhere secure like a fireproof safe or safe deposit box
• A printed list of every online account you’d need to recover access to, without listing the passwords themselves, just the accounts and recovery emails or phone numbers tied to each
• Enough physical cash on hand to cover a genuine short-term gap if card networks or ATMs go down; even a modest amount changes what’s possible in the first 24 to 72 hours of a disruption
• A written, physical copy of your family’s emergency communication plan, since a plan that only exists as a note in your phone is useless the moment that phone is dead or compromised

Know What to Do the Moment Something Feels Wrong

Speed matters once an incident starts. Waiting to see if it resolves itself, or feeling embarrassed about having clicked something you shouldn’t have, both cost you time you don’t have. Ready.gov’s official guidance boils the individual response down to a short list that’s worth memorizing rather than looking up mid-crisis.

• Disconnect the affected device from the internet immediately (turn off WiFi, unplug the ethernet cable) to stop malware from spreading further or continuing to transmit your data
• Change passwords for any account you suspect was exposed, starting with email, from a separate, unaffected device if at all possible
• Contact your bank or credit card company right away if financial information may have been compromised, and consider that security freeze mentioned earlier if you haven’t placed one already
• Report the incident; individuals can report suspected cybercrime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and to CISA at report@cisa.gov
• Don’t pay a ransom demand on a personal device without exhausting other recovery options first, including checking whether your backups (see above) let you simply wipe and restore instead

When the Dollar Fails, Your Savings Could Vanish Overnight

A cyberattack can lock you out of your bank account for days—but what if the financial system itself starts to fail? Inflation, banking instability, and a weakening dollar can quietly destroy your purchasing power long before you notice. Dollar Apocalypse reveals practical strategies to protect your savings, preserve your wealth, and prepare for financial uncertainty before it’s too late. Get your copy today and build financial resilience while you still have time!

The Bottom Line

Preparing for a cyber attack means treating it like the two-layer problem it actually is. Layer one is personal: strong unique passwords, MFA everywhere, a real backup habit, and enough financial account hygiene that a phishing email doesn’t turn into a drained account. Layer two is infrastructure: recognizing that the power grid, water systems, and financial networks you depend on every day are active targets, and building the same practical resilience, stored water, backup power, offline documents, non-cellular communication, that you’d want for any other extended disruption. Do both, and a cyber attack becomes an inconvenience you’re ready for instead of a crisis that catches you flat-footed.

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How My 3rd Great-Grandmother Has Lived for 237 Years

My third great-grandmother, my grandfather’s great-great-grandmother, was born in 1789, the same year George Washington took his first oath of office. She never saw an airplane or a refrigerator. She raised her children through cholera outbreaks and crop failures, buried more than one infant, and lived through winters where the difference between eating and starving came down to what she’d canned, dried, or smoked the season before.

She’s been gone for over a century now. And yet she is, in every sense that matters, still alive in our family today.

The skills she carried, the habits she drilled into her children, the quiet stubbornness that refused to let hardship win, all of it got passed down. Generation after generation, through epidemics, depressions, wars, and blackouts, someone in our family reached back into what she taught and used it to survive.

She built a lineage that couldn’t be starved out, frozen out, or scared into helplessness. That’s 237 years of her fingerprints on every generation that followed.

Her Son Learned to Heal With Herbs During the Cholera Years

Cholera tore through towns in waves during the 1830s, and doctors of the time had almost nothing to offer beyond bleeding a patient or telling the family to pray. Her son grew up watching his mother reach for her garden instead of a doctor’s bag.

She brewed bitter teas from herbs she grew and dried herself, treated fevers with what she could grow rather than what she could buy, and kept her family standing through outbreaks that emptied houses up and down the road. Her son learned every bit of it standing at her side, and by the time he had his own household, he didn’t panic when sickness came through. He already knew what to reach for.

Her Great-Granddaughter Carried the Garden Through the Great Depression

Her great-granddaughter grew up learning how to grow a garden that could feed a family through anything. She planned it around food that could be preserved, stretched, and stored through a hard winter.

Part of that plan was a small pond dug at the low end of the property, filled by runoff and lined with clay to hold water through the dry months. She stocked it with fish for food, but the pond did more than that. She used the water to irrigate the rows below it, running it through shallow trenches whenever the garden needed a drink. The fish waste settled into that water and fed the soil right along with the crops, though she never would have called it fertilizer. She just called it good water.

