Lessons from the Great Depression & modern Prepper terminology

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/ Lessons from the Great Depression & Modern prepper terminology)

A. The Most Often Forgotten Survival Preparations
31 July 2012, SHTFplan.com, by Brandon Smith







Secondary Retreat Locations

Physical Fitness And Health




Community Building And Networking




Barter Markets And Trade Skills


Overlooked But Vital Items



Extra Survival Clothing:

Body Armor:

Gas Masks And Filters:

NBC Alert Items:

Thermal Countermeasures:

Extra First Aid Supplies:

Solar Panels:
I am astonished at how many preppers still do not have any solar power capability today. It’s FREE off grid power, for god’s sake! Pay the initial costs, and at least buy a system that is capable of charging and running batteries and essential electronics that will aid you in your survival.


Raw Building Materials:

No Room For Error


B. Prepper Lessons from the Great Depression
Why it’s so important to create a deep larder
This article by HappyPreppers.com
Pasted from: http://www.happypreppers.com/Depression.html

Preppers are optimistic for the best of times, and yet they know that our fragile society can quickly cause the worst of times as with the Great Depression in the decade following October 1929. What lessons can preppers learn to prepare for the next economic collapse? The Great Depression certainly caused an economic collapse; however people did not starve during the Great Depression! There was never an interruption with the food supply other in that people changed their eating habits. They did more with less. They ate all the food on their plate. They also grew their own food and raised animals. Some accepted the charity support of penny restaurants in which patrons paid a small portion of the actual food costs.

What are the prepper lessons?
Here is a summary of lessons from the Great Depression:

1.  Most people did with less. Food was actually ample during the Great Depression. While times were tough, most people just made do with lesser quality foods, such as lower quality meats. Soups and stews made up most of the meals, because it could stretch! Casseroles stretched the budget, too. As an example of brands that thrived during the Great Depression:

  • Crisco was a less expensive option to butter.
  • Oscar Meyer Weiners replaced finer sausages.
  • Maxwell House Sanka coffee replaced more expensive whole bean coffees.
  • Heinz Ketchup was used as the base for a simple tomato soup.
  • Underwood Deviled Ham substituted fresh lunch meat.
  • Carnation evaporated milk substituted fresh milk.

    depression foods

 2.  People grew their own food. The exception being the dust bowl states (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and parts of Texas). This was 100,000,000 acres of land barren, which forced farm families to flee, mostly from Oklahoma. While today, big farms and machines work the fields, back in the day, a farmer fed an average of eight families with his crops. People got by also got by with food grown in their own gardens and they canned foods for the Winter. While the economy collapsed, the food on the farms were for the most part unaffected.

3. Penny restaurants fed the proud. Penny restaurants popped up as a way to feed unemployed families who were too proud to accept charity. People paid pennies for meals that were subsidized by charitable organizations.

4. Soup kitchens fed the rest. Soup kitchens fed many people, the way charitable organizations and food banks feed people today. Chefs could make soup with whatever was available, including produce grown in charity gardens. Soup was a convenient, one pot meal that could be served with bread. Plus, it was easier to clean up than other more elaborate meals.Happy Preppers don’t rely on the public food supply. They know panic buying can strip store shelves in a few short hours. Anyone who lived through Hurricane Katrina can attest to this. But why is this so? The culprit is just-in-time inventory: a cost effective management practice established in the 1970s borrowed from the Japanese. In concept, just-in-time inventory saves on warehouse space and other expenses, and it generally provides less risk and less capital, but requires more infrastructure. Mind you this is a corporate benefit; it actually puts the general public at risk!

What’s different about the food supply today?

Why is just in time inventory dangerous?
In the good old days, grocery stores stocked back rooms with inventory of canned and dry goods, and they replenished the shelves as needed from this stock. In other words, there was more food in the back. That was back in the day.. Unfortunately, supermarkets today have virtually no back room warehouse. Managers order twice weekly. Merchandise comes off the pallet and directly onto store shelves, quickly and efficiently. What you see is what you get.   Trucks may be unable to deliver food for many reasons:

•  Natural causes. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes always create local food shortages, albeit temporary. Droughts and dust-bowl storms of the 1930s contributed to the Great Depression and disrupted the food supply.
•  Economic Collapse. In a hyper inflation scenario, gas might be too cost prohibitive to distribute foods.’
•  Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). In an Electro Magnetic Pulse or nuclear catastrophe, vehicles will be unable to start as the electrical components would be fried.
•  Rationing. The government could halt production for any number of reasons, including issuing wartime rations, or to ration gas.
•  Pandemic. In a pandemic situation, truck drivers and the people who stock the shelves may not want to risk their lives getting exposed. Or worse yet, they may be dead and unable to continue.

