We do import a lot of frozen and canned fruits/veggies too; in fact, about fifteen percent of all food consumed comes from abroad. Assuming that we can replace fifteen percent with some little pills may be overly optimistic. (Oh, yeah, some of those vitamins and minerals come from overseas as well, along with $75 billion in pharmaceuticals, plus surgical masks and gowns and medical equipment and all sorts of other stuff you MIGHT want to have available.)
#1 I thought the whole point of closing the borders was to prevent the spread of the disease. If the disease is already running rampant here, what’s the point of border closures? What are you hoping to achieve or accomplish?
#2 It’s not just “losing money”; it’s “not being able to afford to feed my family or provide for our needs or buy medicine.” Death somewhere far away is a lot less tangible and “in your face” than having the heat in your house shut off because you can’t pay the bill.
Look, it may be boring as fuck, but you can live a LOOOOOONG time on beans, rice, diminishing amounts of canned and frozen goods, the meals are just really boring. I think the issue would self resolve in a few months at best if the borders are closed worldwide. I inventoried our pantry goods just before the beginning of the year [checking use by dates and such, moving stuff to get to the older items first] and we could manage 1000 calories a day for each of us for easily 4 months - as I said, it would get incredibly boring as we don’t really have tons of seasonings, we do have a year of pregnancy multivitamin [at the base exchange they were the same price as the regular human vitamins, so we got in the habit of buying them while I was in chemo for the added stuff like folic acid] so that would be 6 months of multivitamin. Protein is fine between beans and rice - we would suppliment by hunting small game [the benefit of living in the rural area - many things have no season and I have no major objection to eating ‘song birds’ that are not on the endangered list and country pigeons are not gutter carrion eaters like in cities and I have a number of good recipes for rabbit…] It is soon coming onto spring, and I have the ability to start plants so we can break sod and grow veggies both in CT [we can break an acre easily] and western NY [we can garden an eighth of an acre easily] Thanks to my brother’s casual gro op in the basement, we have more than enough full spectrum grow lights to turn the living room back into a grow op but doing veggies instead of weed so we can start veggies earlier than April.
JUst how long do you think the global pandemic will go on? It isn’t like Mad Max, a certain percentage of the population would die, or be permanently impaired and gradually just like with the Spanish Flu, the world would get back to normal. WHat, 4 months, 6 months, a year?
SO we would just prepare to do a WW2 style victory garden in the back and side yards, not a big deal for suburban and rural dwellers - and the selection of veggies would get a bit more boring. I bet the lovely people in areas now growing soybeans might jump on the bandwagon and grow veggies instead of commodities. [handy we already bought the seeds for spring planting =) ]
How long do you think the stocks of beans and rice would last in such cases?
Given the amount of panic buying I see every time the weather service predicts half-an-inch of snow, I’m guessing any sustained closure will clear the grocery shelves quickly. For folks who have decent stockpiles, that’s not so bad, but somewhere around ten to twelve percent of the American population doesn’t have consistent access to sufficient food on an ongoing basis, much less access to multiple months’ stockpile. In urban areas, where most Americans live, hunting small game isn’t a viable solution for very long (there aren’t THAT many pigeons), and gardening may or may not be feasible. Here in Kansas, e.g., even if you have the sunlight and the soil, you’re not going to have much of a crop before June or July at the earliest.
I vaguely recall in WIRED a couple decades ago a set of, not predictions, but scenarios, of our future. One involved total global quarantines. Hardware might cross borders if lethally sterilized, but no bio-entities are allowed through, just information. Lovers across jurisdictions can only exchange digitized genetic codes.
How to isolate? Physical walls won’t work - they blow over, among other failures. Force fields are the only answer. Force-field bubbles over cities are still SciFi dreams, right? But if they’re ever built, the world will look from above like 3D crop-circles of urban isolation, invulnerable city-states. Shielding an entire large nation, the globular bubble would wreck low-orbit objects. Might bother seismic faults, too. Oops.
The other answer: Work on those immune systems, folks.
