What to Eat After the Apocalypse | Hacker News Reader

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

nautil.us

104 pointspmcpinto158 comments

> You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. It’s all the same! It’s just the spices.

We should really stop with this BS. There are a lot of delicious ways to cook vegetables; but a veggie patty does NOT taste like a sausage one. I'd bet the second part of the sentence applies to insect as well. I'm not sure I'm ready to find out about the first part.

Some insects are delicious. Tarantulas taste like shrimp or lobster, without all the shell [1]. Ants taste great with flour [2]. You can't tell the difference after cooking and spicing.

[1] http://www.thedailymeal.com/deep-fried-tarantula

[2] http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/recipe-ica-fa...

Congratulations, you've contested the point by completely ignoring it.

So what? He provides interesting material. Why the need to attack?

The thread started with:

> You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty.

The argument is not "insects can't be tasty", the argument is "insects may indeed be tasty but people can taste that it's not beef/chicken". Given that people can tell the difference between, say, grass fed and grain fed beef, the claim that an insect or vegetable-based alternative will be indistinguishable needs more evidence than "nuh uh!"

I'm pointing some insects can be indistinguishable from other kind of meat, if not sausages. Tarantulas taste like shrimp or lobster, ants with flour taste like pork because it's fried in fat.

And I've eaten those if that's enough evidence, it's available in my country.

Seriously, that response of yours was uncalled for. This is not a pissing contest.

The Typhoon restaurant (http://typhoon.biz/) serves insects. They have a whole insect section on their menu. I tried the Taiwanese crickets once. They were quite tasty: crunchy and nutty. I highly recommend giving it a whirl if you're in Santa Monica.

Tarantulas aren't insects.

Right, my mistake. In my native language "insect" is common name for any bug.

"Some arthropods are delicious" then.

But that's too wide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacostraca (shrimp, crabs, lobster!)

"Insect" is acceptable for those willing to be a little loose for the sake of this sort of discussion. "Bug" is better.

I'm amazed at how often I hear "you can't taste the difference" with something that obviously tastes different. Its like a color blind person saying "you can't tell the difference between red and green" instead of "I can't tell the difference". I can taste the difference between and specify about a dozen types of animals. How in the world does anyone think I won't be able to tell a veggie patty or insect patty from any of them?

I always think this about the soda taste tests, where people say they prefer Coca-Cola, but then prefer Pepsi in the blind taste tests, as if they couldn't taste the difference. They don't taste the same at all...

I've done the Coca-Cola vs Pepsi blind taste test. I could tell the difference. I've also seen other people fail the test when they swore they could tell the difference.

The fact is some people can tell the difference and some people can't. Part of it is training if you devote some time to learning the differences in taste then you will gain some skill. I drink both of those colas roughly about the same amount so I've become acquainted with the taste differences.

Part of it is genetics some people just have more sensitive palates than other. I do in general have a more sensitive nose than many of the others I know so that may be part of it as well.

I would wager though that the majority of the population have neither trained nor have the sensitivity to tell the difference between a lot of things.

I meant my comment more as "as someone who can taste the difference between certain things, it's really hard to imagine what it is like for people who can't" than a general "I can't believe some people can't tell the difference between how some things taste!" I don't think people are lying or stupid or anything else, just that it's hard to imagine. The color-blindness analogy in another comment is apt I think - if you can see color differentiation, it's really hard to imagine not being able to.

Ahhh I totally misread that then. :-)

No, I think I actually mis-wrote.

There's a couple of things going on.

Those taste trsts normally give small sips of the drink. That changes the way you drink it, and that affects the flavour.

They also tend to use colder drinks which also affects flavour.

I did the taste test, mine was rigged. The Coca-Cola was warm and flat, the Pepsi was chilled and recently opened.

The people who picked pepsi got swag, the people who picked coke did not. They didn't hide this at all, they would yell that pepsi was the winner every time someone picked it, and gave them cool stuff in front of everyone.

I probably couldn't consistently tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi in a blind test either, although I generally prefer Coke. However, I will immediately reject any diet soda as the taste of aspartame, which so many say is tasteless, is obvious and disgusting. Other sugar-free sweeteners are less offending, but I can generally taste the difference between HFCS/sugar and an artificial sweetener on the first sip.

I suspect something similar is going on with other taste tests. Different people are sensitive to different flavor profiles.

Not sure what it is, but I have the same reaction when it comes to diet sodas -- with the exception of Dr. Pepper. Not sure if it is the additional spices in it or not, but a number of times I didn't realize I was drinking the diet version.

Dr. Pepper seems to have less aspartame. It's the only diet soda I can drink without gagging (though I'd still normally avoid it). I can still taste it, but it doesn't bother me as much.

Pretty much a moot point since I don't drink much pop to begin with...

There's a difference between thinking you can tell the difference or convincing others that you can tell the difference, and actually being able to tell the difference.

Nowhere is this difference more strikingly demonstrated than in the studies that have been done on wine tasting.[1]

An example from the article:

  Hodgson isn't alone in questioning the science of
  wine-tasting. French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of
  labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57
  volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a
  table wine, the other for a grand cru.

  The tasters were fooled.

  When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more
  positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When
  the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely
  to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.

[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...