The list could go on. All you need to know is that it’s wise to create a deep larder of food in case the food distribution chain suffers a disruption.

Planning food supplies for a catastrophe, not just a disaster Preppers know the difference between a disaster and a catastrophe. It’s not a matter of semantics, because there is a fundamental and important difference, which will affect the food supply strategy of a Prepper.

You see, a disaster is a local occurrence, such as a hurricane or an earthquake, which affects a region. Disasters have the support of various agencies that come in to mobilize and support victims.
A catastrophe is a much grander problem by scale. Most notably, a catastrophe is outside the scope of ability for government to mitigate and charitable organizations to respond. In a true catastrophe, it’s every man, woman and child for himself.
In short, planning for a disaster means having food supplies that will last a couple of weeks; while planning for a catastrophe means food and supplies should last a year or more. Newbies should first plan for a disaster and then move towards being as prepared as possible for a catastrophic event. Happy Preppers have a vast knowledge of long term food storage, considering their stockpiling a sort of self funded and secured food insurance plan.

Happy Preppers are not panic shoppers;  they actively plan food needs for a catastrophic event ensuring adequate supplies at a fair price. They start with their short term food storage needs (mostly foods that are shelf stable including an excess of canned foods that people normally stock in their pantry. Then they have a second storage system filled with freeze dried foods for their long term needs, including foods in #10 cans, dehydrated foods, buckets of foods packed in gamma lids. Extreme Prepper’s plan for self sustenance by farming food at home and foraging for food.

Weird facts about the Great Depression…
1.  Women Preppers: take a lesson from the Great Depression. After the collapse of the economy, families began splitting up. Nearly 1.5 million husbands of the Great Depression left their families leaving the women and children to fend for themselves!
2.  What did people miss most during the Great Depression? As one Prepper’s grandmother put it… “nails, garden seeds, wire, string, sewing supplies, clothes pins, bleach, disinfectant, and vanilla.” What will you add to the list? Take one day to write down everything you use from your toothbrush to a pencil to ear swabs or chocolate. What will you miss the most? That’s the stuff you should hoard too.
3.  What did people eat During the Great Depression?
Meals during the great depression included:

Foods the debuted during Great Depression, include:
_ Bisquick
_ Good Humor ice cream bars
_ Kraft macaroni and cheese
_ Krispy Kreme doughnuts
_ Kool-Aid
_ Toll House chocolate chips
_ Ritz Crackers
_ Spam 

Even though food was ample, after the Depression, many people began conserving and stockpiling food and money for times of uncertainty. Sugar was a premium item!
Preppers today take comfort in stockpiling food and water, the way the people did just after the Great Depression, taking lessons from the past.


C. Prepping Terms and Acronyms You Should Know
SurvivalistPrepper, by Dale
Pasted from: http://survivalistprepper.net/prepping-terms-acronyms-know/

Ok, here’s the situation:

“It’s TEOTWAWKI and the SHTF because of a HEMP which caused an OTGE. So you call your EOTWBFL and tell them “Grab you BOB and put it in your BOV we need to GOOD and get to our BOL! And get over here ASAP before the golden horde gets to your front door and your SOL. And don’t forget to BYOW and MRS’s because if not YOYO”

Did you get all that?

There are quite a few prepping terms and acronyms you should know and that we see all the time, not to mention all the OMG’s and LOL’s we have to learn these days if we want to understand our teenagers. It seems like everywhere you go you and read an article you see the basic SHTF, BOB’s and EMP’s but but it seems like I come across something new all the time and say “what is that!?” Like EOWBFL… Not sure what that is? keep reading.

Some people hate these acronyms and some people use these acronyms all the time, regardless of where you stand the more you read, the more you will see these.

Now I’m not going to go through every acronym and term you will hear because honestly I can’t think of them all right now. But I am going to go over some of the terms you are most likely to hear as you begin to educate yourself about preparedness.

I also have a PDF at the end f this post for you to download that has a complete list. But keep in mind, I did my best putting together this list, and I’m sure there are more out there, and I’m sure there are even some that I haven’t heard of.

So let’s dive into this list so hopefully when you are reading an article you don’t have to stop and look up what TEOTWAWKI.

