Participating in a discussion is a great way to learn and contribute to ideas for superstructing. When you post a comment, try to provide information that others may not know, and avoid getting into arguments. Winning discussions are all about working together to get smarter.

Please login or register to post


    Ravenous: What's the hardest thing you're dealing with personally during this superthreat?

    Talk about the changes you're making in everyday life to deal with the Ravenous superthreat.

    Started by: mrjudkins Raves:7

    Subscribe » RSS

    To think that once upon a time we took an abundance of all foods at all times of the year totally for granted... What have you found the hardest as our traditional food networks have begun falling apart? What changes have you had to make to cope?

    It took us a lot of hard work and probably about six months salary, but my family had to buy a hydroponic green house to survive. In the harsh Southern California ecosystem (and everyday it gets worse) we have to ration our fertilizers. Luckily we\\\'ve been able to rent out portions of it to our neighbors, but that\\\'s only barely covering one weeks utilities on the thing. You guys remember playing Oregon Trail in grade school? Meager rations, that\\\'s about where my family is. I\\\'m thinking about sending the kids to live with my parents up north.

    Chocolate! I\\\'ve been a backyard food grower for years, so sometimes it\\\'s potatoes and more potatoes for weeks, but at least there\\\'s enough to eat--but getting chocolate here is increasingly iffy and expensive. I wonder how cocoa plants would do in a greenhouse...

    With the conversion of the oceans to aqua farms food prices have fallen dramtically. Raising crops at home is considered a expensive hobby when you can feed a family of three on what a person earns in an hour at minium wage.

    Les Meveaux is built on the principle of sustainable small-scale agriculture. We weaned ourselves off the local grid over the course of three years, and became 100% self sufficient in 2015. Then in 2017 there was the cold snap, and last year we realized that our bee colonies had been decimated by CCD. Last year wasn\\\'t fun. The vegetables came up for the most part, but our fruit crop was ruined, and we ended up having to go outside the farm for sweeteners, nuts, stuff like that. Of course, we argued about it for weeks before hand (and to be honest, weeks afterwards too.) I helped them build a greenhouse last winter, and Theo\\\'s been working to get the bee colonies back online, but...

    Here in Minnesota where the land is fertile, a group of concerns citizens have pooled our resources, tools, seeds, fencing, equipment and our establishing a community farm to feed our local citizens. Many of us still have our own backyard gardens. I grow tomatoes in the basement, canned green beans, grow potatoes, carrots and onions. Once a week local growers meet at the fairgrounds and trade or sell their food. At first it was only produce, now locals bring in eggs, fresh meat. We cannot rely on processed pre-package food any longer. The day of convenience food is soon to end. I haven\\\'t go so far as to grind my own flour, but each person can do much with a seed and soil. My husband got laid off, he used to work in a food production plant. Now he manages our small plot of land and volunteers at the community farm.

    In an effort to produce my own food I moved from the city to a rural place away from the pollution and congestion. It was not an easy move because I\\\'m 73 and have lived in one city or another my whole life. I purchased as much land as I could. The farm is 42 acres half of it forest with a year-round stream flowing through it. I started raising chickens and rabbits in addition to the vegetables. The only real problem was killing the animals. I chose them because they\\\'re fairly self-sufficient food-wise all I have to do is keep the predators away. I have had to install a water filtration system because we\\\'ve been using the stream as a backup to our well. Being away from the city sometimes is a problem because of the meds I require including insulin. My family complains about the diet and killing the cute bunnies but we get by.

    I\\\'ve not been too widely hit by these issues yet. However, I\\\'m waiting for my wife to give birth any day now, and I\\\'m sure my world\\\'s about to change. Does anyone know of any good alternatives to milk and dairy? They seem to be difficult to get hold of in the city here.

    Living in a big city like Seattle, food stocks vary from being plentiful due to the large economy to there being a \\\"run on the grocer\\\", where you\\\'ll be lucky to find a single piece of meat or a single vegetable at the larger store. Thankfully, we do most of our shopping a t small local mom \\\'n\\\' pop stores, so the rushes aren\\\'t as disastrous for us.

    I had to buy a Gun... I consider myself a pacifist. But if people who don\\\'t know what they are doing get into the Aquaculture they can contaminate the food and make it useless for everybody.