I keep seeing this kind of thing, but it goes directly against my personal observations. I've seen people blindly identify any number of wines, down to the exact vintage at times. There are people who can do this, I've seen it done.

That is literally what you have to do in order to be a sommelier. That's the whole test! If you can't do it, you don't pass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sommelier

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/

Except when wine tasters can't distinguish between red wine and white wine with food coloring:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/11/02/the-subjectivity-o...

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-t...

Except when wine tasters can't distinguish between red wine and white wine with food coloring

This oft referenced study took oenology students and asked them to use adjectives to describe the odors of the wine. The only wines tested were white...and white with food coloring. It is unfortunate that red wine wasn't actually tested, as it would provide an interesting contrast, nor was taste actually tested at all. So as is all that you can go on is that given what appears to be a red wine, students who presumably have motives other than being entirely straightforward use red wine-type terminology.

It is an interesting study, but is not quite the trump card that so many think it is.

Further, it's a little silly how people are taking products with minor taste differences (most beers, wines, ryes, etc, are made with almost identical processes, yielding close to identical results), and then presuming to claim that the same applies to things that are dramatically different. That someone couldn't tell the expensive wine from the table wine does not prove that someone can't tell a beef burger from a veggie burger.

> That someone couldn't tell the expensive wine from the table wine does not prove that someone can't tell a beef burger from a veggie burger.

Well, yes. That's true. Don't confuse my contribution to the topic drift for a rejection of that point.

I think you need to read up on what a sommelier is and what the exam is like. People pass it, and the pass rate is such that it's not due to random chance.

I realize that you have a study that's vaguely related but the two are not the same. Not at all.

What are the credentials of the people on the "wine tasting panel"? I can't find that information anywhere.

http://www.wineloverspage.com/randysworld/pinot02.phtml

"We see something, and we simply presuppose how it's going to smell and taste. We know that apples, for instance, are crisp, sweet and drippy. But if we close our eyes, hold our nose and bite into an onion, chances hard we won't be able to tell the difference because onions are also crisp, sweet and drippy."

It works the other way too, if you want to freak someone out switch the coke/beer in their can with OJ while they're distracted. They will act like they have been poisoned.

Excellent, we can see that subtler differences are harder to identify, and that we can have subjective applications to flavour because humans are biased to like things in proportion to how they expect to.

But I'd put money that every experienced taster was able to deduce in blind tasting the bordeaux from the (insert other wine type??). Indeed as I understand it from watching Frasier there are clubs which do these blind tastings all the time.

In other words. I may tell you this bordeaux is cheap and acidic, but at no point was I mistaking it for a bottle of Rose.

Were these tests blind or double-blind?

Frasier is a television show, I was trying to draw out the story. I know literally nothing about wine having had maybe 6 sips in my lifetime.

A similar argument can be made about confusing two types of potato vs a potato and a parsnip. Yes pleasure is subjective, and taste is to some extent. In general there are limits to this effect.

Yes, I could effectively overcook the taste out of both things, mush them into a texture-less paste, and then stuff them full of enough herbs and spices to mask any semblance of their original flavour. At that point perhaps I've won - but then I'm not sure it meets the claim.

Actually, there have been studies where they put red food coloring in white wine and given it to self-styled experts who could not tell that what they were drinking was not red wine.

I hate this example. It's not blind, it's deceptive. It's funny, but it proves nothing.

I agree with the general inability of wine tasters to discern nearly as much as they believe, just not this particular example.

I went back and looked up the details. It turns out that the protocol was that they were served two glasses of wine, one red, one white. They were actually the same (white) wine. The red wine had (flavorless) food coloring added. Yes, it's deceptive, but this sort of deception is common is psychological studies. I'd say it's fair game in this case.

No it's really unfair and a stunt.

Expecting to taste a red wine and getting a disguised white wine means you're not ready to appreciate a white wine. It's a whole different world so no wonder they found it off.

It would have actually been a better call to stick to white wine, no coloring added, and differentiate only with the label.

> differentiate only with the label

They've done studies like that too, with similar results.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...

I'm sure you could find just as many studies proving the opposite. The human nose is not as bad as many people think. I've conducted a little experiments myself together with four or five roommates. We first sampled four different red wines, then going at them 'blind' (not knowing the label) again. Me and a colleague got all four right, the others had two of them mixed up (always the same as I remember). All of us were completely untrained in wine testing. At least we could find good evidence that we were better than random agents, even though to do it conclusively the sample size would have to be larger.

I think when you try to trick somebody into thinking a wine is something different from what it is, that's very much different from saying we can't tell apart wines at all.

There's no question that people can tell one wine from another. But the point is that people's perceptions of wine are as much a function of their expectations as the actual chemistry of the wine. The same thing can be said about insects or veggie-burgers. Yes, veggie burgers don't taste like real burgers. But if people claim that veggie burgers taste worse (or better) than real burgers, that could be as much a function of their expectations as it is the actual flavor.

There have been tests that show people can't tell the difference between 7up and cola - especially when the drinks are served at traditional cold US serving temperatures.

> I may tell you this bordeaux is cheap and acidic, but at no point was I mistaking it for a bottle of Rose.

Oh really?

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-t...

There's a huge difference between telling two wines apart and telling a meat patty and a veggie patty apart. The later is more like being able to tell wine and root beer apart.

