How well could I survive eating local plants and whatever I can grow? How well could what we have nearby support the local population? Resources like the ones mentioned here could prove lifesaving.
I don't recommend this. As someone who has been foraging for over a decade, I believe you are much better off stockpiling food, learning to raise chickens, owning some fishing gear, maybe growing your own crops, and even learning to hunt small game.
Here's my educated opinion:
Foraging is fine as a sort of hobby or interest, but most people shouldn't consider it for survival and the vast majority of people have no business doing it at all. That might sound extreme, but trust me. I've witnessed so much stupidity in foraging communities, online and offline, that I completely gave up participating. Having to constantly correct bad and even dangerous advice got really tiring.
Being good at ID'ing and using plants requires adequate time spent gathering knowledge and experience. Most people won't come close because they don't have the interest.
Many people just don't have the visual processing skills. Foraging is a very visual skill. Some people have it. Foraging came natural to me because I'm highly visual. I can ID things very easily after an experience. Others I've known are nearly incapable of ID'ing plants reliably. I'd say at least half of people are not good at ID'ing and probably never will be without some app on a phone connected to the internet.
Foraging is and historically has been tertiary to hunting and agriculture/livestock. Most wild plants simply don't have the energy density to justify the energy spent to collect and eat them. Those that are energy dense are usually only around for a few months out of the year and still may not be that plentiful.
At best, foraging is a stopgap while crops are growing. I'd love to say that it's practical merely live off the land, and while I think I might be able to get away with it longer than the average person, it's just not viable for most.
So sure, you can live off foraging alone. When everyone else is not.
But when _everyone_ starts hunting and gathering you'll quickly realise how far agriculture has displaced us from the basic carrying capacity of the land, and then move onto the realisation of what happens in nature when the population of an animal exceeds the carrying capacity of their territory.
Starvation, conflict. Nothing great.
That's the problem with post-apocalyptic day dreams, they usually posit you as one of the few survivors. In reality, there'll be way more other survivors, either competing with you for resources, or, if you have a sweet bunker filled with supplies, forming a coalition that can overcome any advantage you have in firepower, by sheer numbers of desperate people.
(Peter Thiel take note, if the apocalypse comes, you can't shoot every Kiwi, and we're mighty interested in what's in your bunker. #AotearoaIsNotYourLifeboatRichPeople)
Supposedly the population of the USA pre-colonialism was comparable to today's population and, whatever way they were managing food systems, they were able to sustain that for millennia, rather than exhausting almost all the soil's fertility in a few generations.
Then there's recent findings that pre-industrial fisheries were often as productive as early industrialised ones[0]. But again, sustained for long periods rather than rapidly leading to vanishingly small returns.
Findings like this really lead me to the question of whether our current approach to feeding ourselves is actually so great or whether we should return to more "proven" methods.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/04/precolon...
Agriculture didn't arrive in the US with white people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_agriculture_in_the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_agriculture_on_the...
for comparison, potato yields 40 tons a hectar, while wheat does like 8 tons and requires processing that most people won't manage by themselves.
Apples also give 30+ tons but thats a stranger diet.
It's probably best to think of supplementing rather than replacing external food supplies and sources. Raising perishable / vegetable crops and having a source of protein (fowl -> eggs, goat -> milk) would probably be your best bets.
You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning.
On a per-acre and per-hour basis, potatos are probably your best bet. A carb-heavy diet will tend to add pounds.
The traditional native American crops were the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash:
https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-...
These are mutually symbiotic (the beans add nitrogen to the soil, I believe there's some pest-management aspect to this as well).
Preindustrial communities also relied heavily on fishing and shellfish --- another iconic pattern are shell mounds, literally the remnants of shellfish eaten. (See Shell Mound Road in Emeryville, as an example, in the SF Bay Area.) Grazing livestock was another standard.
Note that the native population of regions such as the Los Angeles basin may have been a few thousands, and for pre-Columbian North America (including Mexico and Central America) roughly 50 millions.
The squash creates a dense ground cover that clogs out weeds. The beans add nitrogen. The corn provides a trellis the beans can grow up.
back in soviet times, we didn't have 365 day a year avaliability of fruit from another side of the planet, and our grandmother used to can hundreds of kilos of fruit and veg in the summer. She would fill up a storage room and that wouod supplement our diet in the colder months.
Its quite a bit of work, like a week or 2, but was normal withing living memory. Also you need equipment: a canning machine, and like 30+ 5-liter glass jars. And this is just one aspect of what you would need.
The epic exploration of east Asian technology, Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, devotes an entire volume (Vol 6, Part 5) to fermentation and food science. (The series itself is simply phenomenal.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
Canning arrived late to the scene, in the 19th century. It requires glass jars (which are re-usable), and in modern practice, lids which are replaced for each fresh batch. Prior to this, curing and fermentation were heavily relied on for long-term food storage: saurkraut, kimchee, salami, cheese, yoghurt, kefir, tofu, miso, tempeh, many forms of pickling, and of course, fermented alcohols (often employing grains or fruit).
