To honor 9/11 this year, I promised to do a small, but good deed: I've pledged to sort cans at a local food bank.

Canned tuna and powdered milk have been dubbed “the new duct tape” now that Mike Levitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has advised Americans to start stockpiling several weeks' worth of food in anticipation of a possible bird flu outbreak. A pandemic could conceivably disrupt our daily lives drastically for weeks on end, if previous pandemics are anything to judge by. “When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed,” Leavitt said at a conference in Wyoming this past weekend. “When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk, put it under the bed.” Al Franken speculated on his radio show this afternoon that the emphasis on canned tuna and powdered milk “can only mean one thing: the government is planning to fight the bird flu with cats.”