The wines were the same: "He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine"

I have no knowledge of or interest in the methodology of this particular study, but I can tell you my own experience: I can, under double-blind conditions, be given four different ages of The Macallan whiskey and correctly identify the year by taste.

I don't know anything about wine, but I can definitely tell the difference between, say, chicken, turkey, beef, and alligator if you made them into sausages. I'd be seriously surprised if I couldn't tell insect apart from any of those.

Mythbusters did a segment testing the claim that many different meats taste like chicken.

http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/tastes-...

Every different brand of sausage patty tastes a little different regardless of the meat(s) used. The real difference with meat and veggie is the texture. Sometimes veggie patties lack umami, but many newer brands have even been able to fix that too.

Based on my experience, it can be hard to tell if a patty is meat or veg if the quantities are small (too small to feel the texture difference).

I agree; it would be much more accurate to say that they both taste equally good, not that they taste the same.

Boca Burger patties taste absolutely nothing like meat, but I still like the taste.

While mushrooms haven't been plants since the early 80s, if you were to use chicken-of-the-woods the right way then you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference. Especially if you mixed it with something like tempeh in the right proportions.

The quorn line of products made with mushrooms is very similar in taste to chicken. Best imitation meat I have tasted.

I think it's all a matter of context.

Right now? I can taste the difference between a garden burger and a beef cheeseburger. If there is a global food shortage, the difference matters less.

That's what you pick out as objectionable in the story?

Why wait until after a world apocalypse? Insects are plentiful and nutritious and we should be eating more of them now.

There's plenty of evidence that insects are high quality protein with low fat. In many traditional societies around the world, termites, grubs, grasshoppers, and other creepy crawly things play an important nutritional role.

Years ago, my wife and I read a beautifully illustrated travelogue "Man Eating Bugs" written by a husband-and-wife team who traveled the world to see (and sample) insect cuisine in many cultures. Fascinating stuff.

It's a generally well supported view among paleontologists that primitive humans ate lots of bugs. We were opportunistic foragers from way back. It's only in recent centuries, in "civilized" places, that we have regarded bugs as a repulsive thing to eat.

I would imagine that in and after a nuclear winter, animal and vegetable life would dwindle to a tiny population that would take hundreds if not thousands of years to replenish. Probably we should be caching genetic material, sperm, and seeds of every species in some safe, underground arkology, so that two hundred years after the meltdown, whoever's left can restore some biodiversity.

I have sympathy for insects, and I do not want to harm more of them.

There are many seed (and other types of genetic material) banks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

Is a famous one.

In fact, it is happening: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/15/340653853/startu...

If a major restaurant started using insect based meat products, the irrational public backlash would be tremendous.

I supported a kickstarter to get these cricket protein energy bars manufactured. You can order a box now.

https://www.exoprotein.com/

To me, they pretty much taste like any other energy bar--in fact, it's kind of a letdown since you want something more exotic.

I raise Tenebrio molitor in a 5-gal plastic bucket, as pet food. I haven't tried cooking them, but eating the live larvae or pupae isn't altogether horrible. With the adults, bits of the exoskeleton, especially the legs and wing covers, get stuck in your teeth, just like with popcorn.

But they aren't very flavorful, either. I'm not sure what I was expecting, really. I think if I blended the suckers, the resulting bland protein paste could be added to practically any recipe, like tofu or ground chicken.

But there is a big problem. The other people in the household have a contagious, irrational prejudice against not only eating beetles, but also knowing that I might be eating them, using the same dishes and utensils that they might be using later. Bugs will only ever be post-catastrophe food for them, because they literally will not even entertain the notion until they are actually facing starvation.

That's why wait.

The only likely path for getting more insect protein into the US food supply is by feeding them to premium organic poultry fowl or egg-layers. So there may be an opportunity there for industrial-scale insect breeders, but I expect any attempts to go a more direct route will generate a backlash bigger than "pink slime".

by feeding them to premium organic poultry fowl or egg-layers

Which leads me to an anecdote I find interesting. I raise chickens. My older child can immediately tell the taste difference between an egg from one of our chickens that have a varied diet and one from the store. And that's without even seeing them. As soon as you break the eggs open, it's obvious which is which: ours have deep orange yolks vs the pale yellow store bought ones.

tl;dr: eggs from chickens eating bugs and grass taste far different than from chickens raised on cheap feed.

Is it even possible to get true free range eggs anywhere? I know plenty say cage free, but that could just be opening the cage for an hour or so in a day just to make the marketing claim.

Drive into the country and look for the hand-painted sign that says, "EGGS 4 SALE". Selling traditionally farmed eggs to city people is a relatively common way for rural people to make a little cash on the side, or for 4H kids to learn the business. You can think of it like a lemonade stand without the pity purchases.

You may need to bring your own containers, tolerate an occasionally unreliable supply, buy only at a few oddly-scheduled times during the week, and pay in cash. Also, don't tell your foodie friends where you found them.

Sure. There are some CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms around where you can order eggs from pastured chickens (raised on actual pasture as opposed to the poorly-defined "free range") and they will ship to you periodically.

I believe cage free is just what it says: they are cooped together as a flock, but not in individual cages.

