Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.26-113538/https://www.ft.com/content/eeb1ee80-00b8-4f9f-b560-a6717a80d58d
EU households should stockpile essential supplies to survive at least 72 hours of crisis, Brussels has proposed, as Russia’s war in Ukraine and a darkening geopolitical landscape prompt the bloc to take new steps to increase its security.
The continuing conflict in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic that brutally exposed a lack of crisis response capabilities and the Trump administration’s adversarial stance towards Europe have forced the continent to rethink its vulnerabilities and increase spending on defence and security.
The new initiative comes as European intelligence agencies warn that Russia could attack an EU member state within three to five years, adding to natural threats including floods and wildfires worsened by climate change and societal risks such as financial crises.
Europe faced increased threats “including the possibility of armed aggression against member states”, the European Commission warned on Wednesday as it published a 30-step plan for its 27 capitals to increase their preparedness for crisis and mitigation measures.
I’m from EU and this is way less than my country suggests, which is 2 weeks.
I actually have 2 weeks supplies, but I’m gonna eat baked beans and vegan chocolate and drink coke zero the last few days 😅
Yeah, 3 days is a joke. Do they expect a war to be over in 3 days?
It’s an estimate on how long you need to survive on your own, before the government is able to help.
I think that’s very optimistic. Looking at how COVID went, I have no faith at all in people’s ability to stay calm. The government isn’t going to be able to help those in need 3 days in with the masses of idiots around. No way.
Well, during COVID the idea was still that things should run as normally, with a market economy and stuff. During an actual war, any sensible government would immediately take control of the distribution of food, water, energy and other essentials. Scalpers would be immediately detained, rather than to allow them to run rampant.
One would hope so, but I bet you enough people would be influenced by a Russian disinformation campaign to trigger riots on the streets because “Russia is a friend, we are the aggressors” or whatever other bullshit they come up with. Then troops would have to be pulled away from the border to deal with the riots.
I have acquaintances who are invested in the Russian propaganda, and this is very possible.
It’s insane, talking about it does nothing as the root issues are others.
I can’t help them.
Any sensible government would.
But for any government consisting of a bunch of greedy opportunists who are only in it in order to enrich themselves, there is endless opportunity to become very rich by fucking over the public even more than in peacetime.
If it’s an actual war they can throw their weight around just fine, idiots will just have to deal with it. Actually, that happened during covid too. I don’t remember starving, just an every-increasing whinging in the background as the problem was dealt with efficiently.
It is not just for war, but disasters in general, imagine a colapse or jamming of internet network or credit card buying or isolation from a flood or erathquake, help and minimum delivery infrastructures may take easily 3 days in effectively reach the people in need, is a reasonable amount to recover from the shock having around in average the minimum to survive in the mean time. Worse problems will be waiting for solution but this could save lives and improve significantly circumstances.
More likely they expect to be able to get support/reinforcement/aid in, within a couple of days.
It’s big enough to be a useful stopgap, but small enough not to accidentally cause a run on the supermarkets. It also makes people think about it more. If they update it to 2 weeks later, people are more likely to have a feel for what they need, and what will keep.
I think big part is that people would go out and empty the shelfs imediately if they all started stockpiling for two weeks starting tommorow.
I started getting a bit more everytime it was on sale about three years ago, and have a decent stockpile that probably lasts me for more than 4 weeks… It’s an art to not get too much so that you can eat it when it gets close to expiration date though, so it’s better to not buy everything at once but to spread it out.
But in the end, canned food will likely last many more years than the expiration date suggests.
I’ve maintained a basic stock for a while now. I suspected people would panic buy with COVID. I stocked up well before, and so dodged most of it. I’ve kept an extra buffer since.
Just chipping in to say I ate a can of food that was made during WW2 in 1990, so yeah cans do keep for a long time … when they get very old the trick is to shake the can before opening and if it sounds like there’s air inside it’s gone bad
Some special military operations are planned like that 🙄
A proper war lasts at least six days.