When the Depression hit and money disappeared overnight, that garden kept the family fed while neighbors stood in bread lines. She rotated crops the way she’d been taught, saved seeds every fall instead of buying new ones, and kept a root cellar stocked with potatoes, onions, and squash to carry them through to spring. The pond never ran dry, even in the worst stretches, because she’d built it to hold water when the sky wouldn’t.

What she was doing, without having a name for it, is something people now call Aquaponics. Fish and plants sharing the same water, each one feeding the other, no separate systems and no wasted resources.

Today you can build a version of that same setup in a backyard or even indoors, with a small tank and a grow bed doing exactly what her clay-lined pond did a hundred years ago.

Watch how Aquaponics works (plus a few tips for your own survival garden) in the video below:

Her Great-Great-Granddaughter Fed Six Kids Alone Through Wartime Rationing

By World War II, sugar, meat, and gasoline were rationed down to coupons, and grocery shelves thinned out fast. Her great-great-granddaughter, raising six kids alone while her husband was overseas, leaned on everything she’d grown up watching.

She kept a garden that did more work than the government’s victory-garden posters ever gave it credit for, packed tight with vegetables that could be canned, dried, or root-cellared.

She cured her own bacon and stretched a single hog through months instead of weeks. When sugar ran short, she taught her kids to take their tea and porridge with honey instead, a habit that stuck in the family long after rationing ended.

My Grandfather Used Her Water Lessons to Survive a Drought

A brutal drought hit the region in the 1950s, drying up wells and putting entire farms out of business. My grandfather remembered what generations before him had learned the hard way: how to dig a well by hand, how to catch and store rainwater off a roofline, how to ration water without anyone in the house feeling it too hard.

While other families trucked in water or gave up their land, our family got through on wells and rain barrels, using methods that had been passed down and refined for over a century. He used to say the family had always managed water instead of trusting it would always be there.

So, what skills did I learn from here? I learned that water reserves are not optional. Growing up, my family always had water stored in barrels. But pay attention here, because the barrels matter more than people think. Ours were white oak, and that wasn’t random. White oak has a tight grain that barely lets water seep through, and it doesn’t leach the tannins or bacteria that softer woods can. A cheap plastic barrel might hold water, but it won’t hold it clean for long.

Still, we wanted to move on with the times. Inspired by what she started all those generations ago, I went looking for something built for today, and that’s how I found the Forever Water Generator, a home version of the AWGs the military has used for years to pull clean drinking water straight from the air. Most of my family now keeps one running at home.

What surprised me was the cost. The creator behind it wanted it available to regular families, not just military budgets, so he released a DIY version anyone can build for the price of a large pizza with all the toppings. The parts run around 100 dollars, and once it’s built, it keeps producing water without needing a well, a pipeline, or rain.

The Lineage Reached Me Through Blackouts and Ice Storms

Cholera tore through towns in waves during the 1830s, and doctors of the time had almost nothing to offer beyond bleeding a patient or telling the family to pray. Her son grew up watching his mother reach for her garden instead of a doctor’s bag.

She brewed bitter teas from herbs she grew and dried herself, treated fevers with what she could grow rather than what she could buy, and kept her family standing through outbreaks that emptied houses up and down the road.

Her remedies never died with her. She wrote them down, and that handwritten book of cures has been copied, corrected, and passed from mother to daughter ever since. When COVID hit and I found myself taking care of my whole family, that book is what I reached for. 

My niece was burning up with a fever of 103, pharmacies were picked clean, and getting a doctor on the phone took days. So I made her the family recipe we call the Soothing Elixir, a yarrow-based remedy with a few other ingredients; all native medicinal plants from our home state of North Carolina, where the Appalachian mountains grow more medicinal species than almost anywhere else in the country. Her fever broke overnight.

Inspired by my 3rd great-grandmother’s story, my own medicinal garden always has calendula, yarrow, chamomile, feverfew, and chicory growing in it, along with five other plants that go into the recipes every generation of this family has used to survive.

Don’t have a medicinal garden yet? Start yours ASAP with Dr. Nicole’s Medicinal Seed Kit. It has every plant I just named, ready to grow in any state and any soil.

