All Nuclear Famine Papers Are Bunk | Hacker News Reader

All Nuclear Famine Papers Are Bunk

lesswrong.com

Sure if we are farming with oxen and scythes again. Because you can't have industrial farming if your industry vanishes. At least 50% of the population must work in agriculture to survive. This was the case for most of our history.

The rest have to spin thread 16 hours/day.

Or chopping/gathering firewood.

Most of it goes to animal feed/ethanol under normal circumstances.

AFAIK the produce used for ethanol and possibly also some of the animal feed is not interchangeable for food intended for human consumption but I could be incorrect. I believe there has been some debates on here in the past about how quickly ethanol/food crops could be swapped out. IIRC it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 years meaning the food crops capacity would not be realized for a couple years at best and this assumes access to fertilizer.

Dent corn is useless. At least you can make bread from barley.

Pardon? I reckon you've never heard of cornbread or corn tortillas, 'cause both of those are made primarily from dent corn.

You might specifically be referring to yellow dent corn, since that's currently mostly used for animal feed, fuel, and plastics rather than human consumption, but I'd hardly call that "useless", either - even assuming it was somehow entirely inedible and not just less palatable than other sorts of corn.

That's the kind my state grows. So I'm not going to eat it as I know what it tastes like. What kind of dent corn is grown in your state?

> That's the kind my state grows. So I'm not going to eat it as I know what it tastes like.

In the event of nuclear armageddon you might be more inclined to acquire that particular taste - or at the very least figure out that yes, even yellow dent corn can be used to make bread and tortillas. I know it ain't as tasty as the sweet corn you're probably used to, but it's still edible and provides nutrition.

Oh I wouldn't disagree. I've done a lot of thought about the red horseman and the consequential black horseman. People, when they get hungry enough, will eat leaves, sawdust, even each other.

Written like someone who not only hasn’t gone through a rough spot or three, but who has not even considered what life is like in less privileged parts of the world. It’s good to be you.

Ok, I had to look it up 'Dent Corn' : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dent_corn

If you just attemp to eat the yellow dent without further processing you're going to have a bad day, with that said nixtamalization isn't that hard to do.

A bigger issue is that dent corn is a hybrid, it has to be farmed from seed corn and produces no offspring of its own. You better hope central Iowa and Illinois is still around in that case.

The massive amount of fertilizer and assorted chemicals that allow dent to be so productive are likely to be on fire and the natural gas needed is likely going to have is own transport issues.

Sure, but the broader context is around what's already planted or harvested; even if you'd have to plant something other than dent corn later on, existing stockpiles are still useful even for human consumption.

Still I get a chuckle when I see people stealing corn from a field (I guess the Bible says you should let people glean) thinking they're getting corn on the cob. Especially when sweet corn is 10-50 cents/ear where I'm from.

My understanding is that it is pretty much the same from a caloric perspective. The main differences would be handling requirements and possibly taste

You could be right. I honestly do not know. I've seen many conflicting discussions and articles in the past but maybe some of them are meant to manipulate folks. For me personally, I just continue to stockpile dehydrated and freeze-dried foods and water containers since I don't eat corn or wheat products anyway.

If it’s a choice between cornbread and starvation people will learn to eat cornbread.

It looks similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polenta I eat it like once a week. (My recipe has milk and cheese, sometime some tomatoes and grounded beef. I never ate it with lentils like in the photo, but I eat lentils in other dishes anyway.)

This is a lie spread by the meat industry to imply that the majority of farmland used for animal feed couldn't feed humans. The 'useless' kind of corn is the kind that stores well and has high protein and caloric value and can be made into a variety of shelf stable foods. Animal feed corn isn't as tasty as other kinds of field corn (which can be grown on the same land), but other than that it's what you want as bulk primary food (where sweetcorn is borderline useless).

You need to soak it in lye or potash if you intend to eat a lot of it, this is the 'complicated processing' that is scare mongered.

High starch varieties may lead to protein deficiency, but will keep someone alive.

FYI: most corn grown is field corn for livestock, methanol production, and further processing into cheap foods like corn flakes. It isn't the sweet, yellow tasty corn most people imagine.

This doesn’t take into consideration the amount of food rendered inedible due to radioactive fallout especially the food out in the fields. This article also seems to have its own faults.

Oh that's another thing is strontium 90 contamination. The article writer thinks there won't be many ground bursts so that issue might not be there. But does the author really want to find out?

Also does anyone even know or care about electronic nuclear weapons? People in this forum should as it would instantly make their whole skill set unimportant to daily life in whatever hellish life we will have to confront.

I find articles like this deeply disturbing. It is clear as crystal that there will be a nuclear war before the end of the year because the USA is in it's own Disney land when it comes to the news while the rest of the world is being frozen to death or antagonized. Turn on WION or Al Jazeera or any other news from non USA affiliated corporations. The situation is more dire than the general public in the USA know.

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