Not war, but special military operation.
They cant say the real number or it would cause panic. 3 is a sensible number people can get behind without causing a run on grocery.
Yeah, everyone should stock up on a year’s supply of food, at the very least.
That’s how long a war will likely last, anyway.
the problem is that you would need to eat canned food every other day to make sure it’s not going bad
Yeah, I live halfway up a small mountain (in Europe) and usually have everything needed to survive a month, including if the water and power are cut.
We’re currently putting together a pair of bug-out bags as well though, so we can be mobile in an emergency too
I think there’s an AI generated chocolate beans meme hidden somewhere.
Here we only have very short wars, because we’ve got other things to do.
Do they usually make chocolate with meat in your country? :)
P.S. Please stop buying Coca Cola/Pepsi/etc. Look for local substitutions.
Wait, what do.you think “vegan” means?
Slightly less percentage of raw red meat in the final product, with cute packaging featuring the color green
Not sure if trolling.
Joking, but not trying to troll
So jokes aside, do you really think veganism is just eating a little less meat of a certain type?
No. Why do you assume I don’t know what veganism is, after I already said I was joking? It’s not eating animal food products, including not eating foods that contain some animal food products. Let’s please finish this conversation…
This is the internet and a text based medium. It is absolutely possible that you don’t know what veganism is. That’s why I asked instead of assuming.
In case it’s not clear by now, chocolate sometimes has milk and I guess OP doesn’t like dark chocolate.
“without meat”
That’s “vegetarian”. Veganism avoids all animal products (there’s more to it than that, but that’s the simple version), so the dairy in most chocolate is out
Vegetarian is not just “without meat”, it means “no animal has to die for me”. That also technically excludes some cheeses as they contain rennet (although this is often overlooked due to nescience). Plus we’re only talking food right now, not clothing and other lifestyle products.
It bothers me that vegetarians don’t care beyond this very un-though-through concept of ‘animals dying’.
Dairy is a product of the mass rape and imprisonment of cows in horrific factory farms, and chickens are also kept in massively over crowded and unsanitary conditions.
And this is not to mention the constant cullings of male animals, which aren’t considered food as testosterone tastes so bad, and male animals can’t produce eggs or milk.
Or the constant culling of animals that no longer produce eggs or milk to quota.
Or the mass culling of the diseased or at risk of disease from being forced to live in such disgusting environments.
Vegetarianism is not a moral stance, it’s delusional and harms and kills animals at the same rate as eating both meat and dairy.
I get what you want to say and principally, I agree. However, I would highly advise against making better the enemy of perfect. Vegetarians usually are on the right track, they’re often just not educated enough, thinking that some animal products can be sourced ethically (as demonstrated by the other comment).
In my experience, vegetarianism often is just a waypoint towards veganism.
If this were universally true, there would be a lot more vegans.
From my experience, vegetarians are more often than not, a way point towards eating meat again.
In ireland, free range eggs are the norm, and most cows graze on actual fields. but, we have barely any wild areas anymore,.
I mean, plant agriculture isn’t exactly great for wildlife either. Hell, being wildlife isn’t great for wildlife. We theoretically could keep animals in a way that’s fine for them, we just usually don’t.
I eat a mix of free-range eggs and backyard eggs, and avoid milk where possible. Unfortunately the challenge scales pretty rapidly after that. Directly eating meat that can only be gotten in an unethical way feels a lot worse.
How does the math on that work? Less animals harmed is less animals harmed.
Free-range farming is barely a quality of life improvement over cages, look it up.
Only eating meat is only killing animals for meat.
Eating meat and dairy is both killing animals for meat, and raping and torturing animals for milk and eggs, which when these animals no longer produce to quota or become diseased, also gets them killed.
How is eating dairy harming fewer animals?
All animals livestock is unethical. There is no such thing as the ethical rape, torture and consumption of animals when humans can easily and cheaply live off plants. There is no excuse.
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