Winter is coming and it's time to stockpile soup for a nasty 2025

I blame Max Brooks.

Yes, the guy who wrote “World War Z” and the excellent graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters” (artwork by Caanan White).

In his 2020 book, “Devolution,” Brooks combines a gigantic eruption of Mount Rainier and a Sasquatch invasion and civil war and the bumbling of clueless techies. All hell breaks loose.

Most people are woefully unprepared because we are Americans and live for the moment and ourselves. We do not stockpile food and supplies like the LDSers and Preppers. Why bother? Nothing’s gonna happen.

In “Devolution,” residents of the wired Greenloop community high in the scenic Washington state mountains must find ways to do without grocery deliveries by drone, solar power, and cell connections as they struggle to survive. The elderly artist in the co-op knows how to grow spuds from potato eyes and how to trap and dissect rabbits for a yummy stew.

I was thinking about that while staring at the canned soups at Publix. Look at all of those cans. They don’t need refrigeration. They don’t really need to be cooked as they are MREs. So, acting on instinct and paranoia, I grabbed a bunch of Progresso soups. You don’t even need a manual can opener as you can open the can yourself even if you have difficulties with aging hands as I do. I imagine that all of the refrigerated food is eaten or spoiled. We have long since eaten all the packaged crackers and cookies and snacks.

Soup will save us. I grabbed a dozen cans. Piled them high in the cart. When Chris caught up with me, she surveyed my shopping cart and asked, “Why all the soup?”

“Winter is coming.”

“This isn’t ‘Games of Thrones’ “

“Winter, it’s still coming.”

“I know. But not this week. And we have a fridge and freezer filled with food.”

“People are talking about a civil war. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

“You watched ‘Ghostbusters’ again?”

“But what if…”

“What if what?”

A crowd gathered by the soups. People stared at us, and then at the beautiful red-and-white cans of original Campbell’s, tiny tributes to Andy Warhol. Some wanted to get their own soup to stockpile for a looming disaster such as one the USA will face on Jan. 20, 2025.

Chris, alas, had her way. I put back most of the soups. We kept Campbell’s chicken noodle and Progresso creamy tomato and basil.

The rest of the shopping trip was uneventful. I managed to slip in a box of saltines and boxes of Band-Aids, the large kind, the kind you would use for post-apocalyptic wounds. I checked out and went home to continue reading “Devolution,” large-print edition.

And I had to ask myself: What if?