A scary thought just occurred to me. With stores being cleared out in the DC area for toast bread, milk, and eggs, presumably because the residents otherwise feed themselves with take-out food; and combined with the observation that one would actually be hard pressed to cook anything out of the ingredients found in a regular walmart (not a super walmart) and the fact that walmart are ubiquitous and thus representative of profit maximizing consumer patterns: Could it be that people—at least those partaking in this frenzy and it’s quite a lot—frankly have no idea how to cook and feed themselves beyond being able to fry an egg, toast a piece of bread, drink milk, and order out?

Apparently I am out of touch with your every day consumer. It leaves me wondering… what else should not surprise me?

What would they do if they were snowed in? Rained in? Flooded? Heated? Not heated? What if the power went out? Unemployed?

I kinda think of myself as a common sense guy in that I know to drive carefully if the roads are slippery; I know how to dig a trench to divert the water if it is rising; I have clothes for the wet and cold; and we have food for at least a week without even planning for it. Yet maybe compared to the average french toast hoarder, I must be some kind of an extreme survivalist.

This could easily lead to the conclusion, that maybe nobody knows anything?

Have we really as a society been so thoroughly insectisized that we can not do anything if we can not go out and pay someone else to do it for us? Is this an optimal situation for a society?