    I have the good fortune of having been a vegetable gardener for over 20 years. I was gardening and eating my own vegetables back when it wasn\\\'t very \\\"necessary\\\" yet, just a fun hobby and an interesting challenge. The hardest thing for me is dealing with scarcity of the things I love that can\\\'t easily be grown in this region, like coffee beans and tropical fruits. The second hardest thing is worrying that hungry people will steal the results of my hard work, although I can certainly sympathize with their situation.

    To Marcm, if your wife can\\\'t breast feed, it\\\'s going to be expensive. Don\\\'t go for any of the black market baby milk or cheep stuff. Where do you think all the tainted Chinesse milk from the 2017 scandal went? As for the hardest thing, it\\\'s a toss up between slautering the animals and having to patrole the orchard at night just before harvest to keep people from sneaking in to steal food.

    I\\\'m tempted to say it\\\'s been getting out there and actually working. There are a lot of days I just don\\\'t want to garden. But I\\\'ve been following permaculture principles, so it really doesn\\\'t take much work to keep my garden in order, and so I won\\\'t blame my own laziness. No, truly the hardest thing has been dealing with city officials. They don\\\'t seem to care that we\\\'re trying to live sustainably and insulate ourselves and our neighbors from the food scarcity problems. All they care about is the line between a garden (legal) and a farm (commercial and therefore prohibited in a residential neighborhood. We had to fight to keep rabbits for food, and we can\\\'t have the chickens we want because the city won\\\'t let us. It probably doesn\\\'t help that we have one neighbor convinced our \\\"unruly yard\\\" lowers his property values. To these people, the appearance of idyllic suburbia is more important than our ability to eat. I\\\'d like to see them go hungry, but my Mother is a christian woman, so I\\\'ll have to settle for a superiority complex when they come begging for food.

    I level harsh criticism on the idea that large segments of the population can survive building their own greenhouses. This is simply impossible in most modern cities and unaffordable in more than threequarters of the world. I think the idea people \\\"adapt and make a sacrifice and buy themselves a hydroponic garden\\\" is a very very dangerous fallacy that will get us a a civilization seriously, I repeat SERIOUSLY, in trouble. We cannot switch to a model where everyone starts growing their own food and reverts to some hobbit-derived model of peaceful barter. If we try, millions will die, we\\\'ll see wholesale desperate plunder and crime and society will by and large collapse. I reject stories of middle class, out-of-touch westerners spending \\\"some of their free time\\\" growing aubergines as ludicrous and dangerous fantasies. Instead focus on things that are not childish fantasies. Superstruct MUST accept that we move beyond these inadequate fantasies and simplistic projections as soon as possible. We are no longer a society/world capable of going back to decentralized foodproudction without a massive genocidal die-off. And trying to will rip our societies apart causing massive crime, civil wars and unspeakable suffering.

    I demand we stop at once with the childish and dangerous fantasies of families growing their own food and actually surviving. These scenario\\\'s are impossible to realize in 90% of modern rich cities and for modern urban people - and criminally inadequate in most of the third world. These ideas of bourgeois \\\"out of touch\\\" middle class idiots are very very dangerous.

    The biggest issue my family and I are dealing with is making sound choices about what to actually do with the food we have. Since we are living in a collective, all the food we grow is not ours, just a percentage of it. And some of that percentage we have to save to barter with for other goods and services withing the collective. Milk is a luxury now. So is coffee, chocolate, and any other plants that we cannot grow natively. I agree to a certain extent that we cannot grow all of the food we need in green houses, but many of the grains we use we can grow in Ohio. Since we are really shooting for sustainability, making sure the kids know that we do not throw anything away sometimes is difficult. Harley is the main culprit, since she is the oldest and was with us in the city before we moved out here. We use every part of the plant, in some way or another. That localvore movement in the late \\\'00 and early \\\'10 could have been one of the best trends we adopted.

    @Ruud. I fully agree that greenhouses are not a worldwide solution. We need solutions that can actually work. But I don\\\'t know the solution to this one!

    God I miss coffee. There was a time I didn\\\'t get through the day without at least four cups. What is even worse, however, is trying to explain to little Maddy why she can\\\'t have her favorite cereal anymore. The kids have been the hardest hit by the latest changes at the supermarket. It makes me realize how much I spoiled them. I couldn\\\'t get Dex to eat for a week after the shelves emptied and we were forced to sustain ourselves on the rice and beans I had put away. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. My first large scale garden has produced well this year and there will be plenty for our neighborhood canning party. The only problem I forsee is that about half of my crops came out almost seedless, meaning there is evidence of genetic modification contamination in my seedlot. Will have to get seeds elsewhere next year.

