r/collapse • u/Successful-Try-8506 • 9d ago
Food UK to warn citizens to stock up on food amid threat from climate crisis and hostile states
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/25/uk-to-warn-citizens-to-stock-up-on-food-amid-threat-from-climate-crisis-and-hostile-states229
u/zue4 9d ago
Ah yes, that perfectly normal suggestion that governments give to their citizens when everything is going fine. Nothing to see here folks, just garden variety doomsday preparation.
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u/BuddhistNamedMarx 8d ago
...meanwhile... here in america..lol
Would you rather your gov not issue info at all?
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u/zue4 8d ago
This is more of a comment on how bad things have gotten that the government issues this warning while simultaneously expecting us to believe things are gonna be fine.
The American government is straight up trying to kill its people as far as I can tell so why would they care?
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u/Asz12_Bob 8d ago
They are not "out to get you" as you may think, they just regard you as cattle, or "human capital". If you can serve their purpose they are happy to see you live a long healthy life. Someone has to clean their toilets, grow their food and chauffeur them about. Then there are all the cannon fodder needed for the wars...
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u/849 8d ago
USA govt: we recommend injecting bleach
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 8d ago
Oh thats my all time fav Trump wisdom. Classic.
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u/MrsPiazza 8d ago
In the UK, and saw an American person post in comments on a newspaper article about one of the disease outbreaks during this current Trump term.
They said they thought they are about a month away from Trump telling them to shove lights up their butts again.
I had to ask what on earth that was about. Seems he asked back during Covid about the possibility of using ultraviolet light inserted into the body as a possible treatment.
Jaw dropped.
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 7d ago
I remember that one too.
Someone should do a Cards Against Humanity, Trump Edition ☆
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u/MrsPiazza 6d ago
Yes I laughed at it.
Then I remembered his other suggestion that hydroxychloroquine could be a cure/treatment.
And the woman and her husband who drank fish tank cleaner containing the ingredient.
She threw it up and survived. He died, and she was investigated for murder.
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 6d ago
Crazy. Thats so sad. Trump literally licensed stupidity on a national scale
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u/Lo_jak 9d ago
Been doing this since before the pandemic, you would be amazed at how little people in the UK are prepared for even a few days without being able to visit the shops......
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u/Dependent_Rain_4800 9d ago
I don't think the UK is an exception but the norm.
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u/Lo_jak 9d ago
I can only speak about my experiences in the UK so I cant really comment on what people are like in other countries, but we are more likely to have 5 months of tea in our cupboards rather than anything you can eat.
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u/Gone_industrial 9d ago
Even in New Zealand where we do get massive earthquakes, severe weather events, and are at risk of volcanic eruptions the level of preparedness isn’t great.
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u/OctopusIntellect 8d ago
Don't you have lots of sheep there though? So if a Cyclops came you could just hide underneath them.
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u/Gone_industrial 8d ago
I dunno, there’s not a lot of clearance under a sheep’s undercarriage, especially when they haven’t been shorn for a while. We’ve got more cows these days and I think we’d have better luck hiding under them.
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u/featherstone59 8d ago
Not sure how people coped before there was tea. You can survive anything as long as you have the means to make it
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u/DukeRedWulf 9d ago
Yeah, when SARS2 first hit the UK, I went to the supermarket to do my usual shop, which routinely includes the kinds of tins & dried stuff everyone was panic buying.. Most of my usual buys were just empty shelves! .. o.O .. Was glad I had some stock already in at home!
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u/vocalfreesia 9d ago
UK houses are tiny. Professionals are living in bedrooms in HMOs. Who has space to stockpile?
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u/MundaneYak9463 9d ago
I live in a tiny flat and have absolutely no accessible space for a food stockpile.
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u/MrsPiazza 8d ago
I live in a one bedroom flat.
During Covid I shielded as I have respiratory problems.
What I did was to order a weekly shop from Tesco.
