Favorite Genre of movies/games is dystopian/apocalyptic, so I am curious about those baby ruth bars in the movie “The Day After”
What foods would be safe to eat in the aftermath of nuclear destruction given you survive the radiation?
Any food that has not been irradiated, and none that has?
I mean food is still food, question is, has it been contaminated.
A babyruth bar is no more immune to contamination by radiation than great grandma Ethels home canned peaches
Weisshund, Where would one likely find the least irradiated source then? I’ve read somewhere that it would be safer to eat canned goods than fresh, because the metal would block some contamination, any truth to this?
Well yes and no.
What level of exposure have these cans had?
If we are talking some kind of trivial exposure, yea a can of beans is safer than a banana.
But if you are talking about any kind of really exposed areas i dont think the cans small bit of shielding is going to go very far in protecting it.
If i was going to go searching for food, i think my first thing would be to get my self outside of the immediate exposure and heavy fallout area to begin with.
Building a small gieger counter would probably also be a top priority too.
Among other things i could collect food isolate it and test it to see if it is still safe to eat.
Finding safe water is going to be your real priority, you can skimp on food a bit, water not so much.
i probably should have finished about water.
far as i know, best way to secure safe water is to build a still
water itself, plain H2O does not irradiate so easy far as i know, but it gets radiated particles in it
some of those particles are soluble in water, so you can’t easily filter them out, like iodine stronium cesium and stuff.
So you need to distill it, and carefully clean and attend to your still, because when you distill the water, you are leaving behind all the bad radiated stuff in the still.
If you could find a safe area where wells are prominent, aside from working out how to power the well pump, you would probably have less problems with water since it is coming from underground.
I say probably because in Florida the water table might only be 20 feet down, and a nuclear blast is going to penetrate that easily and contaminate it, so having the still handy is still a good idea.
The issue isn’t irradiation.
It’s contamination.
So, anything sealed is going to be way safer than anything that is eaten fresh.
Irradiating food generally doesn’t cause it to become radioactive (although enough neutron flux might do it).
There was a Suspense! or maybe X Minus One radio episode from the 1950s that dealt with this. Survivors were trying to break into a underground shelter that had some of the last known canned goods. Blech.
Agreed - so anything that’s sealed - cans, shelf-stable vacuum packs, etc - the risk is contamination on the outside of the packaging - but if it’s on the outside of the packaging, it’s everywhere else too.
Assuming the scenario is a food-gathering foray, performed by people in protective suits in a contaminated area, as long as the packaging can stand a washdown protocol when brought back to base, it ought to be OK.
Thanks for the responses everyone! Fascinating stuff! Weisshund, how exactly would one build a geiger counter in such a situation, that’d be pretty cool to know. Also wouldn’t a well location be pretty close to a river? Close enough, but just far enough that maybe most of the radioactive particles would be filtered from the soil? Of course all of this would be in an area many many miles removed from a heavy fallout zone. Beowulff Would a particular material or packaging be substantially better/safer? Like Glass versus Aluminum?
The important part of a Geiger counter is the Geiger-Muller tube. While simple in concept, it’s going to be fairly difficult for most folks to build one of these themselves. The Geiger-Muller tube is basically a metal tube filled with a mixture of inert gases (helium, neon, and argon) at low pressure and a couple of electrodes. The tube itself can be one of the electrodes. You have to charge the electrodes up to a relatively high voltage, about 600 volts or so at least. When radiation hits the tube, it causes an avalanche effect of charge through the gases which results in an electrical pulse on the electrodes.
So to build one of these, you are basically going to need access to a bunch of stuff in a neon sign shop and a bunch of electronic parts from ye ol local electronic parts shop, and the knowledge of how to make it all work. It’s probably a bit beyond the skill level of the average Joe on the street.
You’d be better off ordering a Geiger counter now and squirreling it away just in case the Apocalypse does happen.
As beowulff points out - short of serious neutron radiation, things don’t become radioactive from being irradiated. And nuclear weapons mostly don’t produce the sort of neutron radiation that would do this. (The neutron bomb was of course designed for purpose, and was in effect a nuclear bomb that had been tuned to be very inefficient.)
Anything that has been grown or processed before the bomb hits is going to be safe. Anything outdoors after the bomb is going to get contaminated from dust or rain. So you will be safe with anything inside your cupboards or in the shops.
A goodly dose of gamma radiation - which is what is going to be the main thing from the blast will sterilise all the food, and also kill any residual cellular activity in it. So curiously fresh food will become safer, and will last longer before spoiling from microbial action. However the cessation of any activity in things like fresh fruit and vegetables may mean they spoil from internal breakdown faster. Usually it is microbial action that wins, so food, in general, will last longer. A goodly does of ionising radiation will probably induce some off flavours in food. Milk for one. But won’t make it unsafe. (Rather like the taint milk gets when sunlight affects it.) One suspects that anything that gets a dose large enough to really matter chemically will be destroyed by the bast a few microseconds later.
Any foods that are outdoors are only going to be OK until the first rain or wind-borne dust. Get your cattle indoors and butcher them quick. Probably be OK to eat fruit and veg after a good wash, but only up until it rains.
One problem with managing contamination is that whilst externally the only radiation that is a worry to you is gamma, as alpha and beta are trivially stopped by little more than skin or clothing, once you eat a beta or alpha source you are in serious trouble. This is why strontium 90 is so bad. It will come down in the rain and get taken up into the food chain, rendering anything growing deadly. And for all useful intents, permanently deadly.
