Everybody Is a Prepper. Most People Just Don't Call It That.

If you bought groceries this week, you prepped. You looked a few days ahead, figured out what the house was going to need, and got it before you ran out. That's all it is.

Everybody is a prepper. It's just a matter of what kind of prepper they are and how far they go with their preps.

I wrote that line at the end of a piece about prepping with my kids, and I still stand by it. Prepping isn't a personality, a costume, or a hole in the ground. To me it's a ladder, and most people are already standing on the bottom rung without ever calling it anything.

I'm Mike. I've been a union lineman in New Jersey for 22+ years, and I'm a dad of three. My job is daily electrical utility work, putting the power back after storms, ice, and car-hit poles. Nobody needs a bunker to get through a few days without power. They need a little more on hand than usual.

The bottom of the ladder

Start with the grocery run. You plan meals, check what's low, and buy enough so nobody's eating cereal for dinner on Thursday, although breakfast for dinner is pretty good sometimes too. That's prepping for the week. So are the small habits, like grabbing two jars of peanut butter when it's on sale, or never letting the toilet paper get down to the last roll.

And almost every kitchen has the drawer. Nobody planned it as an emergency kit, but that's what it is. Mine right now has spare batteries, a headlamp and a flashlight, a flexible-tip lighter and a Bic, butcher's twine, super glue, rubber bands, a multi-tip screwdriver, safety pins and paper clips, tape, a manual can opener, and a few takeout menus for those rainy days when we don't feel like cooking.

If you do one thing after reading this, go open that drawer and click the flashlight on. Then make sure the spare batteries actually fit it.

One step up is the freezer. Buying meat in bulk, splitting a side of beef with family, putting a deer in the freezer after hunting season. Now you're thinking a month out instead of a week.

We run two freezers at our house. The chest freezer belongs to my wife and the kids, all their snacks and frozen stuff. The upright is the meat: what I buy in bulk from Wild Fork, venison, and some of the more exotic stuff like wild boar from hunts, elk, and rabbit.

The weak spot is power, which is the part I deal with every day. A freezer is only as good as the line feeding it. USDA food safety guidance says a full freezer holds its temperature about 48 hours with the door closed, and a half-full one about 24. So keep it full. Jugs of water work fine as filler and they also double as a great way to keep a cooler full of drinks cold in the Summer. When the power goes out, keep the lid shut.

When the forecast turns ugly

A storm's coming, and everybody heads out for bread, milk, eggs, water, and batteries. Some folks laugh at the bread and milk run. Don't. It's the right instinct. You saw something coming and got ahead of it. The only upgrade is doing it earlier and calmer, with a list.

For me, a bad forecast usually means my week is about to change. Ninety-nine percent of the time I'm forced to stay, already being on the property or called into work for storm prep and repair. So before a storm I make sure all our devices are charged and the power banks are topped off. I check the gas cans to make sure the fuel is still good by the dates and has stabilizer added, and I test run the backup generator we keep outdoors.

The most important part is making sure my wife and kids have everything they need and a plan if the power goes out while I'm gone. Then I make sure the neighbors are all good. If they need anything we've got, it's theirs. They do the same for us. We look out for each other. Oddly enough when I am either on storm for work or taking a routine inventory/cleanup trip up to the cabin something seems to ALWAYS come up big or small at my house.

One habit that is good to start: keep the gas tank at half or better. Most gas pumps need electricity, and a station that loses power with no backup can't pump. A half tank means you're never stuck waiting on a line or a lineman.

Jars, jerky, and buckets

Canning, dehydrating, and freeze drying are prepping with a skill attached. Plenty of families have done it for generations. You're taking food that would spoil and turning it into food that sits on a shelf, and you know exactly what went into it.

My family does a little of all of it. We can a variety of foods, and we make our own sourdough from a starter we have. We dry food in the dehydrator as we go. For freeze drying, we head over to my wife's uncle's house and batch some out on his Harvest Right.

One rule on canning: follow tested recipes. The National Center for Home Food Preservation publishes USDA-based guidance. Use it. Canning is not the place to wing it.

Not everybody has a garden or the time to can. Some people would rather buy a shelf that's already done, and that's a reasonable call, not a shortcut. Just watch the label math. Count calories, not servings. A sampler that lists 6,390 calories across 18 servings works out to about 355 calories a serving. That's a light meal for a grown adult, never mind a teenager. Plug your real headcount into the Food Storage Calculator and see how many days you actually have.

If I had to recommend anything, it would be food, fuel, and water first, then add whatever else you can from there.

Further up

Past that, it stops being a pile of stuff and starts being a system. Water is the big one. FEMA's floor is 1 gallon per person per day, and comfort is closer to 2 after heat or hard work. Rotation matters too. Eat what you store and store what you eat, because a shelf you never touch turns into a trash bag. Don't forget kids' medicine in kids' doses.

And have a simple plan. Who picks up the kids. Where you meet. Who you call if you can't reach each other. Three things, maybe four. If a kid can't remember it scared, it's too long.

What I tell people is to prep one night a week after the kids are in bed, and enjoy life the rest of the time. If prepping starts running the house, you've lost the plot.

The top of the ladder is where people picture the bunker. Some folks build shelters, and that's their call. Nothing wrong with it. For most families, though, the realistic version is a second place to go, like a relative's house or a cabin. The rule I like is that it sits within one tank of gas, because if the power is out over a wide area, stations along the way may not be pumping.

My brother-in-law and I share a cabin in Pennsylvania, and we use it as much for practice as for family weekends. The drive is within a tank of gas with some to spare, plus the spare can I carry on the truck. I set up my 2025 Sierra so we can make that trip without stopping. Up at the cabin we keep a lot of canned goods, plenty of firewood to last several weeks, and a few ways to filter water. There's a well with a backup power supply and a rain collection system. That stash is different from the one at home, because the cabin has its own winter and summer upkeep.

Then there's the rung people forget: snowbirds. Retirees who winter in Florida or Arizona, and remote workers who split the year to dodge the cold. They keep two stocked homes and drive the same route every year. Most of them would never call it prepping. It is.

It's okay to be prepared

You probably know more preppers than you think. My brother-in-law and a few of my friends all prep. I've also been working on my neighbors, just through conversation, and passing them a few things from time to time. A few of them now keep a steady short-term supply of food and water on hand.

Nobody calls you paranoid for buying groceries. Nobody blinks at a full freezer or a shelf of grandma's canned tomatoes. The rest of the ladder is just more of the same idea. Go at your own pace, take one step up from wherever you're standing, and help your neighbors get there in their own way, even if they'd never use the word.

Everybody is a prepper. The only question is what kind, and how far they take it. It's okay to be prepared.

Mike Sasarak is a union electrical lineman in New Jersey with 22+ years on the job. He sees how power actually fails, and what families need when it does, on ordinary workdays, not just big name disasters.

Originally published on Prepper Evolution.