Normal greenhouses are much simpler, more efficient and have been in use for decades. They make full use of the sun.
Check out “The Market Gardener” by Jean Martin Fortier. The quoted statement is a myth. Farms historically were nowhere near as large as today and we able to provide a balanced diet to those literally on the same block (think “in-fill market gardens”)
It depends on what you mean by "balanced diet" (are you going to require meat?) but let's just work an example with sweet potatoes, which are pretty nutritionally packed and can be ludicrously productive.
Let's say you planted just one acre over with sweet potatoes; you could grow roughly 5 tons of usable roots, about 10,000 kcal/day. Swap some of that area out for other crops for nutrient balance and you'd still have a huge excess for one person, even accounting for a farmer's caloric needs. You might also end up hating sweet potatoes after a year, but that's why you specialize in a few calorie crops and then trade with others for what you need.
Anyway, it seems to me that an acre would be more than enough for a whole family.
I keep bees, for instance, and my hives produce about 50-100lbs of honey per year. It's not super nutritious, but it's low effort per lb. Ten hives could produce a lot of raw calories. But it's also a skill, and you can kill your bees if you aren't careful.
The point I'm making is that, we're all bringing different skills and backgrounds. I've grown potatoes but never at the scale of an acre. I don't know what challenges that brings.
More to the point, how is everyone in a big city going to find that space?
I think this generally holds for living in cities. Since residence is basically vertical, it gets progressively harder to also grow and raise food vertically also. All the space is already taken. And all the space that isn't housing is infrastructure (roads, sewers, cables) that would all have to be ripped out in order to plant enough to sustain the city.
So the food production moves away from the city, and away from the people who need the food. The OP is right to wonder: what happens if the supply lines from the countryside are cut? That would be a huge disaster, and whenever this has happened throughout history, it was a huge disaster. E.g. when Greece was occupied by the Axis, in the 1940's, the people in Athens died in droves of famine while the people in the countryside, well, they subsisted. In fact, anecdotally, my friend's grandma told her there was no other time they were so fat in their lives because they ate all they had everyday, just because they didn't know if they would have any more food tomorrow. But the countryside had food to eat while the city was left with scraps. btw this was originally caused by the Nazis who requisitioned crops to feed their war effort, assholes.
in the greater Athens–Piraeus area alone, some 40,000 people died of starvation, and by the end of the Occupation "it was estimated that the total population of Greece [...] was 300,000 less than it should have been because of famine or malnutrition" (P. Voglis).[24]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_occupation_of_Greece#Econ...
(When I'm tired, I write too much :P)
Cities have other benefits, though -- access to materials, labor, community, rapid healthcare. Gotta make your tradeoffs.
If it's one year’s output of that land to feed that person for a year, then it's just 5 acres for a person (and you can drop of then “for a year”, since the output period matches the consumption period.)
The above is true with some qualifications. You will need decent soil and plentiful clean water. And a power source to pump the water. And fertility which you will have to bring in. The compost you make won't do it. A way to control pests, (ya ya muh organic, but we are trying to survive here). So some pesticides. Sprayers. More then one, they break. Maybe some herbicides as well so you don't burn so many calories hoeing. Some mechanical help like a rototiller will make this much more possible. Fuel oil and parts for that. Some fencing and trellising. Bird netting. A way to preserve harvests like canning, drying or freezing.
Most importantly (and most people will lack this rendering half an acre vs 5 acres moot for practical purposes) you will need a fair amount of expertise to pull it off. Generally from experience. And it will be a lot of work and mostly unforgiving of mistakes.
Source: I mostly made it up, but I am an agronomist and long time gardener. It's probably roughly right though.
I'd assume even with massive supply chain disruptions, books still exist (and perhaps even libraries) and you can still ask other people for advice or even band together, division of labour is still a thing and useful.
You can either organise that as some kind of cooperative, or just like we organise companies today.
Well I don’t, but if you need some help I suppose you can use my profile for contact information. This could be delicate for both our families. KIDDING I’m pretty sure you meant fertilizer there.
And yes, your half acre number is much much closer to accurate.
(Their server seems to be slow tonight, check out this for a summary of their system: https://web.archive.org/web/20210411002519/http://growbioint... )
You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.
Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help.
It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
I'd say you have more of a need for a water stock pile in Arizona than in Singapore. We get more than two metres of rain a year here.
(Of course, even in Singapore you can get unlucky and hit a dry spell for a few weeks. But they are rather rare.
The city has dedicated a lot of its land to water reservoirs.)
The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated.
And water is far more essential to life. A person can survive only a few minutes without air, or a few days without water. It's possible to live without (or with sharply limited) food for weeks or months.
