Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Starving to Death

No, we are not going to see Americans starving to death in the streets because the food supply chain is showing cracks and potential failures.

(Or are they....?)

At least not for a while.

You'll see people in countries like India and Egypt and whatnot doing that first.  If you see multiple people getting shot and killed in food riots in poor countries, you will see that before you see it downtown in your city.

You might see some lean times.  You might eat more potatoes.  Less steak.  Or you might have less ribeye and more cube steak.  I ate a LOT of cube steak in the 80s.  And when I got steak steak it wasn't choice ribeye.  But cube steak is why they invented A1 sauce!

Get a good cornbread recipe.  And buy some bottle of A1 before there is a run this fall.

But Germany in 1918, with sawdust bread and turnips if we're lucky?  No, not for a while.

What the heck, maybe play around growing potatoes in your yard!  Just to learn and in the back of you mind as a precaution.  You need an old trash barrel, or just about anything.  Plenty of how to's on youtube.  People don't grow a lot of their own potatoes because potatoes are cheap.  You grow your own for when potatoes aren't to be had for any price because they aren't there.

But like I said, that is a long ways off.  Like, months.

Lovely thing about potatoes.  Popular in war torn lands long before countries that did a lot of winning.  So Germany adopts potatoes in the 30 years war and France doesn't go for them until their population out grows the land's ability to grow enough wheat for bread.  Potatoes are harder to burn than wheat fields, you don't need to harvest them all at once, and you get twice as much calories per acre

2 comments:

McChuck said...

David the Good's books on gardening are amusing as well as informative. Just keep in mind that he's spent his life in southern climes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/9527065712

Howard Brewi said...

I agree that we may see lean times but the should not be outright starvation unless cival unrest further disrupts the supply chain. I also agree about growing potatoes. One word of warning: don't count on planting grocery store potatoes. Many commercial potatoes are sprayed with a chemical to keep them from sprouting! I know two people who tried it and just got twisted misshapen plants that barely broke the surface.