With the economy struggling along, I keep hearing people talk about the collapse of civilization, like the good old Y2K scare. I think these fears are wildly unrealistic. I worry about our president’s attacks on liberty, and I worry about runaway inflation, but I don’t worry about collapse. Nonetheless, there’s nothing wrong with learning some self-reliance, right? You don’t have to be prepping for the apocalypse to prefer making to buying.

Our home is a do-it-yourself kind of place. Arielle makes her own household cleaners, and I’ve made shelves for our extra-narrow closet. We especially seem to enjoy growing things. Arielle makes bread almost every week, and lately she’s been making yogurt, too. Now she wants to start making sourdough. Meanwhile I’m trying to save money to buy beer-brewing equipment. So we’re growing critters on our counter probably three days out of seven. If disaster strikes, we’ll have plenty of yogurt and booze.

But we’ll need a lot more than that to fend of disaster if modern resources fail us. This morning, just as a thought experiment, I asked Arielle what would be really valuable, if civilization just ground to a halt. Say we had no electric grid and no more gasoline. What would be just too valuable to buy? Surely one thing is medicine, right? And one big slice of medicine is antibiotics.

Now, penicillin is the original antibiotic, and it’s just mold, right? So that got me thinking: couldn’t we make our own penicillin? With rising medical costs, wouldn’t this be big savings? Besides, I’m sure commercial penicillin contains all kinds of preservatives, so it probably causes cancer and birth defects and autism. I think I even read somewhere that phamaceutical companies, in an effort to speed up production, are now injecting penicillin with FGH (Fungal Growth Hormone), which has been alleged to cause premature meiosis in humans. So I think to be safe, we really should start growing our own. Besides, it would be a rewarding and enjoyable experience. So stick it to Big Pharma and grow your own penicillin!

. . . So after writing this post, I did some research, and it turns out there are people who have really worried about this and others who seem less worried.