Also as the other commenter says, drive around a rural area and you'll likely see any number of farms advertising fresh eggs. However, even there, many of them keep the chickens in a run or coop and they are fed mostly chicken feed. Better living conditions than the average commercial battery farm to be sure, but the eggs won't taste that much different.

You need look no further than the folks pushing "Cricket Flour"[1] (which is a weird juxtaposition for me) to see folks eating bugs today, and there was restaurant selling grasshopper tacos in San Francisco but that was stopped when they were unable to get FDA 'food safe' approval for the grasshoppers they were importing.

[1] http://chapul.com/

Soy and other vegetable proteins are the most resource efficient to make. You have to feed insects something, they don't make all aminoacids.

Now bacteria and in particular cyanobacteria, that is the future. That is a 10x performance over current crops.

Remind me to kill myself when we're hard up enough as a species that we're eating bacterial slime to survive.

It can be fed to something else, like fungus, plant or animal.

And if it's used directly, nowadays we already eat plenty of industrial food products with unknown origins. The future of that technology used for good (instead of plain sales and market share) could create efficient, tasty and nutritious foods.

Most of the advice in the article is a bit silly; however, the question is vitally important.

Most large cities only have 2-3 days worth of food available. If the daily deliveries stop for whatever reason, things will go bad fast.

The best three pieces of advice I ever heard: 1) Get out of the cities. 2) Get out of the cities. 3) Get out of the cities.

It was just yesterday that I was discussing this question with some friends, ie, what do you do if shit hits the fan? Most said 'get out of the city' first so that's reassuring. But the scary part is I don't know how to build a house, cultivate food, nor do I have the property to do so.

Same here. I live in New York; if shit hit the fan in an hour, I'm not sure how much there is to be gained by leaving. At least here, I know the area, I can expect to stay reasonably warm in the current weather inside my building, I can work together with the neighbors that I know. We have enough food in our kitchen to last us a week, and we could immediately begin to stockpile water. We even have some medical supplies. Hell, there are always rats I could trap and eat if I were willing to risk bioaccumulating some poison.

If I set out for New Jersey, or Connecticut, or even Long Island, I immediately lose shelter, I am limited to the food I can carry on my person, I don't know where the nearest stores or houses are, and I don't know anyone there at all.

The only immediate advantage I can think of is that there would be less people around willing to kill me for my stuff.

The textbook "survivalist" (the term prior to prepper, see the literature going back to the 1970s) answer to this is to have one or more "retreats", places you can flee to. Such as relatives living in less populated places, where you can offer skills and manual labor to help out. Or a "vacation home" that's a bit more than that.

Sheltering in place can have its advantages, but if you're living in NYC, it's game over, you're not even allowed to effectively defend yourself (less than 60K each licenses to own handguns and long guns, numbers personally counted by myself after the lists were leaked).

In any big city it sounds marginal (in sizing ammo required, one of the best survivalist, Bruce Clayton, asked "How many firefights do you expect to survive?"), then again, it actually takes much less than you might think to keep people alive. Not very many tractor trailers filled with wheat and corn (e.g. "downshift" and feed people what we've been feeding animals), so of course all this depends on the shape of the disaster.

Sure, but this presumes that you've already done the prepwork - my comment was based on my current status, now. I don't have anyplace nearby I could retreat to.

I'm also not sure how much of a game-over New York is - sure, I don't have a gun to defend myself, but statistically, how many of us own guns anyway? If I were still living in Dallas, or Austin, the number of guns I have at hand would be the same as now - zero. And one small advantage of NYC is that my neighbors probably won't be coming at me with rifles and shotguns, either.

I think that all these equations change very rapidly based on how much preparation you've done. I've done zero.

Presumably some of those neighbors you know, if you were in Dallas or Austin, would legally own guns. Statistically, at least half the country owns guns (add survey results to reasonable estimates of "none of your business" non-responses, double check with NICS sales plus new firearms production and imports, which are closely tracked for tax reasons, vs. the New Math of gun grabbers which would have the average gun owner's armory at around $100K per my estimate).

It's estimated there are at least 2 million illegally owned guns in NYC, and while plenty are not in the hands of true "bad guys", plenty obviously are, and unless your group can stay off the radar while everyone else around you is starving, which will get hard as people get thinner ... someone better armed will come knocking sooner or later.

And agreed to the preparation. But do you truly know no one in "flyover country" who might take you in?

The problem with flyover country is that you typically have to fly into it - in case of a great disaster, my odds of walking to Indiana aren't great.

It's been my personal observation that "flyover country" includes upstate NY, which doesn't feel materially different from my corner of SW Missouri.

But of course what really counts is where those relatives or friends are in comparison to you, and if you're alert and decisive enough to not miss "the last train out", assuming that's a possibility.

> And one small advantage of NYC is that my neighbors probably won't be coming at me with rifles and shotguns, either.

No, they'll be forming packs and gangs and groups. And though you see differently in movies, once there are more than about 3-4 of them who are intent on killing you, you will have zero chance of living through that. They won't need guns to do this. Baseball bats and knives and whatever else they can get their hands on, and you'll be done for.

Guns would make such gangs slightly more dangerous for you, but at the same time they make you much more dangerous to them.

This is verging on "Turner Diaries" level of prepper pandering.

