The only real problem with insects is that you need to harvest a LOT of them to make it worthwhile. That’s why people tend to prefer insects like locusts – lots of large muscle per insect. (Besides, if your locusts ate your grain crop, you might as well eat them.) According to anthropologust Marvin Harris, the women who worked in silk factories unrolling silk cocoons ate a lot of metamorphosing larvae – they had to put the cocoons in boiling water to loosen the threads, so they had plenty of boiled larvae right there for the taking. Eating things like ants and termites is a losing proposition – too many required, very little edible tissue, and too much chitin. Things like chocolate covered ants are a luxury and a gimmick, but not a reliable source of protein. Stick to grasshoppers, locusts, giant water bugs, and the like.
One of my proudest cookbook purchases is the Eat a Bug Cookbook, which is absolutely for real and honest. The author can be hired to cook insects for your group
Full disclosure – I’ve never made anything from this book, and don’t intend to. But it’s hilarious.
Harris has much to say about pig eating, too. The problem is that, unless you can count on letting your pig forage in the forest, or have a reliable source of human-inedible food (or human unlikely food, like acorns) , pigs effectively compete with people for food, eating the same things you would be eating yourself. You’d be better off eating the original food (garbage and scraps will only get you do far in feeding your pig). On the other hand, if you can afford it, meat from pigs is nutritious and tasty. Harris argues that a large part of the taboo on pig-eating in mostly arid-land cultures (Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Jewish, and Muslim) is due to the large amount of effort required to raise pigs in that environment (pigs will die from heat exhaustion if not given mud to keep cool – they don’t sweat) and come up with enough food for them when people want to eat the same thing.
Judging by the unused open areas around me, Canada geese ought to be a prime resource. Supposedly they’re stupid and easy to kill, too, though probably that would change as they learn the guys carrying golf clubs are no longer just out for fun.
I put in a vegetable garden for the first time last year, and got an awful lot of decent potatoes, carrots, onions and tomatoes. Sure, if I were to farm these for years, and was looking to maximize yield, I might need to start worrying about all that, but for the vast majority of people, growing enough food to avoid starvation for a year or two isn’t really that hard. Anyone with even a decent backyard can get something growing.
In a famine situation, I’d be a lot more worried about people stealing my harvest than what the nitrogen levels in my backyard are.
Meats can be smoked, salted down, or jerked–all of them methods that don’t require much in the way of gear, and pre-modern-technology people mastered them ages ago
Yeah, but we are talking about “non”-pre-modern-technology humans, most of which, at least in the US are mainly good at staring at little computer screens all day, where cooking means DoorDash, and the only thing foraged from outside may be the occasional flower plucked from the garden for decoration only. Killing, cleaning, prepping, and preserving meat is probably fairly straight forward once you have done it a few times, but most of America would be starting from zero.
Any hunters around here could probably describe the process - it’s not just slicing off a haunch and covering it with salt.
Geese are not stupid, at least not the ones I have known. A far bit smarter than ducks or chickens, for example. Wild geese are only unwary enough to get close to where people feed them, like city parks. Otherwise no. Easy to kill maybe with a rifle if you have one and are a good shot. Ganders will attack and hurt you bad with the knobs on their wings if they feel you are looking the wrong way at their children or wife.
I don’t know if they’re the absolute best, but chickens are pretty darned good. They don’t eat much even if you’re feeding them entirely yourself, they can forage most of what they do eat, and even before you kill them they’re producing a steady supply of food. They’re also really, really easy to take care of, even if you don’t have much experience with livestock: Just keep the predators away, and make sure they have access to plenty of water, and that’s about it.
For chickens, and pigs, you would have to choose the breed carefully. A lot of chickens and pigs are not good foragers and would die if they had to rely on those skills. In areas with serious winter options would be very very limited.