    The hardest thing we\\\'re dealing with right now is the uncertainty. Locally (Southeast Virginia) the networks are working pretty well. There\\\'s food on the shelves, goods move from place to place and, in general, if you\\\'re employed and own a home you\\\'re not too bad off. We\\\'re scared of what might happen if REDS hits Norfolk (the port handles a LOT of East coast ocean traffic) and if things get worse out west we\\\'ll probably be short of most things so we\\\'re trying to do what we can to build a local buffer. The hardest thing about that is convincing the majority of the people around here that we really are facing a real disaster. No matter what they see on TV, since the stores are full here they assume there\\\'s no problem.

    My husband and I have been trying to hunt elk up in Idaho during every hunting season (my parents live there), something we would have never done ten years ago but my dad and I have been trying to get better at it, and we keep that in a freezer for the year. However this year we are unsure if we can make the trip because of the recent severe state to state regulations on transporting meats, in addition to the fuel costs...

    I spend way too much time thinking about food. Everything revolves around it. I need a way to distract myself. I've started brewing mint tea, as there is some wild mint near my Northern Californian home. Not sure my massive daily intake of mint tea is doing any good. My neighbor's nearly ripe tomatoes look so good!

    Boredom. I know it sounds weird, but the variety of food I used to eat was astonishing, and that variety is heading out of the window fast. Importing spices and herbs just isn't something that the wallet will stretch to any more so usually what you made for dinner on Tuesday is going to be the same as what you have on Friday. I'm getting used to it though - you get used to anything, eventually.

    At our school, we are no longer allowed to bring in our own food. The state is slowly reintroducing rations.

    Food likes to be grown on a certain scale. That is one reason why victory gardens do well when they are all together. What we quickly found out here dry farming as a group is that you have to use the exponential power of nature. At one end of the scale you are barelygetting ten percent of your diet from the garden; at the other end you have so much food that it sits rotting in the field. Food must be integrated into the schools, and large groups of children are very good at planting. Your best best is to tear out the shamled houses in the suburbs, and pull out the concrete and garden on those lots. Use the concrete to build up keyhole gardens like they do in africs closer to the back doors of each house, so that you can really pump out the greens. Personally I like millett and chard and quinoah so its not a sacrifice.

    I used to think it was a pain when someone would "pay" the minister by bringing a bag of zucchini. Now the generosity of my congregants keeps me fed. I've never learned to grow food and I sure couldn't kill an animal for food. Luckily, my congregation shows they value my leadership by bringing food. I don't control what I eat, and when things get scarce, I feel it first. But since I have dinner with congregants almost every night, I'm likely to have at least one meal a day.

    ruud dirven: does something have to have the potential to solve the WHOLE problem to be worth trying or even discussing? Maybe victory gardens will keep our scientists alive until they find out how to clone proteins? Maybe it will *help* even if it's not enough alone.

    one of the most difficult things is convincing my girlfriend to eat what I scavange/hunt/gather. Eating grasshopers is apparently less than romantic.

    Surely one of the hardest things for us old people that used to live in the old days and remember the huge variety of foods that we could actually afford and the variety of meals that we could prepare is now getting used to the limitation of the things that you can actually afford to grow or trade. I worry everyday about the nutritional profile of my family.. are my kids getting the nutrients they need? and with the health treats such as REDS this concern gets even bigger. Im also find myself worried everynight about someone stealing from my home garden, my husband definetely has a shotgun under our mattress although we're very peaceful people we have a family to care for.

    The weird thing is that we really do have all we need to eat and it's been incredible what gets distilled out of our collective deep knowledge base. Nutritionally, we really are not in any kind of malnourished zone. It's more the emotional attachment to certain 'comfort' foods that have disappeared. Mostly when we're really tired, or cold, or other things haven't gone well in a day, that's when I 'just wish' we could pick from the palette (or platter) of the Gods (aka Whole Foods deli!)

    This thought reminds me of the importance of going back to old ways of living to survive troubling times. Growing your own food as much as possible is the only sure-fire way to save yourself from this scare.




    Nominate For A Badge

    Badge:
    More detail on badges



    NOMINATE CANCEL