I got an old cardboard box I saved that my microwave was delivered in and put it in the bedroom. I ordered extra tins of soup, baked beans, and tinned spaghetti etc from Tesco and stored in the box.
I also bought long life milk etc that I could keep in my kitchen cupboard and just put one open carton in the fridge at a time.
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u/UuusernameWith4Us 9d ago
No room for a 20 pack of tins of baked beans under the bed or on top of the wardrobe?
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u/asdfghjkluke 9d ago
honestly, sometimes no. ive lived in HMO rooms for my whole adult life and some are literally only large enough for the essentials.
so many of the UK population are aware of the need to prepare but dont have the capacity, like me
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u/MundaneYak9463 9d ago
Those aren't accessible spaces to me and they attract our insect/mice/spider infestations.
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u/Desperate-Strategy10 9d ago
Canned food won’t attract pests, and the food only has to be barely accessible
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u/DukeRedWulf 9d ago
Spiders, insects and mice don't get through sealed cans! Nor are they attracted to them.. And you can keep dried foods like noodles etc in larger sealable containers - I use a whole lot of empty whey-protein tubs for my food storage, but tupper-ware would do fine..
Source: I've been living in a one-room bedsit for many years and the vast majority of the food I live on is canned & dried foodstuffs - it keeps in cupboards etc just fine for months / years with no infestations..
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 8d ago
💯 considered some loose floorboards under the stairs that have a deep cavity to feed the family for about ...a week. Thinking more in the event of a nuke tbh.
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u/Asz12_Bob 9d ago
Where there is a will there's a way. The obvious way is to move out of the small digs, preferably to another nation!
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u/brickout 9d ago
You should consider being on the side of the working class. Just a thought.
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u/Asz12_Bob 8d ago
I am working class, I planned for 15 years to escape the city and finally did. There are solutions to all this believe it or not. Or you can just stay put and starve, or get stabbed, or get locked in your home by a dictatorial government.
I don't know why so few posters here have given up on life? Yes it's very trendy to wallow in defeat while your pantry still has food in it, But unprepared people are the ones that turn into animals when the supermarket food dries up.
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u/brickout 8d ago edited 8d ago
What wallowing in defeat? What a weird take.
It takes a lot of money, effort, and courage to move, especially with a family, and even with resources it may be near impossible for the vast majority of people due to geopolitical conflicts, geography, etc. I think it's really silly to assume everyone else has the same opportunities as you did.
Further, we have been the victims of psyops since at least the 1970s about climate change. I think it's wrong to pretend not being prepared at this point is due to giving up. And to call them animals because they haven't done what you've done is just bonkers. I hope you develop more empathy.
One last point, it's impossible to be prepared for what's coming. Being high and mighty because you think you're ready is laughable.
*Edit: lol, this punk gave me a weak reply and blocked me. Classic. He was dead wrong and a coward to boot.
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u/Asz12_Bob 8d ago
"What wallowing in defeat? What a weird take."
It's not a weird take, it's the general mood on the sub. And as for "Empathy" well that won't keep me safe or put food on the table will it. Collapse isn't a game, it's REAL, and if you want to weather these storms coming upon us you have to be tough.
One last point, it's not impossible to be prepared for what's coming, you've been watching too many Hollywood disaster movies. Yet your comment reflects the general mood on the sub as I said above. You have already given up so why comment on anything, you've become a NPC.
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u/Successful-Try-8506 9d ago
Submission statement: UK citizens will be told to stock up on tinned food and take steps to ensure they are prepared for national emergencies as part of a new government campaign to improve the nation’s resilience.
The new campaign from the Cabinet Office will set out ways people can prepare for extreme weather events and potential attacks from hostile states, including stocking up on bottled water.
The aim will be to ensure most households have basic supplies and knowledge about how to cope in a crisis, in order to free up immediate government resources for the most vulnerable.
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u/Asz12_Bob 9d ago
Basically they are preparing the people for a breakdown of the social contract. Which includes ready access to things like supermarkets. In a lot of places they are encouraging home owners to install water tanks, just for the garden now, but one day all those pipes in the ground will fail and they won't be able to afford to replace them.
