The year’s supply and the kit, taken together, made me feel like the world was always on the verge of ending. Each kit contained drinking water, food bars, a flashlight, gauze, and so on. We also had 72-hour kits, meant to provide essentials for three days, packed in red backpacks-one for each family member. The year’s supply was there to help us through periods of great wickedness, through wars and rumors of wars, until Christ established his kingdom again on earth. The talk of being prepared, of having a year’s supply, went hand in hand with talk about the last days and the second coming of Christ. “But they’ll keep you alive,” my father said. They might have been the worst thing I had ever tasted. The crackers tasted of dust, and even with a lot of water you could barely choke them down. If you managed to do so without slicing open your fingers, you could then unwrap a waxy package containing what looked like the evil twin of the saltine. To open the tin you had to stab the lid repeatedly with the tip of a knife until it was perforated enough to tear apart. At some point, we made the mistake of tasting them. Probably largely to support their son, my parents bought a number of these tins and stored them in the garage, making them our primary food reserve.

And as long as the can’s seal remained unbroken, the crackers would last virtually forever. A tin of these, we were to say, would keep you alive for a very long time. We were instructed to tell people that survival crackers were essentially the same thing as hardtack, and to talk about how effective they had once been at sustaining sailors during sea voyages. They came in large metal tins that had stamped on the top “Civil Defense All Purpose Survival Cracker.” The tins weighed 12 pounds 4 ounces, and contained “1,091–1,163 crackers per can.” Each was marked with a “packed on” date-in the early 1960s, 20 years before. In other words, they would be as inedible in 10 years’ time as they were on the day they were purchased.

The crackers, he claimed, were made to last forever. We were sent door-to-door to sell them as an alternative to food storage that had to be rotated. Survival crackers were my Scout Leader’s idea of a fundraiser. We did that for a while, until the advent of the survival cracker. Canned goods and preserved apples and peaches in Mason jars were periodically rotated, newer jars replacing older ones.

When I was growing up, we, like most Utah Mormon families, kept a year’s supply of food in the basement.

Design cracker