Skyrocketing food prices cause riots on three continents. (via CNN)

I told you this was bad news. Didn’t I tell you? Yeah, I told you.

I’m not saying it’s time to start stockpiling spam and twinkies against the apocalypse… there’s time for that yet, plus, twinkies are expensive these days. Still, maybe its time for us all to dust off our long term disaster plans. After all, if civilization ever does collapse, stockpiled food will only take you so far. Eventually you would have to start farming, or master some kind of useful pre-industrial trade like woodcarving, or pottery. (Or prostitution.) But you won’t have time to learn these skills after the collapse, when you’re being chased by flesh-eating mutants, you’re starving, and there’s no electricity, roads, or oddly hypnotic pottery instruction youtube videos set to the melancholy strains of Sigur Ros. Really, by the time there’s any credible threat of apocalypse – and I don’t quite call this food situation a credible threat – it will be too late. So the time to start training for it is now. Worst comes to worst, and the world DOESN’T end? You’ll still have learned how to turn pots. (Or, you know. Tricks.) So it’s really a win-win.

For more on this line of thought, see Max Brooks’ indispensable The Zombie Survival Guide.