If things collapse, food will quickly go scarce. Be prepared. From Ol’ Remus on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
Food. Finding good water isn’t a problem in the hills of Appalachia. Survivalists who fixate on water probably have other regions in mind, the arid southwest or the western high plains. If I lived, say, on the lee side of the Rockies I’d worry more about water than I do. Which is not much.
Here there are springs and weeps everywhere, creeks big and small, lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, even the occasional swamp. If this isn’t enough to keep you hydrated, it rains regularly and generously in summer, and snows in the winter. Water would often be an obstacle to the travelin’ man keepin’ low and movin’ fast in interesting times.
Where survival doesn’t turn on a scarcity of water and adequate shelter has been managed, food quickly reveals itself for the priority it is. This is not as obvious as you’d imagine. You’d have to get up early and work hard to avoid food in America. In the last hundred years, only in the “dust bowl” times of the ‘thirties did America see anything like a food shortage. Notice there was always bread for the bread lines in the Depression. The lines were from lack of means, not lack of product.
Great Britain came close to a food emergency in the early ‘forties when wartime sinkings by U-boats meant already meager rations had to be cut and cut again. Our wartime rationing was, by comparison, leisure class dining. Japan was besieged so effectively it was in the first phase of actual starvation before the war ended. Totally exhausted and dysfunctional post-war Europe wasn’t far behind.
As a nation we’re unwilling to entertain even a cutback in variety, much less prepare for actual scarcity. But given all the swords hanging over our heads, a time will almost certainly come when “low fat, low calorie, gluten-free” pseudo-food will be the meal of last resort, a time when even foodies will dream of double cheeseburgers and heaps of greasy fries. Calories and nutrients are life, no getting around it.
To continue reading: Everything Can Collapse Really Fast