Yeah, I can't decide whether it's just simple escalation - if we all have bats, it's not significantly different if we all have guns - but then again, guns do amplify power much more, so attacking someone who only has a bat when you've only got bats seems much safer than attacking someone with a gun when you've also got guns.

The combination of rifles "of military utility" (e.g. a turn of the last century bolt action service rifle, or at least the design, such as this last remaining or about used up variety: http://www.gunbroker.com/All/BI.aspx?Keywords=Mosin+Nagant), knowing how to use them, and having them sighted in, is much, much more than an escalation.

Against the untrained, or those with only shotguns or handguns, as long as you don't let them get within 100 or so yards of you, you're pretty safe and they're bleeding on the ground or have fled.

Although as the previously mentioned Bruce Clayton pointed out, budget some of your money for food for other people. You need more people pulling triggers than yourself.

James Burke's 1978 TV series, Connections, starts with just that quandry. He starts with the question [what do we do if all the electricity goes out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw) and uses that zombie escape as a path to our bedrock tool: the plow.

The article reminds me a lot of Randall Monroe's What If? site when he answers questions like, [What if all the water disappeared](http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/).

And finally, I have lots of sympathy for the bug eating movement. I would totes eat cricket mcnuggets. But, when I went to buy some insects to make some, all I found was fish bait (unless I rear my own). I felt a bit dizzy and questioned my motives a while, before I remembered that those suppliers are targeting their predominant market.

Yep, just-in-time logistics are highly efficient, at the expense of low inventories.

The oft-repeated advice to vacate cities is complete bullshit. No matter what "countryside" means, there's less food there in almost every case. Go to any small town and what do you find? Smaller grocery stores, with inventories just as tight as in the cities. Same suburban-style communities of people just as unprepared as anyone else.

Emergency provision of supplies is made efficient by the same things as normal delivery logistics: densely clustered populations and major infrastructure, exactly the things that make cities what they are.

Just look that the slow-motion SHTF scenario of the Great Depression of the '30s, when the American countryside was drained of its population, never to recover.

While I agree with your general point, outside of course grain growing regions, there were too many things going in the '30s to ascribe the rural depopulation you note to just this.

Biggest example would be the federal government suppressing food production and trying to keep prices high, at the same time the same Department of Agriculture estimated 1/4 of the population was malnourished. As was confirmed by the WWII draft, and I've read that was one of the inputs into the Truman school lunch law.

As an extreme example, see Wickard v. Filburn where in 1942 the Supreme Court ruled the Federal government could prevent you from growing wheat on your own property for your own consumption.

Get back to the price supports, a big problem was an inability for all farmers/farms to make a living on what they could produce. Specialization meant it was much harder to try to provide for yourself everything you needed, and people responded to these incentives and opportunities in more urban areas, real ones at least once WWII production got started and the draft drained the manpower pool.

And of course a large part of this was increased mechanization, which pretty much never stopped replacing farm labor with machines. My parents are from farms and the Silent Generation, so they experienced the tail end of this. And they made very sure to "get off the farm", the work is brutal, a lot more so back then.

Grain-growing regions have grain, not food. Short term survival in oft-fantasized SHTF scenarios depends on easily accessible calories. A grain elevator full of maize is not accessible calories. Less so a cow. So while you're in the country trying to break in to a grain bin so you can chew on some raw millet, I'll be cowering (and crying) in my suburban basement waiting for the National Guard to set up a food distribution center close enough for me to fight my way to it with two mags of 9mm and a sharp stick.

See how absurd these discussions get?

BTW, I have family in a small Kansas town a with couple thousand people, four dipshit cops, roughly equal amounts of meth and ammo, and one giant grain elevator. If SHTF I bet you my mano&metate that they show up at my house in the city within days or weeks.

"A grain elevator full of maize is not accessible calories."

Only to those who so little imagination they literally can't pound rocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metate

Although as Nuclear War Survival Skills (NWSS) points out, bundling three metal pipes together works a lot better.

Boil with water and you have edible gruel. Maybe not enough fat to keep children thriving (NWSS said that about wheat, at least), but that can wait a bit.

If you had bothered to read my previous post, you'd know that I won't have my mano or metate because I will have lost them both to YOU in a frivolous bet.

I'll look into those bundled pipes. You figure out how to fend off the co-op members when we try to break into their granary. They don't care much for city folk down there.

I agree food will be a problem anywhere.

I think the advice to get out of the cities stems from the fact that there are about to be tens of thousands of starving people going from house to house looking for food.

And their leaders will have guns, and it will be violent.

In the country, that can be avoided for a time - so you can at least starve in peace.

Cities often have large elevators full of grain. Much of it is meant to be fed to animals which would no longer make sense in a disaster.

This article is more concerned with the long term. What do we do when the grain runs out?

So this is "what to eat after an apocalypse that is not the one we're actually facing". I would be far more interested in knowing how we deal with a "soft apocalypse" of fossil fuel depletion, drinking water scarcity, high ocean acidity, etc.

Store food, medicine a few guns and then enjoy the good life while it last.

As our "leaders" are blind or don't want to see what's coming, I don't have anythin better than this advice.

I imagine people with children, among others, would have a hard time agreeing with this advice.

If you mean to say that people who don't like guns would have a hard time agreeing, then just say that. There are plenty of people with children who have no problems with guns.

Unless I missed the point, and there's some reason I can't fathom why people with children would have a hard time agreeing with a reserve of foods and medicine.

