I'm saying that such things have an effect on the show, or it can just be a stupid shooting gallery or whack-a-mole (walker) instead of a true tv program.
Yes, in the rural South, people grew up canning and gardening and filling pantries. Their grandparents were preppers by today's standards, but in their day, it was just "normal" and prudent since freezing and dehydrating foods was done less. Those stupid prepper reality shows are aimed at the single bugout bag crowd who literally are like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction deciding to "roam the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu" and thinking blithely that somehow they'd acquire enough water, wild edibles, and game animals to make it. All very innane actually.\
Watch a survival reality show sometime where an expert lives off the land with 10% being a good number of daily calories, so instead of 2000 (for fairly sedentary folks) you get 200 calories. One cannot live on that very long without the body going into starvation mode, cannibalizing your own tissues, bone loss, dehydration, deep glycogen deficits, and terrible persistent weakness. All of which would kill most migrating people. Worse, the US military has ensured that their soldiers get 3500-3700 calories in MRE packs due to increased labor under stress, and thus even if one had 2000 calories, then with all of the additional work, you'd be in a deficit as well.
But as yet, except for Herschel's farm, the group has unrealistically found food on "runs" when nothing like that would happen in reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After
If you read One Second After, in which an EMP weapon or multiple EMP weapons are detonated, then due to the loss of power, and no ability to quickly replace those transformers, and all of the ruined equipment, then the entire country falls into chaos. At first they are not that concerned and expect someone will take care of them, but the grocery stores are emptied along with needed medicines.
All of the diabetics have issues, as do those on routine life sustaining medicines for heart and lung problems. People with mental illness might have problems coping. Drug addicts have trouble coping. Farm animals are sacrificed to feed people barely, when those are stock animals that must be bred in order to produce more food. Animals like hogs and lambs and rabbits are vital since they can harvested to produce a lot of meat in a fairly short amount of time. Or chickens or goats since both produce more than one food item.
Instead, with migrations of folks who are stuck on the highway when their cars stop, they end up holing up in these rural communities, have no skills to help the town, but add even more attrition to the town's supplies. Preppers think about these things, not to be paranoid, but to think rationally how they would cope with something like a sustained ice storm that might cut power for two weeks and coping with that. The former might not ever happen as the last Carrington Event happened during the Civil War. One can expect a bad ice storm every 5-10 years in some locales, or a hurricane, or a tornado, etc.
So preppers also are a subset of the people watching the Walking Dead, but watching in horror, dismay, and then pissed that the show is doing such a lousy job when preparedness for storms is important, and FEMA has been diligently working to get people to have at least two weeks of supplies in American homes for simple prudence.