Well, depends on how many people forget that rice and beans exist - and go by the gold standard of disasters, french toast [mrAru and I rate disasters in terms of french toast as it seems milk, butter, eggs and bread vanish the fastest when storms are announced … <baffled> Personally, I would go for powdered eggs, powdered milk, yeast, flour … give me a cooking fire and a cast iron dutch oven and I can bake bread, and a skillet and I can make french toast =) and I don’t have to arm wrestle some housewife in the dairy section …]
You would be amazed at what people will eat in a pinch [I remember running across a description by a frenchman in a seige discussing how many recipes for rat they ended up knowing.] Pigeon, squirrel, rat, raccoon, possum, rabbit, dog, cat, crow, sparrow. Of those I am hesitant to eat city pigeon or rat as they eat garbage, cat and dog the same - carnivores are noted for not tasting ‘nice’ for certain values of nice. In a pinch, out in rural areas I would not be as worried about them being contaminated by bad garbage/chemicals as I would be in town. But again, I grew up eating game and have no qualms about killing and eating what I hunted or fished. If I had access to a horse auction, I can tell you what would be in my freezer in 2 days time after delivery.
Sprechen-sie grow lights? Electricity, window boxes, dirt, seeds, grow lights, time = food. Radishes have a 20 day [more or less] seed to plate, certain forms of lettuce 49 days [butter head, a cute little single serve veg] and both easily grow in window boxes. It has been said that 1 acre of potato cropped will provide food for a family of 4 for a year … and it takes basically something like 5 bushels cut into seed-pieces to sew the acre - not that I urge people to run out and dig up their lawns and plant potatoes - but I have grown potatoes in a ‘milk crate’ [a square yellow cube tote with solid sides, though they sell these bags specifically to grow potatoes in] Havent even discussed homemade hydroponics at all, but I know at least 3 different prepper or whatever groups pop on my facebook feed offering how to books and equipment to set up ones own hydroponics grows of veggies [one is specific to lettuce grown in little plastic cubes designed to act as packaging to sell on to organic markets or whatever]
Based on the panic-buying I see in such circumstances, working at a store and all, I have come to the conclusion the average American hasn’t a clue how to stockpile for a genuine emergency.
I’d be buying beans, rice, and other boring stuff while panicked shoppers were fighting over the last gallon of milk - milk doesn’t keep long, beans and rice and canned food do. Lots of flour and yeast to make bread. Raw ingredients. Stuff that will keep awhile in cool conditions like potatoes and onions.
Very shortly there would be even fewer pigeons. And fewer squirrels. Eventually fewer stray dogs and cats…
You start with “winter vegetables” that are cold tolerant - the cabbages and related, lettuce and related, chard, kale, etc. You can take part of the plant before its mature and eat it, letting the rest continue to grown. Here in the Chicago area I’ve started getting meaningful amounts as early as late March/early April. It would be enough supplement the boring rice and beans stuff.
Or else I re-start the hydroponic set-up I had a few years back. That will require that the power stay on, but if things get so bad the power grid fails then, well, you’ll have to move to more than just “stock up” for a survival strategy. Doubt it will get that bad.
If somebody doesn’t have the money to ensure they have a secure food supply, where are you anticipating they’re getting the money for these grow lights or a nice hydroponics setup? (For that matter, where are they going to get the grow lights, etc., considering how much of the equipment [and parts thereof] are imported from China, Finland, etc.?)
1 acre of potato will feed a family of 4 for a year … great. That doesn’t do much good, however, if you don’t have an acre of ground, and in urban America, most people don’t. Sure, you can grow potatoes in a milk crate and lettuce on the window-sill, but how many of these cute little single-serve heads of lettuce are you planning to grow on that windowsill?
I understand that your own personal situation is different, but more Americans live in concrete jungles than rural paradises. I, for example, live in suburbia, but the only part of my yard that gets anything like adequate sun is a strip 4 feet wide by 25 feet long on the west side, with what is politely described as compacted clay soil, conveniently situated so that it gets all of the runoff from my neighbor’s roof and driveway. That is a larger area than most residents of the big cities will have, and yet it isn’t going to produce enough to make a meaningful difference in my standard of living. (I tried for years to have a veggie garden there, but have given up.) If I had an acre, or even a 4x25 strip, of Kansas River bottomland, this would be a different story, but I don’t.