I think his issue might be with "enjoy the good life while it lasts". That attitude might work well if you're alone. But if you have kids, you generally want them to have a good life too.

Yep, that is what I meant.

Touche. I can't see how that statement is loaded, though, or why enjoying a good life is something people would object to, but I'll count myself as odd man out here, since you obviously got it.

What should the people with children do ? Send a strongly worded letter to their politicians and vote for the other party next time ?

I mean yes, it's a rather sad perspective but nobody came with a solution to change the world yet.

Of course if we could all agree to shoot politicians, journalists and bankers on sight ... ;-)

It is my opinion that western civilization need a collapse before it can reinvent itself better (I hope). The power structures are so well entrenched that nothing short of said collapse can dislodge them (or let us do without them like they don't exist).

People have been screaming "The end is near" for as long as I can remember, but no one ever comes back and says "We were wrong, sorry for the inconvenience".

that's a great point. i bet some insects would still be on the menu...

Fossil fuels will not run out anytime soon. Depleting all the deep gas and coal deposits will take centuries.

Yes, that's not the point. We haven't run out of gold, either, but if you invented an engine that could burn gold it sure wouldn't be too useful for powering cars. Oil doesn't need to run out to be economically useless for powering the world economy.

Let's burn more coal.

In the case of drinking water, desalination is already cheap enough that we're talking pennies a day. Even a typical American usage of 100 gal/day is around $0.15 at market energy rates [1] and is still under $0.50/day with solar.

[1] http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/water/gamechangers/... gives $489 per acre-foot.

Total fossil fuel depletion is a bit extreme, but let's talk about oil depletion:

First of course, we'll rapidly turn to a conservation economy where energy(and critical commodities) are used only for necessities , probably under some kind of martial law. And of course we have some huge reserves for a case like that.

But , we have such a huge redundancy in food. If we go to the basics, people can live on a big bowl of rice/wheat a day. That comes down 100-200g per person per day. that's tiny.

We also have some amount of fuel diversity - some vehicles models can run on pure ethanol, some can easily converted to natural gas(LNG), and we already have 40K LNG based trucks in the u.s. .

Also there is at least one plant that can make fertilizer from LNG, and others can be built.

As for drugs, which are usually made using precursors from oil derivatives, there are new methods to make those precursors from other means. And some drugs are'nt manufactured locally , but it's possible to import using fuel reserves,or by converting ships to lng.

And since it's under martial law, i assume we will work on rapidly converting our economy to LNG, so as to not be dependent on reserves and increase the living standards .

100 to 200 g of wheat is not a big bowl, especially if grown to use bigger ammounts.

For just about anyone that's too little except for short term emergencies. A little over 300 or 600 calories, call the bigger serving lifeboat food. A bit more from polished rice, but not a lot.

Still, that shows how little is required to keep people from immediate and then longer term starvation. Grains are very concentrated.

Nuts and seeds are even more concentrated. Nut-rich trail mix has almost twice the calories of a bowl of rice.

You could pretty much live off muesli after the apocalypse. (Until it runs out, anyway.)

Drinking water scarcity is simply not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future. The amount of water we need for drinking is just far too small. The much more imminent danger is a shortage of water for irrigation leading to a food shortage.

This person ought to understand ocean ecology better. If there's not enough sunlight for agriculture, fishing is unlikely to be more productive than it already is now with normal sunlight.

I think they have a general problem with ecology in general. Knock out the plants, and you can't sit pretty by eating bugs and rats, either.

> What kinds of disasters do you think about?

> Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case.

The nuclear winter is pretty low in my list. Financial meltdown and climate change are at the top.

Yeah I can't take this article seriously. It reads as though written by some nutrition/health food fanatic who distorts reality to suit their conclusions. There's just something not quite sane in the writing.

    The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually.

I mean this is nitpicky, but what?

He's decided that nuclear winter involves a very very small nuclear war hitting a few large cities. Which means the vast majority of humans live.

If US and Russia unload, say, 75% of their arsenals I'm pretty sure that is inaccurate. Not to mention there seems to be no consideration of the radiation levels in various foods?

The earth is very big, and we are very small in comparison.

Even back when the warhead and delivery inventories were much larger (100 times or so if my memory serves), a LLNL 3D simulation of "nuclear winter" resulted in a single nuclear fall (TAPPS, which I read when it came out and studied, was fraudulent, especially in it's use of a 1 dimensional model of the atmosphere (i.e. no winds, no oceans, etc.)). Not good, just like all too many volcanic eruptions in recorded or thereabouts history, but not the end of the world.

An overall radiation increase would small to immeasurable, the effect immeasurable. It would suck to be close and downwind of a warhead explosion unless you're prepared, further away not so good, but even in Cold War targeted US 10s of millions would have survived without lifting a finger WRT to radiation.

I think GP's point is that the sentence "The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually" is pretty incoherent. It's hard to guess what he means by "eventually" and what specifically he means by "humanity" (vs "humans").

It's not inaccurate at all. The Earth is really really big, all the nuclear weapons we have would hardly kill a fraction of the people.

A pandemic should be in there somewhere. The CDC gamed their response to one a few years ago, and results were mixed for North America.

Remote learning and remote working could drastically cut down on pandemic spreads.

