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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Yes, absolutely. Some of the best resources out there are Mormons. Those groups also tend to have great advice on finding good pricing as well.

As to why Mormons tend to be so into it, I have a theory. The Mormons started out very poor (generally speaking), and repeately ended up leaving their homes and starting anew, including at one point in the barren and remote mountain west (where their headquarters are today). Having stores of food and other supplies were literally a matter of life and death and survival. I think that same spirit is still active among them.

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It's actually an explicit religious expectation to prep for emergencies. I believe the generally understood requirement is a 3 months supply, but I'm not LDS, so I don't know the details of Mormon practice and variations therein.

What's interesting to me is that Judaism doesn't have any kind of similar requirement. There you also have a history (or at least a stereotype) of having to pick and up and move in response to religious persecution. I wonder if it's because in reality the gaps in time between periods of stability and persecution were often quite large? I don't think Jews have historically seen themselves as a wandering people as much as outsiders have seen them that way.

Mormons, meanwhile, had to move from place to place in quick succession over less than half a decade. It's another reason why LDS Church feels like the ultimate American religion: prepping is baked directly into the religious practice.

The amount of movement spread over several thousand years versus 200 is hardly a fair comparison.

The vast majority of Jews made significant geographic moves in the 20th century, either from Europe/Russia or the arab world. Most of them went to North America or Israel.

In 2014 I stopped at a Subway in Utah, in the 'burbs.

Some guy was oh-so-excited to show me the back of his truck, and how he had set it up to live there if he needed to. He had a whole solar setup.

(And, even though I'm not a prepper, I bought one of these buckets, and iodine pills, when war broke out in Ukraine.)

I think the Utah War comes into play as well. Mormons should score pretty high on a spectrum of how much people consider themselves to be independent of the federal government.

> As to why Mormons tend to be so into it, I have a theory.

No need to theorize, the rapture plays a big role in their canon, and is proselytized heavily.

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