Ok, the comet/meteor shower or whatever has come by, the zombies are running around and things aren’t looking so good. We now know the power will last anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, but how long will food last - how long will we be able to go to Shoprite or 711 before the food is (even more) inedible? and what could we, the survivers, easily grow?
Depends on the number of survivors. It is much easier to kill a person than to destroy an entire warehouse of creamed corn in cans.
(That sounds counterintuitive, but is true. A single zombie can kill you in a flash but would take days to bust each and every can. Same is true of an incoming comet or whatnot.)
In any case, the life-span of canned goods is quite long (and dependent on storage conditions). At some point, the surveyors will have to grow food, but if only a small number of people survive, they will feast on creamed corn for a long, long time.
In 1968 I ate canned food that was canned in 1944. I had some every Wednesday, for most of seventeen months. I didn’t die, and the only time during that seventeen months that I got sick from food was eating food, which was entirely fresh, in a restaurant.
Canned foods have been eaten after a century. (Well, bottled, in actual fact, but the idea is the same.) The best thing for you to do, once you get elected Omega Man, is to get a nice empty dumpster, and fill it with trash cans full of canned goods, and then bury that sucker under about six feet of dirt. Then loot grocery store above ground for the first decade or two.
The constant temperature and the absence of light will help, and the metal box will keep out varmints, and probably Zombies, too.
Tris
Dried foods will last quite a long time as well. Assuming that a lrge number of people are zombified, and eating only brains, then you should be set for the rest of your life. If a lot of people survive, then there will be trouble. The average town only has 24 - 48 hours worth of food in town at any given time. Stop the Von’s trucks, and there will be food riots within 72 hours.
If you’re going to have to grow your own food, you’d need to start doing it sooner, rather than later; after fifteen years of living on canned foods:
-You will not necessarily be very fit or healthy
-Suitable agricultural land will be very seriously overgrown
-The means to work the land (and we’re probably talking about plough horses, rather than tractors) will not be easily available
-Many types of vegetable seeds will either be unavailable or non-viable
-Some types of vegetable not normally grown from seed (potatoes, for example) may be locally extinct.
So what do surveyors know that we don’t? 