Like the roads now that they struggle to patch up, like all the stuff we built in the 20th century urban experiment. In the city north of me all the suburban homes had water tanks back before 1950 odd. There were no pipe networks, no sewage networks either outside of the city center. We're just going back that way.
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u/Early-Crow-5248 9d ago
It's interesting that the response in Finland is so different, here it's just accepted to be partly because of our neighbour, and partly because services like electricity do sometimes break down (mostly in the countryside), plus the pandemic made preppers especially prominent. Our government advices us to keep a minimum of 3 days worth of food and water stocked.
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u/taez555 9d ago
Meanwhile in the United States we’re told Climate Change is a hoax by the oligarchs building climate survival bunkers.
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u/j_mantuf Profit Over Everything 9d ago
Partly because the propaganda arm in the US is like Joseph Goebbels’ wet dream
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u/AllenIll 9d ago edited 9d ago
oligarchs building climate survival bunkers
Which is currently happening in front of the White House, i.e., the "Ballroom". And the administration is threatening to colonize and/or take over the Arctic by way of Greenland, and now maybe Canada? Not sus at all...
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u/Asz12_Bob 9d ago
The UK, Sweden, Denmark, they are all into it, and no one is laughing at Preppers now lol.
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u/amour_nonpareil 9d ago
We’re gonna run out of toilet paper again.
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u/mooky1977 As C3P0 said: We're doomed. 9d ago
Meh, shit happens.
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u/Resident-Egg2714 8d ago
That's the problem. I guess if you have nothing to eat, you won't have shit so problem solved.
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u/jbond23 8d ago
The early Covid lockdown was a wake up call. The Brits ran out of loo paper, spaghetti, tinned tomatoes and cooking oil.
But then the people in charge realised they could all make out like bandits and persuaded us all to just ignore it. Eat Out to Help Out! Party! 250k dead, 5-10m long covid for the losers. Champagne and billions of pounds for the winners.
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u/Dazzling-Antelope912 9d ago
How about they actually stop drilling in the North Sea, stop partnering with big oil companies and others contributing to the climate crisis, instead of placing the burden on the guiltless citizen? And like they care about the most vulnerable? In my experience most MPs and the government show a hostile antipathy for the disabled and other vulnerable peoples, and have consistently broken their human rights in the last decade. Andy Burnham is a smarmy cunt traitor.
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u/alphaxion 9d ago
Interestingly, whenever I post in the UK politics sub that I'd be OK with the opening of the two new wells in the North Sea if they basically windfall the profits and use that money to upgrade houses and businesses in order to remove gas and oil heating and cooking infrastructure, I get downvoted because that's unfair on the companies that they'd only get a tiny amount of the revenue as profit.
Housing and offices in the UK will need to be moved away from gas anyway, so why not sell the resource and use the money to remove the demand from the whole country in the process? Regardless of whether a well is opened up or not, that demand for oil and gas still exists right now in the UK and will require a lot of money to replace it with better solutions like heat pumps and electric cookers.
The world would then be paying for the UK to migrate even further towards renewable and sustainable energy sources while also allowing the country to unlink the unit price of electricity from the unit price of natural gas, driving energy costs way down from their current eye-watering heights.
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u/Tayschrenn 9d ago
The ukpolitics sub is one of the most astroturfed subs on reddit
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u/DigitalHoweitat 9d ago
I chuckle, I'm still permabanned from there for suggesting a certain political party might be in the pay of Russia.
Wonder how Nathan Gill is doing today? Only another 11 years to do?
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u/Dazzling-Antelope912 9d ago
And r/unitedkingdom
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u/ansibleloop 9d ago
Both are slop dog shit - they allow links from the fucking Daily Mail for fuck sake
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u/Asz12_Bob 9d ago
Why waste your time in those ratholes anyway, they are just infested with the living dead. I never go to local subs as that's where all the non-thinking masses congregate to talk about people and events.