Geiger counter is going to be hard, as above. A simple dosimeter is viable as a diy project. Whether one might be useful to determine the safety of food is another matter. Calibration is not going to be easy. What you really need is a gamma spectrometer. That will tell you great deal about what you are dealing with. Not a post apocalypse diy project sadly.
I know that the Atomic Energy Boy Scout merit badge used to have building a Geiger counter as one of its requirements (don’t know if it still does). I don’t have a copy of the old merit badge book, though, so I’m not sure how they expected a teenager to do that, or what materials they expected he’d have access to.
Poking around on google, I found some information about that Boy Scout merit badge. This is all it says about the Geiger Counter:
More info here:
I am assuming that the Boy Scout was expected to order the parts and instructions from a mail order kit.
I also found some relatively simple radiation detectors that someone who is handy with electronics could build even if they don’t have a way of making a Geiger-Muller tube.
http://madscientisthut.com/wordpress/daily-blog/easily-make-a-radiation-detector-ion-chamber/
I don’t know how well they work.
think about this one:
can there be “unsafe food”?
the universe ended a few days ago - just what do you propose to do for the rest of “your life”?
there ain’t no immortality - all the world’s cultures cover this - the immortal is the huge loser in all of creation - no cease, no rest - for all time.
that is about the most horrifying scenario the clever monkeys with 46 chrommosones have yet produced.
Francis nailed it. After the blast, your problem is radioactive dust and radioactive rain. If any of that gets inside you you’re screwed fairly soon.
So your challenge is to collect food, be that fresh or packaged, and wash it clean of any radioactive particles, even the microscopic ones. Using water that itself has been cleansed of any radioactive particles. And to breath only dust-free air.
Most isotopes commonly found in weapon fallout have short half-lives. So after just a month they’re effectively gone. Your challenge is hiding from *all *that stuff for a month; not eating it or breathing it or working it into your skin.
After that your concern becomes the long-lived radioactivity which will have been incorporated into still-living plants and animals. Those emitters are weak enough to not pose much hazard to a squirrel with just a 2 year lifespan. Likewise to a fruit or veg with a 6 month life. Those things will live just fine on their own. But ingesting that squirrel meat or apple or corn may implant an emitter in you that’ll kill you over the next 5-10 years.
As will choosing to make your home in an area with a heavy dose of long-lived contamination. Which areas will be randomly scattered about the countryside.
With a Geiger counter you have a hope of avoiding the worst of it. Absent that you’re screwed.
Could go here pre apocalypse
geiger-counter-kits
You could make this post apoxy clypse
Exposure meter
By the way, if you want a good place to scrounge food and medical supplies, look for an abandon farm supplies store like Tractor & Supply, Farm & Fleet, Rural King etc.
Most people wont go there looking for food.
Cases of canned dog food, sacks of cracked corn you can soak and boil, syringes, antibotics, wound cleaning and treatment, surgical glue, suture kits, dressings, hand tools, etc. You could probably almost facilitate your whole survival out of one of those places. Good in case of zombie invasion too
Also good to locate a supply of iodine tablets to help you with exposure.
Yes.
It did? I thought it was just a nuclear war on one small planet.
Well, eat, sleep, read, etc. Many of the things I do with “my life” now.
Could you expand on this? I think I saw a Twilight Zone episode that addressed this, but otherwise I don’t recall much mention in “all the world’s cultures” about the drawbacks of immortality. What are you referring to? And why are you bringing up immortality anyway? Is a nuclear war going to make me immortal?
Thanks again for the responses, this is great! I’m setting SDMB as my homepage now, it’s one of the few things that is NEVER disappointing. Francis Vaughan Thanks for the elaboration, just curious though, what would be a safe place to be out of the wind that would deposit particles? somewhere with higher elevation? I can imagine that with the rain, places like Seattle and London would be screwed in that respect, unless widespread nuclear destruction could somehow alter weather patterns? Is this possible? Weisshund I actually have Potassium-Iodine tablets, I have one of those prepper kits I built as a hobby. It’s in a backpack with those loop things all over it, and has EVERYTHING one would need, minus a firearm, which I figure since I live in Chicago, won’t be too hard to find, and my cousin a few blocks away has many. This talk has made me want to fire up the Xbox and play Fallout now.
Uh, trick question?
Huh? I dont think if the entire mass of our entire solar system was a nuclear bomb that wrecking the entire universe would be possible, be one little blip of light in one arm of one galaxy.
If i am not dead, culture is not over, some piece of the world’s culture still exists, if others live, then more exists
I don’t think God ceases or rests now
It’s horrifying only because i don’t get it
We were in Japan when the Fukushima incident occurred. Our children were small (Daughter: 2 years 5 months and son: 5 months). There was no good information from the government so I did a lot of studying at the time to attempt to see if there was and real danger and if so what kind.
Having a Geiger counter isn’t the end-all. Most of the radioactive particles in Tokyo weren’t meaningful. They may not be in forms which could be absorbed by the body, for example. You could have a high Geiger reading, but it doesn’t mean the contamination is dangerous.
The two forms we were most concerned about were Caesium and Strontium.
Leafy vegetables are a concern because of their tendency to absorb minerals. Normally this is a positive trait because they are nutritious but not in this case. Simply washing off the dust won’t help.
Meat can become problematic because the animals may have consumed contaminated food.
We concluded there wasn’t much danger to us in Tokyo after Fukushima.