TEOTWAWKI is an acronym for the end of the world as we know it. This doesn’t necessarily mean doomsday or Armageddon it’s something that would not kill us, but change the way we need to live our lives. For kids TEOTWAWKI could be losing their cell phones, and unfortunately this could be the same for some adults.

When I think of TEOTWAWKI I think of having to survive without power, water, heat stuff like that.

TEOTWAWKI is synonymous with SHTF (Sh*t Hits the Fan) or WTSHTF (When the Sh*t Hits the Fan) and if you don’t prepare you might need to GOOD – (Get out Of Dodge) or you could be SOL – Sh*t out of luck.

A few others will see are BOB, BIB, BOV and BOL these all involve Bugging Out.
You have a BOB which is a bug out bag
You have a BIB which is a bug in bag
You have a BOV which is a bug out vehicle
And a BOL which is a bug out location.

Why would you need to bug out? Good question. If you live in an urban area you are more likely to be surrounded by the GOLDEN HOARD which is basically swarms of people that are flipping out and want what you have and coming towards a town near you. The GOLDEN HORDE is made up of the POLLYANNA or SHEEPLE, these people blindly follow the masses and are in denial about world events

Or it could be because of an economic collapse that causes FIAT CURRENCY to become worthless and you need to own some JUNK SILVER (1964 or earlier silver coins)

An EMP (electromagnetic pulse) could also cause an economic collapse because it would cause a GDE (Grid Down Event) or an OTGE (Off the Grid Event) An EMP could be caused by a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) from the sun or a CARRINGTON EVENT (caused by a large Coronal Mass Ejection)  or even a HEMP (High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse) because an unfriendly neighbor launched a missile at us.

But don’t worry, if you have a FARADAY CAGE (Used to shield electronics from an EMP) your iPad will still work…although the internet will probably be down.

All of this could cause our government to enact MARTIAL LAW because WROL (Without Rule of Law) the GOLDEN HORDE and the POLLYANNA’S would be after our LONG TERM FOOD STORAGE and we don’t want to be in their LOS (Line of Sight)

You don’t want to bug out with just the cloths on your back and it’s SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to have BOB or a 72 HOUR BAG ready to go. You might use an ALICE backpack as your BOB which can also come with an ALICE frame. ALICE packs were created by the military To Reduce the load of the Infantry Combat Soldier and distribute weight more evenly.

The ALICE pack has been superseded by the MOLLE system (Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment) {pronounced molly} by the armed forces and some preppers as well.

The MOLLE system is modular because of the use of the PALS (Pouch Attachment Ladder System) and allows you to add storage space. You might not want to use an ALICE frame for your BIB because a bug in bag is for getting from where you are to your BIL (bug in location) where your BOB is. These could be stored in your car or taken with you when you leave home. I personally choose the MOLLE system but the choice is yours. Price might play a role in this as well.

Along with medical supplies, water, weapons and survival gear you might want to have some MRE’s (meals Ready To Eat) or some C-Ration (Combat ration) to eat along the way, but try to avoid food from Monsanto because it is made from GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms)

So, FWIW (For What It’s Worth) if the SHTF because of an EMP or an OTGE  well basically YOYO (You’re On Your Own) and you won’t be able to depend on FEMA (Federal Emergency Management System) or ARC (American Red Cross) for your safety. You need to take your survival in your own hands and have a BOB or an INCH (I’m Never Coming Home Kit) that you can put in your BOV to get to your BOL or ISOLATED RETREAT (A BOL but better) It might be a good idea to get a HAM RADIO license or have a crank radio JIC (Just in Case) you have no other way of communicating with the people around you.

And if were in a GDE you might want to have some FIAT CURRENCY or some JUNK SILVER because you won’t be able to get money from the ATM (automated Teller Machine) and you might not have the money in your account that you thought you had.

Long list right, honestly this probably doesn’t even cover all of the terms and acronyms you will hear, but it gives you a good idea and a good starting point so you don’t have to Google every term and acronym you come across while your reading articles and learning about preparedness.

Oh yeah, an EOTWBFL is a term that a member of the Facebook group coined. It means end of the world buddy for life…I had no idea until he told me.

Here is a video I put together for the free intro to prepping course I am putting together at the Survivalist Prepper Academy. If you are just getting started in prepping head over and have a look. (This article is a transcript of the video)

YouTubeYou tube video: “Prepping Terms and Acronyms You Should Know”:



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