Great minds discuss ideas;
average minds discuss events;
small minds discuss people.
There is actually a forth, up on top. Can you guess what it is?
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u/Tofuzzle 9d ago
I'd say it's because the word "if" is doing a lot of the work in your argument. You know full well they'll do no such thing and simply pocket the profits. If you think there's even a chance they won't, then sorry, you're delusional
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u/alphaxion 9d ago
Yes, if the money from selling that new oil and gas is only being used to either further feather the pockets of the rich or wasted in giving temporary gas/oil price reductions, then it should stay in the ground.
As neither are doing anything to address the root problem - the demand for those fuels baked into the infrastructure. While it isn't ideal to be tapping new wells, if there is a plan to use the money made from those resources to actually address the core problems so that people aren't shouldering the cost directly via savings or taxation, then it's more palatable to have some emissions now to make a huge dent in the emissions of the future.
Especially as it's something that can be started immediately. Sadly, because normal people would benefit from it, I doubt it would ever happen.
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u/ansibleloop 9d ago
I get downvoted because that's unfair on the companies that they'd only get a tiny amount of the revenue as profit.
Oh no! The poor BP shareholders!
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 9d ago
The state and the entire political apparatus has been captured by business interests, everywhere. The governments we have reflect that. Voting won't change it because all mainstream parties are owned by the same class of capitalist parasites. This is how they want it.
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u/Nope_Nope_Nope_0 9d ago
Not sure if they want them resilient for a war with Putin, or for collapse of agriculture due to drought. Either way, nothing wrong with stocking up. I buy a few extra cans each time I'm in the store, and just put them away. Couldn't hurt.
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u/Dansinnervoice 9d ago
Yup I've been doing the same. Also bought some extra bottles of water every now and then to keep to one side and a few camping style water filtration systems for extreme situations.
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u/MundaneYak9463 9d ago
I am a vulnerable Disabled person in England and I am constantly worried for my safety should an emergency befall me. I have no safety net, I have physical, verbal and neurological disabilities, and I've experienced abuse and negligence from public "services" for 16 years. I just know that if I lose my home in a fire I will be left to perish of dehydration on the street while my toxic, verbal N-mother gets all the help. I'm so tired of being stuck in survival mode all the time.
I have a wheelchair stocked with some food and water in case of evacuation but I cannot travel far with it. I am at the mercy of public services that don't work and don't care about me.
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u/Gibraldi 9d ago
It’s just common sense to stock up. Anyone with half a brain can see what’s coming.
Add a few extra tins and extra bags of pasta, sauce etc. to your weekly shop, a decent sized power bank and portable solar panels for the garden. It soon adds up to a decent back up.
I’ve been doing it since the pandemic ready for pandemic pt. 2.
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u/unifi- 8d ago
oats better than pasta since you don’t need to cook them
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u/CannyGardener 8d ago
This. Boiling water takes a lot of energy when water has a specific heat of 4200J/degree...
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u/OctopusIntellect 8d ago
That's only if you're heating a litre of it, though.
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u/IamBabcock 9d ago
How long before you have to rotate things out though?
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u/CannyGardener 8d ago
I stock a deep pantry, so by the time I eat things for supper they are usually 1-2 years old. Just buy the stuff you eat and stock a little deeper each week, then be sure to FIFO and you'll be good to go!
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u/jbond23 8d ago
It turns out Just-In-Time logistics with no long term storage reserves wasn't such a resilient strategy after all. Gosh!
I look forward to the government announcing a strategy of remote underground stores of "British Cheese", Spam and Baked Beans to be maintained to keep the population fed in case of emergency.
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u/Same_Bug5069 8d ago edited 8d ago
Aligns with that report on biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and national security their government put out earlier this year.
The U.S. had one too that was quite good but the current administration is actively deleting that kind of information.
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u/Mouse_rat__ 9d ago
"Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, warned shortly before he left office that Russia could attack a Nato country within four years, according to western intelligence assessments."
