A better -- and recent favorite of mine -- sci-fi book about scarce resources and food is "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's not about nuclear war either, but not only is the actual story very engaging, it focuses on how energy is generated and stored, what people eat, and how food is delivered in a post-oil world. Bacigalupi calls this crisis "the Contraction". Warning: more than a few digs at Monsanto as well, not so much from the "transgenics are bad" angle but from the "copyrights and patents on food oppress people". Strongly recommended!
You can do movies like this (The Road, Schindler's List, Dallas Buyer's Club, Hotel Rwanda are all good examples) but if the world of the story is crushingly awful then you're basically reduced to one plot - moral individual risks/sacrifices self to provide glimmer of hope to others. Offhand I'd say you can only put out a truly grim a-list movie about once every 5 years.
For all the dramatic hand wrangling over finding supplies, the survivors are essentially living in a world of plenty -- enough arms, ammunition, canned food, and supplies for a world population, >50% of which presumably no longer have an interest in such things.
It's the antithesis of all that "we should compromise for the good of all, saving the planet, etc" (because how does that sound fun?).
However.
Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts.
Just a very weird book.
It was the weirdly sexualized race and gender based cannibalism that I think puts it over the line, not the actions of Joe, except in the context of the former.
I mean I see what he was trying to do, but rather than basing his African elites on anthropological evidence, or on real white cultures that were horrible to other races, (which would have gotten his point across better, I think,) he based them on the most disturbing (and to me, last believable or sympathetic) racial fears of the time, and because of that, it is kinda uncomfortable.
1964 was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed. I imagine ideas of baser racial instincts were different when there were still lynchings and fear of sexual racial mixing. :(
As someone born in the very early 90's, it's weird seeing evidence of people taking seriously these thoughts I've only seen caricatured.
Of course, it's done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but somehow it's far more forgivable in its consistently tone deaf naivety than if it appeared Henlein actually had a decent understanding of race relations. (like the District 9 filmmakers ruining their perfect race-relations satire with comedy savage Nigerians...)
The daddy who's such an ubermensch even his own daughter wants to sleep with him, whilst he's actually busy screwing her best friend is much harder to accept, of course.
Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle goes into a bit of the politics and aftermath of a comet striking the Earth. It talks about survival, civil defense, and a few other things that would be spoilers to mention. That said, it has some points that are weirdly racist when viewed decades after publication--if you can look past those, though, it's a solid read.
One Second After by William Forstchen talks about the aftermath of an EMP first-strike on the US. Perhaps the one of the more interesting things is that he does specifically pay attention to both the food and medicine logistics--specifically, what happens when we lack ability to run refrigerators and move around grain. It's a bit cheerful in the end, but a good read.
Warday by Strieber and Kunetka takes place 5 years after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR. The premise of the novel is that a pair of researchers are traveling through the US and interviewing folks, reading documents, and generally piecing together both the initial conflict as well as the efforts to survive and recover. It's a really good bit of speculative fiction, but is pretty depressing.
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One of the biggest things that makes nuclear war difficult to imagine today is that we have the Internet and cell phones, things which at once are utterly integral to most of the non-rural folks and which are completely vulnerable to any sort of honest nuclear strike. The lack of books, CB radios, and basic practical knowhow and repairable goods brought by the rise of technology and international trade might well yield a situation where a theoretical 2020s United States would have a more difficult time recovering than a 1980s US.
At least as far as the 'net stuff goes, the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow is maybe one of the only ones that treats the tech angle seriously in a modern light.
Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with Farnham's Freehold. I picked it up at a used book store for a dollar - Heinlein! Post-apocalyptic society! - but I haven't enjoyed it very much, and yes, it does get weirdly racial as it goes on. The other books you mention sound much better! Heard great things about Lucifer's Hammer - that'll go to the top of the list.