14 ms·

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

104 points by pmcpinto 12y ago

lbenes 12y ago
So the article inspired me to try some white pine tea for the first time. I'm sipping it right now, and it tastes quite good. If you live in the north try it out. Here's the recipe that I followed: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle-Tea http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle...
- rglover 12y ago
  Good lord: Ponderosa Pine; also known as Blackjack, Western Yellow, Yellow, and Bull Pine. This pine contains isocupressic acid, which is known to cause abortions in cattle.
  - lbenes 12y ago
    Nope, definitely was White Pine, 5 needles on each sprig and black bark. Ponderosa Pine doesn't grow natively in the North-East. Oddly, people do make tea out of Yellow Pine too! Give you an idea, this stuff is pretty good. Going help myself to a second glass once I'm sure I don't have any weird reactions. [1] http://rockymountainbushcraft.blogspot.com/2012/11/rocky-mountain-tree-identification_19.html http://rockymountainbushcraft.blogspot.com/2012/11/rocky-mou...
subbz 12y ago
Some dark force made me read "Where to Eat After the Apocalypse".
- staz 12y ago
  Still better than "Who to Eat After the Apocalypse"
  - headShrinker 12y ago
    ... And with that comment being upvoted, HN became reddit
- deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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- fit2rule 12y ago
  I heard from some dude in a black jacket that there's a nice burger place run by a guy with a brain the size of the planet, just near the restaurant at the end of the universe.. ;) Seriously though, it does seem like we ought to be switching over to mycoremediation as quickly as possible, in order to prevent the apocalypse, not just survive it. Also, the last paragraph of this article .. the feels .. seems like there should be ways to deliver survival shroom-kits to the poor and needy. If only it weren't all being used, instead, for war.
crpatino 12y ago
Slimy yet satisfying.
- yabs 12y ago
  hornworms, you mean?
  - crpatino 12y ago
    I don't think the article mentions specific species of insects, but... I have tasted maguey worm and crickets, and they are both quite good. So, unless it is poisonous, I think hornworm would do, too.
jessaustin 12y ago
This person ought to understand ocean ecology better. If there's not enough sunlight for agriculture, fishing is unlikely to be more productive than it already is now with normal sunlight.
- Semiapies 12y ago
  I think they have a general problem with ecology in general. Knock out the plants, and you can't sit pretty by eating bugs and rats, either.
Zarkonnen 12y ago
So this is "what to eat after an apocalypse that is not the one we're actually facing". I would be far more interested in knowing how we deal with a "soft apocalypse" of fossil fuel depletion, drinking water scarcity, high ocean acidity, etc.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  Fossil fuels will not run out anytime soon. Depleting all the deep gas and coal deposits will take centuries.
  - sbierwagen 12y ago
    Yes, that's not the point. We haven't run out of gold, either, but if you invented an engine that could burn gold it sure wouldn't be too useful for powering cars. Oil doesn't need to run out to be economically useless for powering the world economy.
  - hawleyal 12y ago
    Let's burn more coal.
- jmnicolas 12y ago
  Store food, medicine a few guns and then enjoy the good life while it last. As our "leaders" are blind or don't want to see what's coming, I don't have anythin better than this advice.
  - proveanegative 12y ago
    I imagine people with children, among others, would have a hard time agreeing with this advice.
    - bmelton 12y ago
      If you mean to say that people who don't like guns would have a hard time agreeing, then just say that. There are plenty of people with children who have no problems with guns. Unless I missed the point, and there's some reason I can't fathom why people with children would have a hard time agreeing with a reserve of foods and medicine.
jmnicolas 12y ago
> What kinds of disasters do you think about? > Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case. The nuclear winter is pretty low in my list. Financial meltdown and climate change are at the top.
- wanda 12y ago
  Yeah I can't take this article seriously. It reads as though written by some nutrition/health food fanatic who distorts reality to suit their conclusions. There's just something not quite sane in the writing. The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually. I mean this is nitpicky, but what?