So the article inspired me to try some white pine tea for the first time. I'm sipping it right now, and it tastes quite good. If you live in the north try it out.

Here's the recipe that I followed: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle...

Good lord:

Ponderosa Pine; also known as Blackjack, Western Yellow, Yellow, and Bull Pine. This pine contains isocupressic acid, which is known to cause abortions in cattle.

Nope, definitely was White Pine, 5 needles on each sprig and black bark. Ponderosa Pine doesn't grow natively in the North-East. Oddly, people do make tea out of Yellow Pine too! Give you an idea, this stuff is pretty good. Going help myself to a second glass once I'm sure I don't have any weird reactions.

[1] http://rockymountainbushcraft.blogspot.com/2012/11/rocky-mou...

Let me elevate a comment in a subtread to the top level: nuclear winter is bunk, real effects would be on the scale of historical volcanic eruptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768412

BUT, if you want a disaster of that scale, nature will be happy to provide! Just have a big meteorite hit an ocean; hitting a big and deep body of water is critical, because otherwise "too much" of the heat radiates back into space. That's a big reason the vast majority of fielded nuclear weapons never got very big, there effects doesn't scale well.

There's some good science fiction that covers this and how to respond, email me at my contact address if you want a recommendation that is necessarily a spoiler.

The degree of cooperation the article assumes is untenable on a global scale. Perhaps more isolated countries could coordinate, or maybe after the initial chaos some coordination could develop...

He ignores that the most plentiful source of food will be other people after a month or so...

Yes, based on the litmus test of the recent lack of global cooperation in managing climate change, we can expect developed countries to look after their own citizens only, using their militaries to steal all available food from less developed countries. Immigration-based countries such as the U.S. will be better positioned to convince their citizen base that they owe nothing to other countries peoples by presenting their own population as "representative of the world's ethnic balance", and even as "the subset of the world that God wants to save". Expect to hear "the United States is the Ark of Noah for this day and age" broadcast on U.S. televisions as drone robots march through the Brahmaputra harvesting rice for loading onto ships destined for the U.S. as the local population starve. The leaders of developing nations with nukes such as Russia and India will be given U.S. citizenship en mass, Roman Empire style, in return for control over those weapons. English-language testing will be canceled for Chinese students wanting to study in the U.S., who'll be distributed around colleges in cities all over the U.S. to discourage their parents launching Chinese nukes at them.

Well, where "cooperation" is "people kindly send us mushrooms out of the goodness of their collective heart", sure.

North America and Europe paying elevated prices for food from the tropics, now, that could actually work. At least until someone decides it sounds more fun to just invade some of those countries (and ends up spending even more for the privilege).

> "...an invasive water mold ... reached Ireland, where, '... four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and … the rest were heavily dependent on them.'

Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop . http://ensia.com/voices/its-time-to-rethink-americas-corn-sy...

(roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. So, a 50% drop in corn production would not have nearly the impact you might think.

Also, during the potato famine Ireland was forced to export a lot of food which made everything far worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#mediavie...

Note: Yield per acer does not stay down for that long but acerage under production does.

> Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop

There would still be plenty of food to go around. Problem was that British did not allowed people to eat corn.

Rubbish. There was famine across the whole of Europe. The government imported millet to feed people and militant Irish Nationalists called it "Peel's Brimstone" (it's yellow, remember) and claimed that those eating it would put their immortal souls in danger.

Yes, they could have done more. But that doesn't mean they actively plotted to starve people as modern Irish Nationalists like to claim.

maybe we'd be better off? so much corn (and byproducts) not a good things for us.

sorry, i meant, "so much corn--not a good thing for us"

> The Great Famine, as it came to be known, could have been avoided in any number of ways, not least by ceasing the export of food from Ireland to Britain. But the British government failed to take effective action.

"...the British government failed to take effective action"

That's one way of putting it!

Braiiiiins, of course. Jeez.

Nice to see Michigan Tech!

I am going to try to divert your minds away towards some questions that you might not be interested in, but nonetheless could be more productive than the game of hole-poking that this essay invites.

I think many readers will have arrived at a similar set of conclusions, based on whatever assertions or citations may have inspired doubt; for me, it was Pearce's surprise that the world was unable to feed everyone despite having full agricultural production. Perhaps I have greatly misunderstood the matter, but I had believed that problems of famine and chronic hunger were entirely due localized logistic and political problems, and that the world was in fact handily capable of feeding everyone, even with the current (very inefficient) distribution and scale of agricultural production.

This suggests to me that either I am very wrong --- something that does happen --- or that Pearce and Denkenburger might not have done a lot of what one could term 'peripheral' research on the topic they were interested in. This is a situation where two engineers are attempting to problem solve in a domain that might require, at any given turn, significant expertise in chemical or biological processes; or manufacturing processes, for that matter, or logistics, or economics, or international commerce.

Consequently, this comes across as what one might term a 'Dunning-Krueger Study': facile, misinformed "solutions" to misunderstood problems in which the progenitor has an erroneous confidence. Given my own lack of knowledge, it would be hypocritical to label it thusly; the deposition of their suggestions should be placed in the hands of the various relevant domains.

