Last night at one of my freelance jobs, a woman I work with was musing on the current financial mess: “I figure, my family lived through the Depression. It wasn’t pretty–but they survived.”

Survival is key. But I worry that people today don’t have the same survival skills they did back in the 1930s. I mean, indoor plumbing was still pretty novel then. People still got blocks of ice delivered, in lieu of refrigerators.

We’ve gotten dangerously soft.

I admit that my acquisition of cooking skills is underpinned by a creeping fear of the coming apocalypse, whatever it may be. Every hurdle jumped makes me feel a little more relieved, a little more independent of the cloying net of consumer goods we flail around in all the time here in the US. “Well, if the power goes out again, at least I’ll have some tomatoes put up in the pantry,” I mutter as I finish canning.

“Well, if everything goes to shit, I know I can grow some beans on my porch.”

“Well, if it comes down to it, I could probably hack up a pig into edible pieces.”

In a non-apocalyptic climate, this just seems like gratuitous culinary bad-assery, showing off maybe a little too much. But all those people who can’t even boil water? How are they going to eat? After the Oscar Mayer Lunchables are gone (I’m sure they have a long shelf life, but still), it’s gonna get ugly.

It’s not too late to learn to cook! Now’s the time. I recommend it, if only for peace of mind.

(Also, maybe work on the upper-body strength, for lugging water up from the river…)