  - Ntrails 12y ago
    He's decided that nuclear winter involves a very very small nuclear war hitting a few large cities. Which means the vast majority of humans live. If US and Russia unload, say, 75% of their arsenals I'm pretty sure that is inaccurate. Not to mention there seems to be no consideration of the radiation levels in various foods?
    - hga 12y ago
      The earth is very big, and we are very small in comparison. Even back when the warhead and delivery inventories were much larger (100 times or so if my memory serves), a LLNL 3D simulation of "nuclear winter" resulted in a single nuclear fall (TAPPS, which I read when it came out and studied, was fraudulent, especially in it's use of a 1 dimensional model of the atmosphere (i.e. no winds, no oceans, etc.)). Not good, just like all too many volcanic eruptions in recorded or thereabouts history, but not the end of the world. An overall radiation increase would small to immeasurable, the effect immeasurable. It would suck to be close and downwind of a warhead explosion unless you're prepared, further away not so good, but even in Cold War targeted US 10s of millions would have survived without lifting a finger WRT to radiation.
    - bmm6o 12y ago
      I think GP's point is that the sentence "The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually" is pretty incoherent. It's hard to guess what he means by "eventually" and what specifically he means by "humanity" (vs "humans").
lultimouomo 12y ago
> You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. It’s all the same! It’s just the spices. We should really stop with this BS. There are a lot of delicious ways to cook vegetables; but a veggie patty does NOT taste like a sausage one. I'd bet the second part of the sentence applies to insect as well. I'm not sure I'm ready to find out about the first part.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
  Some insects are delicious. Tarantulas taste like shrimp or lobster, without all the shell [1]. Ants taste great with flour [2]. You can't tell the difference after cooking and spicing. [1] http://www.thedailymeal.com/deep-fried-tarantula http://www.thedailymeal.com/deep-fried-tarantula [2] http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/recipe-ica-farofa.html http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/recipe-ica-fa...
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    Congratulations, you've contested the point by completely ignoring it.
    - blisterpeanuts 12y ago
      So what? He provides interesting material. Why the need to attack?
      - ceejayoz 12y ago
        The thread started with: > You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. The argument is not "insects can't be tasty", the argument is "insects may indeed be tasty but people can taste that it's not beef/chicken". Given that people can tell the difference between, say, grass fed and grain fed beef, the claim that an insect or vegetable-based alternative will be indistinguishable needs more evidence than "nuh uh!"
alinenache 12y ago
http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.ro/2013/02/food-and-sleep.html http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.ro/2013/02/food-...
wahsd 12y ago
> "...an invasive water mold ... reached Ireland, where, '... four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and … the rest were heavily dependent on them.' Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop . http://ensia.com/voices/its-time-to-rethink-americas-corn-system/ http://ensia.com/voices/its-time-to-rethink-americas-corn-sy...
- Retric 12y ago
  (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. So, a 50% drop in corn production would not have nearly the impact you might think. Also, during the potato famine Ireland was forced to export a lot of food which made everything far worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#mediaviewer/File:Potatoes_Production_Great_Famine_en.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#mediavie... Note: Yield per acer does not stay down for that long but acerage under production does.
- qwerta 12y ago
  > Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop There would still be plenty of food to go around. Problem was that British did not allowed people to eat corn.
  - Wildgoose 12y ago
    Rubbish. There was famine across the whole of Europe. The government imported millet to feed people and militant Irish Nationalists called it "Peel's Brimstone" (it's yellow, remember) and claimed that those eating it would put their immortal souls in danger. Yes, they could have done more. But that doesn't mean they actively plotted to starve people as modern Irish Nationalists like to claim.
- yabs 12y ago
  maybe we'd be better off? so much corn (and byproducts) not a good things for us.
aikah 12y ago
Apocalypse means "revelation". I hate when people use that word like it means "the end of society as we know it",or like it's "madmax time" or something. Apocalypse is of religious nature.It has nothing to do with a "global catastrophe.". Aren't scientists supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?How can they continue to spread that non-sense? PS:I'm not religious.But the word Apocalypse has a specific meaning.