My question is regarding this type of research in general. I imagine the defence of it would be that it (at least) initiates investigation and problem solving, and that it (at least) arrives at useful suggestions, preliminary analyses, and approximate solutions. Does the Dunning-Kruger phase of knowledge have a discernible utility or application? Is there in fact a use or place for such investigations? Are they a form of deceptive mimesis, imitating research in pursuit of resources? Does ignorance of the domain of knowledge ever have a value? If so, how does one identify that one is in a Dunning-Krueger situation, and how should one proceed from there? Can one have knowledge about the meta-domain of Dunning-Krueger situations that allows one to limit or avoid the negative consequences of misjudgement?

It strikes me that perhaps situations analogous to the one in which a hypothetical Peirce and Denkenburger are required to figure out how to feed the entire world after an apocalyptic event are not in fact rare, but actually occur all the time, and that it is a routine problem in design and engineering that one needs to find solutions in a problem domain that one understands poorly or not at all. I have no expertise to support this notion; there is a question mark hanging on the end of the assertion. But one could regard this as occurring in the course of ordinary life as well. How does one systematically make the best possible decisions on the basis of incomplete and possibly erroneous information, given that computation is itself a cost? In that context, a Dunning-Krueger epistemology starts to look like a reasonable strategy.

You are over-interpreting the Dunning-Krueger paper.

I also think "mimesis" is the wrong word. They aren't imitating research, they are applying their real actual research and analytical skills in pursuit of resources.

> You are over-interpreting the Dunning-Krueger paper.

Almost certainly true, as I've never read the actual paper; I've encountered the concept and phenomena in the wild. I take your word for it. If you have a better term for what I am describing, I will be happy to learn it.

Their research seems to lack introspection and fundamental rigor. Did you get a different impression than that, from the essay? My contention (if mimesis was my thesis) is that it is research insofar as it carries out the activity of research, but that it carries out that activity without being truly informed by the material of the research; process disassociated from content. However, it was a question, not an assertion; I've no opinion.

Interdisciplinary research is a thing. Though I guess it doesn't start from the presumption that incompetence will be helpful.

Some dark force made me read "Where to Eat After the Apocalypse".

Still better than "Who to Eat After the Apocalypse"

I heard from some dude in a black jacket that there's a nice burger place run by a guy with a brain the size of the planet, just near the restaurant at the end of the universe.. ;)

Seriously though, it does seem like we ought to be switching over to mycoremediation as quickly as possible, in order to prevent the apocalypse, not just survive it.

Also, the last paragraph of this article .. the feels .. seems like there should be ways to deliver survival shroom-kits to the poor and needy. If only it weren't all being used, instead, for war.

Slimy yet satisfying.

hornworms, you mean?

I don't think the article mentions specific species of insects, but...

I have tasted maguey worm and crickets, and they are both quite good. So, unless it is poisonous, I think hornworm would do, too.

Apocalypse means "revelation".

I hate when people use that word like it means "the end of society as we know it",or like it's "madmax time" or something.

Apocalypse is of religious nature.It has nothing to do with a "global catastrophe.".

Aren't scientists supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?How can they continue to spread that non-sense?

PS:I'm not religious.But the word Apocalypse has a specific meaning.

The meaning of words evolve and are adapted. It clearly refers to "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale"

> a great disaster : a sudden and very bad event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse

Is there another word that better (or even similarly) captures what "apocalypse" has come to mean? I don't know of one, and I think it is a useful thing to have a word for. It is almost never worth fighting a word's widely-understood meaning. (Although I was definitely disappointed when dictionaries added an alternate definition of "literally" as meaning "figuratively"...)

The technically correct term is "eschaton", but no one uses that and everyone uses "apocalypse". I don't think this is a battle worth fighting.

The Illuminatus Trilogy does.[1]

Immanentize the Eschaton!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton"

Speaking for myself, I'm going to start dropping "eschaton" in everyday conversation.

Neat. I actually knew that word, because it's the name of a fictional game in the book Infinite Jest, but I never put two and two together.

Language is a slippery thing, and meanings of words change over time. Here's a short story illustrating how absurd it would be if we insisted all the words were used in their original sense: http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/blog/2014/08/quest-pos... "The lord, the bishop, and the harlot: an etymological fallacy"

While we're on the subject of pet-peeves, I hate it when people speak of an "existential threat". That has absolutely nothing to do with Existentialism.[1] What people probably mean when they use that term is "a threat to ___'s existence". "existence" != "existential".

I also hate it when people say "hackers" when the proper term for what they mean is "crackers".[2]

And I hate it when people say "Linux" when they should properly say "GNU/Linux".

But I rarely complain about these pet-peeves of mine, since I recognize that language is a living, changing, growing thing, out of the control of any one person or small group of people, though the French language police[3] and dictionary publishers may disagree.

[1] - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

[2] - http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_of_Culture_%28France%...

Go ahead, submit the last 10,000 posts you've placed on the internet, and then subject them to a group of anal literalists.

To use proper terminology in all domains at all time as all domains rapidly evolve is an impossibility.

If you're smart enough to be anal about these distinctions, you're smart enough to develop an error correction and handling layer.

The word "existential" (attested since the late 17th century) was used as an adjective relating to existence long before the birth of Existentialism. In the phrase "existential threat", there is no cause of confusion (unless there is cause to speak of threats relating to Existentialism). So I don't have a problem with this usage.

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