Hurricane Helene has spread devastation all over the Southeastern United States. My friends who went to western North Carolina for prepper camp got a REAL prepper experience when the storm brought down trees and electrical lines, leaving them with no electricity and no running water, stranded at their Airbnbs. Thankfully, they're preppers and even without their usual supplies, handled this like rock stars. You ladies know who I'm talking to!

But not everyone was so lucky. Parts of the South have been simply devasted by the high winds and torrential rains. Asheville, NC has suffered extensive damage, and there's hardly anything left of the adorable small town of Chimney Rock, NC. I know people stranded in Boone who watched their vehicles float away and we came extremely close to a catastrophic dam failure. Gatlinburg, TN is horribly flooded.

I-40 in Western NC is missing huge chunks where the road just collapsed and is undrivable for who knows how long.

And this is many miles from the coast. In Florida and Georgia, they'll be picking up the pieces for a very long time. South Carolina is also experiencing devastation. My friend there has been out with a chainsaw clearing roads. His neighbors lost their roof, and another neighbor's house got hit by a tree.

This kind of storm was really unexpected for some of the areas it hit. There are a lot of prepper lessons there but there are two things that. we must also consider:

1) Insurance companies are getting more and more reluctant to pay out. Some folks will have lost absolutely everything despite paying premiums for decades.

2) If your home is neck-deep in water, how many preps you have won't really matter because they'll be gone, and you'll be swimming to a boat to flee unlivable conditions.

We can prep as hard as possible but we can't prep for everything. There are some situations that render our preparedness supplies useless, like fires and floods.

But no situation can take away our survival state of mind. We can do our best to think one step ahead of the storm, think calmly and clearly about what to do, calculate how long our supplies will last, and make plans for what to do then.

Being a prepper has to do with far more than how many cans you have stacked up (though we really want a lotta cans!). It's about what you do when you're thrown into a shocking situation that nobody expected.

And I promise you this. Being a prepper and having a survival mindset will help you through it.

For all those affected, please be safe and careful. Please know that all of us will be pulling for you. Hang in there, dear friends. We hope that your damage is limited and your family is safe.

You're going to come through this with so many lessons to share. We love you, prepper friends.

Having something to eat isn't guaranteed.

We're facing threats to our food supply from many different angles: supply chain breakdowns, drought, food facilities being ravaged by fires, skyrocketing inflation, and outright shortages. No longer can we live in the comfort of unthreatened abundance. We're learning exactly how delicate the system really is.

Prepping and putting back supplies is incredibly important but what we're seeing now goes beyond that. You have to be able to produce and acquire more food. You have to be able to put back your harvests to eat during the winter. You have to be able to prepare items that once were as convenient as popping open a can or little plastic container.

You need a paperback copy of How to Feed Your Family No Matter What, our Organic Prepper anthology with ALL of our content about food. You'll get more than 500 pages of content that are all about food when you can't just go to the store and buy whatever you want.