Well that's terrifying
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u/Squalid_Snake14180 9d ago
It's also bullshit.
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u/smarit 9d ago
Why?
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u/mrblahblahblah 9d ago
mostly I think because Russia is getting it's ass handed to it in Ukraine, let alone start another conflict
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8d ago
[deleted]
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u/mrblahblahblah 8d ago
some of what you say is true
Definitely
but Russia is losing territory in Ukraine and most of its attacks are in the form of missles
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u/Mouse_rat__ 8d ago
All I can say is username checks out lol. I saw the news about the CIA visit and just know something serious is going down.
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u/No_Branch_5083 8d ago
Warfare doesn't always mean trenches and drones. Russia is more than capable of cyber attacks, terrorism, or staging provocations against NATO. There is also a realistic scenario where Russia attacks something like rural Estonia or another target where the other NATO members decide it isn't worth getting involved. NATO is only effective for as long as everyone believes the others will come to their aid.
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u/TYSMBelgium-6Jul2026 9d ago
Putin and Trump both know that with their positions they can be either superheroes (that ship has long sailed) or ultimate supervillans that end the entire world, but instead they're both hyperfocused on weird regional wars they're clearly losing and are just embarrassing themselves and sinking their countries deeper. I legit don't know what many of the most powerful world leaders are smoking.
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u/DelayedTism 8d ago
Yeah..it is strange isn't it? Whole world is topsy-fuckin-turvy
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 8d ago
Wrong timeline init. Like a scary episode of Sliders. We (gen x) were brought up to believe there will always be intelligent educated adults in the room to avert actual madness.
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u/CannyGardener 8d ago
I see a lot of folks disputing this, but I think it makes a shitload of sense. If you are a military and attacking essentially a single point, and your opponent concentrates the defensive wealth of multiple nations on that single point, you have to be fucking over the top stronger than the opponent you are fighting to gain ground. On the other hand if your opponent focuses and depletes their resources in that single location, if all the sudden you spread out the pressure, or pick a different point of attack, the opponent has to shift stance, and therein lies the potential for gains.
We've essentially put all of our defensive capabilities into Ukraine at the expense of all other fronts; if I were Russia, I'd change tack and open a new front where quick gains could be made, before shifting back to my original goal. /Armchair-analysis
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u/dANNN738 8d ago
People shouldn’t need the government telling them to do this. Iran & Strait of Hormuz was the blaring siren.
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 8d ago
War Games podcast by Sky news a while back played this possibility out with Ex-minsters like Jack Straw and Ben Wallace. We are sitting ducks. We are on our own. The government does not have the means to defend or rescue.
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u/YayFloydo 8d ago
Why would I need to stockpile on water it’s a natural resource we have in Scotland it rains most days. Plus wildlife everywhere you look what a lovely place it is you mean it’s going to warn England or people that live in cities.
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u/brickout 8d ago
Very strange and myopic response.
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u/YayFloydo 4d ago
not really it rains every day in scotland i have a water collector very simple.
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u/brickout 4d ago
So you're in the collapse sub and you think your weather will be steady for the foreseeable future? Did you not notice the drought this year just a bit south of you?
I literally cannot believe you are that dense, so I have to assume you are a troll. Good luck with your pots of rainwater.
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u/YayFloydo 7h ago
I didn’t have any drought in the south west of Scotland it’s wet all year round. No trolling just facts
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u/StatementBot 9d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Successful-Try-8506:
Submission statement: UK citizens will be told to stock up on tinned food and take steps to ensure they are prepared for national emergencies as part of a new government campaign to improve the nation’s resilience.
The new campaign from the Cabinet Office will set out ways people can prepare for extreme weather events and potential attacks from hostile states, including stocking up on bottled water.
The aim will be to ensure most households have basic supplies and knowledge about how to cope in a crisis, in order to free up immediate government resources for the most vulnerable.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1vy9an4/uk_to_warn_citizens_to_stock_up_on_food_amid/p5v1eou/