- umsm 12y ago
  The meaning of words evolve and are adapted. It clearly refers to "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale"
- jtreminio 12y ago
  > a great disaster : a sudden and very bad event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse
- sanderjd 12y ago
  Is there another word that better (or even similarly) captures what "apocalypse" has come to mean? I don't know of one, and I think it is a useful thing to have a word for. It is almost never worth fighting a word's widely-understood meaning. (Although I was definitely disappointed when dictionaries added an alternate definition of "literally" as meaning "figuratively"...)
  - defen 12y ago
    The technically correct term is "eschaton", but no one uses that and everyone uses "apocalypse". I don't think this is a battle worth fighting.
    - pmoriarty 12y ago
      The Illuminatus Trilogy does.[1] Immanentize the Eschaton! [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
swamp40 12y ago
Most of the advice in the article is a bit silly; however, the question is vitally important. Most large cities only have 2-3 days worth of food available. If the daily deliveries stop for whatever reason, things will go bad fast. The best three pieces of advice I ever heard: 1) Get out of the cities. 2) Get out of the cities. 3) Get out of the cities.
- personlurking 12y ago
  It was just yesterday that I was discussing this question with some friends, ie, what do you do if shit hits the fan? Most said 'get out of the city' first so that's reassuring. But the scary part is I don't know how to build a house, cultivate food, nor do I have the property to do so.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Same here. I live in New York; if shit hit the fan in an hour, I'm not sure how much there is to be gained by leaving. At least here, I know the area, I can expect to stay reasonably warm in the current weather inside my building, I can work together with the neighbors that I know. We have enough food in our kitchen to last us a week, and we could immediately begin to stockpile water. We even have some medical supplies. Hell, there are always rats I could trap and eat if I were willing to risk bioaccumulating some poison. If I set out for New Jersey, or Connecticut, or even Long Island, I immediately lose shelter, I am limited to the food I can carry on my person, I don't know where the nearest stores or houses are, and I don't know anyone there at all. The only immediate advantage I can think of is that there would be less people around willing to kill me for my stuff.
    - hga 12y ago
      The textbook "survivalist" (the term prior to prepper, see the literature going back to the 1970s) answer to this is to have one or more "retreats", places you can flee to. Such as relatives living in less populated places, where you can offer skills and manual labor to help out. Or a "vacation home" that's a bit more than that. Sheltering in place can have its advantages, but if you're living in NYC, it's game over, you're not even allowed to effectively defend yourself (less than 60K each licenses to own handguns and long guns, numbers personally counted by myself after the lists were leaked). In any big city it sounds marginal (in sizing ammo required, one of the best survivalist, Bruce Clayton, asked "How many firefights do you expect to survive?"), then again, it actually takes much less than you might think to keep people alive. Not very many tractor trailers filled with wheat and corn (e.g. "downshift" and feed people what we've been feeding animals), so of course all this depends on the shape of the disaster.
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
Why wait until after a world apocalypse? Insects are plentiful and nutritious and we should be eating more of them now. There's plenty of evidence that insects are high quality protein with low fat. In many traditional societies around the world, termites, grubs, grasshoppers, and other creepy crawly things play an important nutritional role. Years ago, my wife and I read a beautifully illustrated travelogue "Man Eating Bugs" written by a husband-and-wife team who traveled the world to see (and sample) insect cuisine in many cultures. Fascinating stuff. It's a generally well supported view among paleontologists that primitive humans ate lots of bugs. We were opportunistic foragers from way back. It's only in recent centuries, in "civilized" places, that we have regarded bugs as a repulsive thing to eat. I would imagine that in and after a nuclear winter, animal and vegetable life would dwindle to a tiny population that would take hundreds if not thousands of years to replenish. Probably we should be caching genetic material, sperm, and seeds of every species in some safe, underground arkology, so that two hundred years after the meltdown, whoever's left can restore some biodiversity.