I see talk here of food shortages, which won’t require pandemic-sealed international or internal borders, merely a distribution or production breakdown. Knock out power and roads and see how fast famine strikes. For shortages that will end eventually, try the Mormon trick of keeping one year’s food supply stashed - not easy for urban apartment dwellers. Most survivalists move out of town, init?
You personally not in emergency situations - target shade liking greens - lettuce, spinach, romaine lettuce, many herbs. These can be grown in grow buckets/bags or in hydroponic plugs set into gravel and water with fertilizer instead of dirt. Potatoes also will grow in light sun/shade/dappled sun however you want to call it. Many veggies actually do not like stark direct sunlight if given light shade will thrive. Soil augmentation [rototilling in sand and organics lighten up clay nicely, my grandfathers handyman tilled in a combo of cow crap/bedding from a local farmer’s barn with a few bags of generic builders sand every fall after picking the garden, which takes advantage of leftover pea vines, corn stalk, whatever else he was growing that summer. ] If you speak to someone in a local ag college, they can point out plants that will thrive in that environment. mrAru is better with plants than I am, though I have a lot of practical experience in weeding gardens, my grandparents and parents had around 2/3 of an acre in garden, and about an acre of orchard every year. But container gardening is just as productive as trying to grow in heavy clay and can be very decorative.
I’m sure a good many Americans will, if at all possible, grab every possible container to grow food if the situation warrants it. But where are all the seeds coming from? Yes, you can use the seeds from some store-bought produce, but that’d be in short supply. And while you can grow spinach and cabbage from plants allowed to go to seed, you first have to have the plants. So what am I missing here?
Is that really panic-buying, where people are stockpiling for an emergency, or are people just doing their regular shopping a day or two early because they won’t want to go out when the weather is bad? Milk will be one of the first things to go in that situation because milk is relatively fresh and there aren’t several days worth of it on the shelves.
Without turning this into a dissertation - no, it’s not normal buying a day or two early. As soon as the weather forecasters predict a blizzard or whatever our shelves get stripped of 1) milk and 2) bread. As in, we sell out in under 3-4 hours.
Great for getting rid of older stock, not so much fun when the next wave of buyers show up and take their frustrations out on the staff.
We probably have more days of milk than of bread in stock on an average day. Properly chilled milk does keep for several days/week.
My local extension service very VERY strongly discourages adding sand, even in combination with organics, since it tends to turn the soil into concrete: you can’t dig in it, and roots and earthworms can’t penetrate it. Yes, I spent years talking to the extension agents and adding compost, etc., but the combination of compacted clay, lousy drainage, and decades of salt run-off proved too much. I do have some containers with tomatoes, etc., but small containers are a no-go (direct afternoon sun in Kansas) and most of the leafy greens are out for the same reason. (Other than that one western face, I either have no room or no sun due to adjacent buildings and a line of mature maples; it’s not dappled but dense shade, too dark even for kale once the maples leaf out.)
I sound like I’m whining, and I don’t mean to be; I’ve adapted to what is possible in my current domicile. However, an bounteous victory garden isn’t one of the possibilities here, as it isn’t for a lot of people.
How about mushrooms? Don’t have to worry about lighting with those. You could trade with other gardeners to get plant-based stuff in exchange for your tasty fungi.
Just this morning I was railing at another board for drastically underappreciating pandemic/apocalyptic discussion and praising the Dope (anonymously). And here we are!
I’ve grown mushrooms, culinary and you know. They’re fairly straightforward to grow, but temperature/humidity have to be in a fairly tight range. Also, your “seeds” are spores that initially need to be inoculated onto a sterile medium, not just sown in the soil.
That said, I’ve grown oysters in layered straw in a laundry basket set under rhododendrons and harvested hundreds.