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I'm struggling to imagine what would happen in the modern day if the US government went to war and tried to resort to WWII-style rationing. Limited meat, limite

• susiecambria 2y ago
  Totally agree. I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens. I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
  • bobthepanda 2y ago
    It is important to note that people in 1939 often did not have experience with this either. A lot of WWII rationing and planning focused on educating people on how to do these things in the first place.
    • singleshot_ 2y ago
      Also in 1939, people did not have experience self-organizing into bands of likeminded internet-enabled jerks. I posit this helped avoid civil strife immeasurably.
      • wileydragonfly 2y ago
        If you put three people in a room, two clubs will be formed immediately that leave one of them out. Internet has nothing to do with it.
        • ssl-3 2y ago
          So the two clubs have a membership of exactly 1 person each, and the remainder of exactly 1 person is unaffiliated? Why not two clubs with 1 permanent member each, with one person swinging between them? Why not one club with 2 or 3 people? Why not 3 "clubs"? Why must it be as you describe?
          • faggotbreath 2y ago
            [flagged]
          • wileydragonfly 2y ago
            Don’t overthink this
            • ssl-3 2y ago
              Too late. It remains your move.
    • ForOldHack 2y ago
      I lived next door to a PhD in plant biology, who would almost foam at the mouth from anger about monoclonal farming. I asked him about alternatives...he said without even a thought: "victory gardens." Time for me to find out exactly why. Turns out the USDA brought all the regional managers and all the researchers to get together on very best practices. It has withstood the test of time. My sister in law planted one exactly out of the book. Plant for plant. Not even full sun and the crops explode. Another friend tried it at a rental unit with 5 galllon buckets. A bit screwed, but he also got great results. Fundamentally a Victory garden is small scale soil managment at its very best. Thanks Gabe.
  • _heimdall 2y ago
    One thing I learned after moving to a rural agriculture area is how few farmers produce their own food. It just doesn't happen with anyone farming commercially. We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      Of course. They're far too tired after dealing with the farm all day.
      • _heimdall 2y ago
        My grandfather managed a pretty large hog ranch back in the day. They still had a garden on the ranch that helped feed most of the families of the people who worked on the ranch.
  • ttepasse 2y ago
    You may be interested in the early 90s BBC series The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a series somewhat reenacting the homefront gardening effort in WWII Britain. It’s on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSxMUY_E07w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSxMUY_E07w The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr https://archive.is/iAGgr (Findable on Dailymotion)
  • krisoft 2y ago
    > I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it What would you like to happen? Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.) I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
• _heimdall 2y ago
  It would be a totally different world, but I expect we would adjust. People are surprisingly adaptive, you just don't expect it beforehand and don't notice it after.
  • rgmerk 2y ago
    We spent a total of 262 days (by an NYT estimate, though the rules varied throughout that period) in lockdown throughout the pandemic. Did it suck mightily? Yes. Did we get through it? Yes. (Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No. Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
    • _heimdall 2y ago
      > (Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No. > Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…). That's a huge caveat you just snuck in there. I'm totally with you on the first part about largely having gotten through lockdowns, though it wasn't without some damage and suicide and crime rates did go up for example. We simply don't have data about how many boomer parents in rural areas were saved from dying. For one thing the virus mortality rate was much less than it could have been. For another we never actually ran randomized control studies testing efficacy against death. Given that you singled out boomers in rural areas, I also assuming that they either didn't get vaccinated or were somehow saved by those younger people in cities that did choose to get the shots. How do you assume that? The vaccines didn't prove out to be very good at preventing transmission, and preventing transmission between populated cities and rural areas is pretty well handled by geography.
    • vasco 2y ago
      How are you under the impression that you saved anyone or that the US had lower rates than other countries? The US is top 10 or close, in deaths per case or deaths per capita of most statistics I can find for COVID-19. It doesn't seem to me like you're basing your thoughts on reality if your pre-existing supposition is "there were less deaths in the US". https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
• p3rls 2y ago
  What? Do you not remember the war on terror or covid? Americans would bend over and ask to lick the boots for the nutritional value if a world war was going on.
• adastra22 2y ago
  We wouldn’t because there is no reason to. All those restrictions back then were because fertilizer, gunpowder, and rubber were all naturally sourced and in limited supply. We have self-sufficient synthetic or domestic production of all now.
  • vasco 2y ago
    In all out war, all available production or very close to it gets repurposed for the war effort. Those or other new rationing limits would certainly come into play when the US gets into a war that threatens survival instead of the run of the mill "make sure we keep production going in case we need it later" wars that we're used to. Maybe it'd be no new iPhone models due to semiconductor rationing or things like that but there's always limits.
    • liveoneggs 2y ago
      WW3 is just the excuse they need to keep data caps!
    • adastra22 2y ago
      Not the same limits though. Bacon was rationed because animal fat was turned into gunpowder. But the Haber-Bosch process is self-sustaining. There will be no shortage of gunpowder.
      • ls612 2y ago
        In an all out war short of nuclear exchange it’s plausible fuel and electronics could be rationed but the USA produces so much food nowadays and even a huge military has pretty hard ceilings on food consumption it’s hard to see the food rationing (which was most impactful to ordinary people) returning.
        • adastra22 2y ago
          Food rationing in the USA wasn’t to ensure a supply of calories to troops, but to ensure that industrially useful foods (e.g. high nitrate fats) got recycled into military use. The development of synthetic gunpowder via the Haber-Bosch process, which fueled Germany through two world wars, but only became available to the allies after WW2, means this particular form of rationing is a thing of the past.
• SalmonSnarker 2y ago
  you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a couple months with world war two rations. we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
  • crossroadsguy 2y ago
    > we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good. Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good. Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there. On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”. Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else. I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
  • lupusreal 2y ago
    The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers. A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
    • chasd00 2y ago
      > If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe. From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
• pyuser583 2y ago
  There was a big crisis in the Spring of 43. The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits. So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job. It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks. So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.” People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
• bruce511 2y ago
  I don't think they'd need, or want, to ration. Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply. Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile. This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like. Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
  • m463 2y ago
    > Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile. is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
    • justsid 2y ago
      Stores implemented limits per person/household, but you could easily work around those if you really wanted to. It wasn’t rationing on a federal or even just state level.
    • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      What I recall in my area was retailers and distributors doing the rationing themselves; "limit 2 per customer" and so on. Masks often didn't make their way to retail shelves because hospitals had purchasing priority. Retailers mostly didn't raise prices even when they could have, because it wouldn't have been worth the bad optics. Some people skirted the rules, bought out store shelves and set up their own at higher prices, but they were pretty thoroughly shunned and some were later taken to court.
  • Anotheroneagain 2y ago
    Overproduction was the problem at the time, not shortages. There was a shortage of money caused by loans - it was impossible to make money to both buy all the goods and pay all the loans. This is why money lending has to be banned, as it makes the markets stuck like this and causes a depression when the economy improves.
• rajnathani 2y ago
  Well, the article mentions preserving ham and eggs in tins in an era close to a 100 years ago, so I think that things will be fine.
• lupusreal 2y ago
  It probably depends... is it a necessary war for the legitimate defense of our country, or is it another bullshit futile war started by bankers or politicians trying to make some sort of twisted legacy for themselves? Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well. (And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
• veunes 2y ago
  On top of that, there’s the added complexity of global supply chains and digital consumption. Imagine rationing electronics or internet