Costco Jumps on the Doomsday Prepper Wagon with Very Intense Emergency Meal Kits

There are days, right? Days when it looks like Mother Nature is trying to go full Michael Bay; days when you're terrified that the words "Little Rocket Man" on the wrong Twitter account will launch us into a world war; and days when we must face the unsettling realization that there's an entire sitcom spinoff about nine-year-old Sheldon Cooper. Those are the days when you feel like dragging your sleeping bag and a gallon of water into whatever windowless closet you can huddle in until the fast-approaching apocalypse arrives. But before you pull the door behind you, just make sure you have enough room for 96-gallon-sized cans of food from Costco, too.

Costco, your go-to store for Bagel Bites and oil drums full of mayonnaise, also carries everything that doomsday preppers and fucked-up John Goodman characters need for their basement fallout shelters. The usually very chill warehouse store now sells emergency food kits designed with enough canned, shelf-stable meal options to sustain between one and four adults for up to a full year, depending on what your doomsday budget constraints are. (It also offers a $99 one-month supply of food that literally comes inside a plastic bucket, if you think that you'll be able to open the airlock and return to the outside world after 30-ish days).

"The idea came about making a great starter kit for a family who wanted to prepare for any kind of disaster," a Costco spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press. "This is a great value with shipping included."

I guess it is. The most expensive options range from $999.99 for the Nutristore One Year Emergency Food Kit, which has enough canned goods for one person, to $5,999 for Nutristore's Premium Food Kit, which has 36,000 servings, will feed four adults for a year, and, according to one commenter, arrives in 100 brown boxes (perfect for stacking or for shredding and serving as a side dish with your 42 cans of Instant Pinto Bean Flakes).

The freeze-dried foods have a shelf life of up to 30 years, which is terrifying on a number of levels, and the $999.99 starter kit comes with an assortment of red wheat, white rice, granola, dehydrated fruits and vegetables, instant milk, and both beef and chicken textured vegetable proteins. One customer who gave it a three-star review said that he was disappointed that it didn't come with recipes, because what's the point in surviving nuclear fallout if you can't make your dehydrated imitation beef really pop?

Even if you aren't preparing for the end of the world, it might be worth keeping several cans of this on hand, purely to throw at your television the next time something infuriating happens—which, we're guessing, will be in the next few hours.