A single closet shelf might provide a very rudimentary sufficient food supply for weeks.
Average per-person household water usage in the US is 80--100 gallons/day (300--380 liter). About 1 gallon (4 liter) is for drinking, roughly twice that for food prep / cooking, and the remainder for cleaning and sanitation.
A 1m x 1m x 2m closet (2 m^3) could hold a bit over 500 gallons (2,000 liter), or about a week's worth of average daily water use for one person.
Under emergency conditions that could be stretched considerably, but even at 5 gallon/day (~20 liter), a week's supply of water for a household of four would be over 0.5 m^3.
My point: You need a lot of water, and will suffer quickly without it.
> The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated.
If you collect it directly as rainwater, should be fine?
How clean your water has to be and how much you need depends also on your energy budget.
If you have limitless energy, you can distill almost basically source of water, and get something potable out. (If you have large but not infinite amounts of energy, you can eg condense water from the air. Our dew point in Singapore is typically roughly around 24C almost all the time.
Singapore as a country has also heavily invested in recycling of water, see eg https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/newater and we also have some desalination going. And the reservoirs I already talked about.
The scenario initially proposed was a supply-chain disruption long enough to plan for at least one, and perhaps a substantial number of planting / cultivation / harvesting scenarios. In any significantly urbanised location (and Singapore is very highly urbansied), there's simply not enough arable land to provide food for the local population.
As a rough estimate, one person requires about 0.5 hectare of land to support them. Singapore has a population of 5.4 million on an area of 733 km^2 (73,000 ha). Given the per-capita requirement, the area could support a population of about 146,000, or the population of 5.4 million would require an agricultural area of 27,000 km^2 (2.7 million ha).
Considering other possible scenarios (hurricane / typhoon, major flooding event, tsunami, earthquake, wildfire, etc.) it's quite possible that structures or containers for large-volume storage would be destroyed, damaged, and/or contaminated. Again my point with water being that large quantities are required even in reduced-usage emergency scenarios and that quality and not merely quantity matters.
In most of these scenarios, your energy budget to a substantial extent is your body's own muscle power. That might be supplemented by fire (do you have fuel), animal power, or (do you have fuel) engines or generators.
Many regions have official or unofficial groups which provide training and coordination for disaster planning and contingencies. Participating in one locally might help in moving understanding from a theoretical to practical basis.
(Just like New York City or London wouldn't be able to feed themselves.)
Luckily, at least we don't have to worry about hurricanes / typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes or wildfire here. Flooding might still happen.
> In most of these scenarios, your energy budget to a substantial extent is your body's own muscle power. That might be supplemented by fire (do you have fuel), animal power, or (do you have fuel) engines or generators.
Depends on what kind of scenario you are planning for. Also, in Singapore you have plenty of solar power. So you could use some of that for evaporating water.
> Many regions have official or unofficial groups which provide training and coordination for disaster planning and contingencies. Participating in one locally might help in moving understanding from a theoretical to practical basis.
Oh, there's definitely groups for that one here. I'm actually happy to leave that to other people, and the government is also doing a pretty good job.
Btw, my original point wasn't actually meant to talk about Singapore as a city. I was just meaning to comparing water needs in Arizona vs some wet place. So I perhaps should have picked some place in rural Malaysia for our comparison. (Malaysia is a neighbour of Singapore.)
If you're storing that in 30WM1G bottles (an HDPE 1-gallon milk bottle), the dimensions are 6"x6"x10" per bottle.
You need 28 * 4 or 112 bottles.
That's 12,096 in^2, or 84ft^2, or 7.8m^2 of storage area.
If you've a 1 m^2 shelf, you'd need nearly 8 shelves spaced at roughly 30 cm, or 2.4 m vertical (7.8 ft) just for a month's worth of water storage.
You. Need. A. Lot. Of. Water.
For grains ... say, a 1.2 kg (42 oz) container of oats, you've got 150 kilocalories per 40g, or about 4,500 kcal per container. A human needs a minimum (we're talking emergency survival rations) of about 2500 kcal/day. Not a balanced or interesting diet, but for bulk calories, a starting point.
A month's supply for four is then just over 62 containers. Which takes up 1.2 m^2 of shelf space. Water requires 6.5 times the storage even with an absolute minimum daily allocation.
There are denser grains. Even with oats, steel-cut roughly doubles the caloric density per unit volume.
It's much easier to provision a long-term food storage than a long-term water storage.
This is why survival water planning often revolves around purification rather than, or in addition to, storage.
(I also have options for handling impure water)
Hm, i will ask my wife whoch one she wants
They also don't purr.
When the pandemic hit, we just bought another 25 lb bag each of lentils and millet and called it good.
Most likely not engough calories, but for growing your own greens in order to complement stockpiled food, I would recommend looking into passive hydroponics ("Kratky method"). It's easy, cheap and fun and it can provide a small constant supply of fresh food.