The Lessons That Made It All the Way Down

A few things survived every generation intact, sharpened a little each time they got passed along.

• Nothing gets thrown away until it’s proven useless twice. She raised her children to save jars, fabric scraps, nails, and string, not out of hoarding but out of respect for what things could still become.
• A garden isn’t decoration, it’s insurance. Every woman in this family who kept a real garden, planned around preservation and not just fresh eating, fed her family through something that would have broken a household without one.
• Medicine doesn’t always come from a pharmacy. Long before hospitals were reachable for most families, herbs from the garden treated what needed treating.
• Water is never guaranteed, so you learn to manage it before you need to. Whether it was a hand-dug well or a rain barrel system, every generation added its own version of the same lesson.
• A stocked pantry outlasts a stocked wallet. This one got repeated so often in our family it stopped sounding like advice and started sounding like a fact of nature.

Why She’s Still Here

You might be asking – how could someone born in 1789 matter to a family living in 2026? But she does, because everything she knew about surviving hard times still works. The world changed, the crises changed, and her skills never stopped being the answer. firsthand.

She never lived to see a single blackout that hit our family, never saw the drought my grandfather survived or the ice storms I weathered. But she prepared for all of it anyway, by making sure the knowledge outlived her. That’s the real definition of legacy. Not what you leave behind in a box, but what you leave behind in the people who come after you, ready to face whatever comes next the same way you did.

She lived to 110, outlasting almost everyone she ever taught, and she’s been gone for more than a century now. But every time someone in this family cans a jar of tomatoes, checks a rain barrel, or refuses to throw away something that might still be useful, she’s there. That’s how a woman born 237 years ago is still, in every way that counts, alive. 

And I decided her knowledge shouldn’t stay locked inside one family. Skills like hers only survive if they keep getting passed on, so when the creators of this book I deeply respect asked me to contribute, I shared some of her secrets. These are the same remedies and methods that carried us through five generations of hard times. If she taught me anything, it’s that knowledge you keep to yourself dies with you.

CLICK HERE for a FREE sneak peek of the book and discover a few of her secrets for yourself.

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Do you have any stories about how your family survived history’s toughest moments? If so, share them below – your comment could become an article.

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20 Most Popular Survival Foods

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Stockpiling enough food to keep you and your family alive for a long time can be very challenging. Think about it: However much you spend on your weekly shopping trip is how much a week's worth of emergency food could cost. And that's just one week.

There's a reason certain foods have remained so popular among preppers and survivalists. Rice and beans, for example. They have a long shelf-life, they're filling, and they're good for you. These foods will always make the cut, while others are best reserved for softer times.

In this article, we're going to take a look at the 20 most popular survival foods and talk about why they're so popular. If you're preparing for a disaster, consider getting every one of these.

Note: Normally when listing products, I would link to them on Amazon.com, but almost all of these foods are cheaper at stores like Costco or Sam's Club. I highly recommend you purchase these foods at stores like those.

1. Apple Cider Vinegar

Salt gets a lot of credit as a multi-purpose survival item, but apple cider vinegar deserves more attention than it gets. It can be used to preserve food, clean wounds, kill weeds, and add flavor to bland meals. It also has a nearly indefinite shelf life when stored in a sealed container. A few large jugs won't take up much space, but they'll earn their keep.

2. Beans

Beans are filling and affordable. They’re also, easy to store, high in nutrients, have an indefinite shelf life, and are easily one of the most popular survival foods. As an added bonus, you can plant some of your beans and grow more.

3. Canned Soup

The biggest advantage of canned soup is the convenience. Most people heat it up first, but you don't even have to do that. Canned soup can be eaten/drank straight from the can for a quick and easy meal. Just make sure you buy soups your family actually likes.

4. Canned Tuna

Tuna is a great survival food and one of the few meat products that made this list. For meats, spoilage is a real problem, but tuna has a great shelf life and will last up to five years unopened, making it a great source of tasty protein in a disaster situation.

5. Canned Vegetables

Fresh vegetables are going to be a distant memory after a long-term disaster, which is exactly why canned vegetables deserve a spot in your stockpile. Corn, green beans, carrots and peas all have a shelf life of several years and provide vitamins and nutrients that other survival staples simply don't offer. Stock a variety so you're not eating the same thing every night.

