A Friend's Plan

A friend said that he only needs enough stuff stored to eat until the garden comes in. This is basically sound, but overlooks an important fact. I have experimented with eating only garden produce for a day at a time. The first time or two isn't bad, but by the third time in one week the fault of this plan begins to show. Even I, who do moderate level work was starving and exhausted by early afternoon. I had been eating as much as I could since morning and even threw in some exotics such as bananas and avocados which will not grow here, consumed my regular caffeine and vitamins. What would it be like to do hard work like digging a garden or cutting wood on this diet?

Some of the men talk of eating fish and game, but we will figure that by now in the scenario there is no electricity, so no refrigeration. You will have at best forty-eight hours to consume whatever you kill, so add hunting to the physical work on a regular basis. Of course growing grains might yield a small crop but is more likely to bring the game animals to you. So for a few weeks you have meat, but after that the grain crop has been consumed without harvest and the animals are gone to look for other food.

So there must be another way found for people to survive the collapse of the economic/societal system on which they are depending today. Adam Smith wrote about the answer over two hundred years ago, we might need to revisit his work and begin to apply it to our plans for survival.