Newsweek, getting on the survivalist bandwagon…months late…(see my piece “Getting Off the Grid“).

You read it first here or on some other libertarian site…then it percolates upward to the “elites,”  carefully sanitized of its origins. An anthropology of the taboos and totems of the journalistic tribe is in order..

“In the end, what it all boils down to, at least for the preppers, is self-reliance—a concept as old as the human race itself. As survival blogger Joe Solomon pointed out in a recent column, during the Victory Gardens of WWII, Americans managed to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables they needed to survive. “My mother’s parents had a 10-acre garden, and my grandfather worked at the dairy farm next door,” says Hill, the former jet mechanic. “They worked by raising their own food, they had their own chickens, they canned vegetables, and my grandfather fed a family of 12 like that.” But in the modern world, he says, many of those skills are easily forgotten. Today, our food comes from dozens of different sources. Most of us aren’t quite sure how electricity gets from the wires to our stoves. We use debit cards to buy a can of tuna and we wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to filter contaminated water. We are residents of the new millennium; we simply haven’t needed to prepare.

So for the moment, people like Bedford are reteaching themselves lost skills—and in some cases, learning new ones. Bedford has read up on harvesting an urban garden, and is learning to use a solar oven to bake bread. She is ready with a pointed shot in the event she ever needs to hunt for her own food. And until then, she’s got 61 cans of chili, 20 cans of Spam, 24 jars of peanut butter, and much more stocked in her pantry; she estimates she’s spent about $4,000 on food supplies, an amount that should keep her family going for at least three months. Now, even if something simple goes wrong, like a paycheck doesn’t go through, “we don’t need to worry,” she says.”