6. Coconut Oil

Oil is essential for cooking a large number of foods. Unfortunately, most oils don’t have a long enough shelf life. Coconut oil, on the other hand, can last up to two years before it begins to spoil.

If you’re planning on frying food post-disaster, coconut oil is your best choice. As an added bonus, it’s one of the healthiest oils you can cook with, and it has many other uses.

7. Coffee

Surviving after a disaster takes a lot of energy, which means you should learn how to make coffee when the power is out. Fortunately, coffee has a long shelf-life and is affordable enough to set aside a huge supply for rough times.

8. Cornmeal

Instead of storing flour for your post-disaster baking needs, consider storing cornmeal instead. Cornmeal can be used in place of flour in most recipes, plus it has a longer shelf life.

While flour requires yeast and oil to make biscuits or bread, cornbread and tortillas made from flour can be baked without these things and come out nicely when cooked in a solar oven or one a skillet.

9. Honey

Honey isn’t all that cheap, which makes buying it in bulk a tough pill to swallow for frugal preppers. However, honey can be used to add a nice boost of calories and flavor to a meal, it’s one of the few sweets with an indefinite shelf life, and it's good for you. As long as you use it sparingly, a little honey will go a long way.

10. Lard

Last year I made a list of 20 reasons lard is the best survival food. You can use it for deep frying food, making candles, making pemmican, making soap, lubricating equipment, preventing blisters, as a butter substitute in any recipe, and much more.

11. Liquor

This one isn't just about morale (though that matters too). Unopened bottles of hard liquor like vodka or whiskey have an indefinite shelf life and have real utility in a disaster situation. They can be used to disinfect wounds, start fires, and serve as a barter item when things get bad enough that people will trade almost anything for a drink. Stock it even if you don't drink.

12. Oats

Oats are one of the most underrated items in a prepper's pantry. They're cheap, filling, and incredibly versatile. You can use them for breakfast, baking, or stretching out other meals. Rolled oats stored in an airtight container can last up to 30 years, which makes them hard to beat for long-term stockpiling.

13. Pasta

If you think the post-apocalypse is going to be completely void of your favorite foods, celebrate the fact that pasta is one of the most popular survival foods. Use it to make spaghetti, fettuccine alfredo, mac and cheese, or whatever you want.

14. Peanut Butter

Peanut butter is filling, affordable, high in protein, and has a long shelf life (even after opened), allowing preppers to stock up on bulk amounts of peanut butter without going broke.

15. Popcorn

Popcorn is such a great snack. It's good for you (unless you add a ton of oil and butter), and popcorn kernels can last for decades when stored properly. If any of your family likes popcorn, you owe it to them to stock up on it.

16. Powdered Milk

Most people don't think about dairy until they no longer have access to it. Powdered milk solves that problem. It can be used for drinking, baking, making sauces, and adding calories to meals. Stored properly in a cool, dry place, it can last up to 25 years. If you have kids, this one is especially important to have on hand.

17. Ramen Noodles

If college students can survive on Ramen noodles for four years, so can you. They’re not very nutritious, but they are incredibly cheap and tasty enough to add a little variety to your food cache. Plus, they can last for years.

18. Rice

For a huge portion of the world, rice is a daily staple, supplying the majority of people’s nutritional needs. It's easy to store, it’s one of the cheapest foods you can buy, and it lasts for decades if you store it properly.

19. Salt

There was a time when salt was one of the most valuable things a person could own. While it may not have the same value this day and age, salt is still an irreplaceable food item to have in a post-collapse world.

It can be used to clean clothes, kill weeds, melt ice, preserve meat, soothe sore oats, and many other things, not to mention vastly improving the taste of bland foods.

20. Sugar

You HAVE to stockpile sugar. I'm not saying you should make it a huge part of your diet, but sugar is a crucial ingredient for almost any dessert you can imagine.

Conclusion

If you haven't already started purchasing these foods in bulk, it's time to get started. Join Costco or Sam's Club and get started. You'll find you can put away a lot of food for less money than you'd think.

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from Urban Survival Site

14 Overlooked Items for EMP Prepping (That No One Stocks Up On)

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