- pmoriarty 12y ago
  I have sympathy for insects, and I do not want to harm more of them.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  There are many seed (and other types of genetic material) banks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault Is a famous one.
- wyager 12y ago
  If a major restaurant started using insect based meat products, the irrational public backlash would be tremendous.
- IvyMike 12y ago
  I supported a kickstarter to get these cricket protein energy bars manufactured. You can order a box now. https://www.exoprotein.com/ https://www.exoprotein.com/ To me, they pretty much taste like any other energy bar--in fact, it's kind of a letdown since you want something more exotic.
cowardlydragon 12y ago
The degree of cooperation the article assumes is untenable on a global scale. Perhaps more isolated countries could coordinate, or maybe after the initial chaos some coordination could develop... He ignores that the most plentiful source of food will be other people after a month or so...
- vorg 12y ago
  Yes, based on the litmus test of the recent lack of global cooperation in managing climate change, we can expect developed countries to look after their own citizens only, using their militaries to steal all available food from less developed countries. Immigration-based countries such as the U.S. will be better positioned to convince their citizen base that they owe nothing to other countries peoples by presenting their own population as "representative of the world's ethnic balance", and even as "the subset of the world that God wants to save". Expect to hear "the United States is the Ark of Noah for this day and age" broadcast on U.S. televisions as drone robots march through the Brahmaputra harvesting rice for loading onto ships destined for the U.S. as the local population starve. The leaders of developing nations with nukes such as Russia and India will be given U.S. citizenship en mass, Roman Empire style, in return for control over those weapons. English-language testing will be canceled for Chinese students wanting to study in the U.S., who'll be distributed around colleges in cities all over the U.S. to discourage their parents launching Chinese nukes at them.
- Semiapies 12y ago
  Well, where "cooperation" is "people kindly send us mushrooms out of the goodness of their collective heart", sure. North America and Europe paying elevated prices for food from the tropics, now, that could actually work. At least until someone decides it sounds more fun to just invade some of those countries (and ends up spending even more for the privilege).
escape_goat 12y ago
I am going to try to divert your minds away towards some questions that you might not be interested in, but nonetheless could be more productive than the game of hole-poking that this essay invites. I think many readers will have arrived at a similar set of conclusions, based on whatever assertions or citations may have inspired doubt; for me, it was Pearce's surprise that the world was unable to feed everyone despite having full agricultural production. Perhaps I have greatly misunderstood the matter, but I had believed that problems of famine and chronic hunger were entirely due localized logistic and political problems, and that the world was in fact handily capable of feeding everyone, even with the current (very inefficient) distribution and scale of agricultural production. This suggests to me that either I am very wrong --- something that does happen --- or that Pearce and Denkenburger might not have done a lot of what one could term 'peripheral' research on the topic they were interested in. This is a situation where two engineers are attempting to problem solve in a domain that might require, at any given turn, significant expertise in chemical or biological processes; or manufacturing processes, for that matter, or logistics, or economics, or international commerce. Consequently, this comes across as what one might term a 'Dunning-Krueger Study': facile, misinformed "solutions" to misunderstood problems in which the progenitor has an erroneous confidence. Given my own lack of knowledge, it would be hypocritical to label it thusly; the deposition of their suggestions should be placed in the hands of the various relevant domains. My question is regarding this type of research in general. I imagine the defence of it would be that it (at least) initiates investigation and problem solving, and that it (at least) arrives at useful suggestions, preliminary analyses, and approximate solutions. Does the Dunning-Kruger phase of knowledge have a discernible utility or application? Is there in fact a use or place for such investigations? Are they a form of deceptive mimesis, imitating research in pursuit of resources? Does ignorance of the domain of knowledge ever have a value? If so, how does one identify that one is in a Dunning-Krueger situation, and how should one proceed from there? Can one have knowledge about the meta-domain of Dunning-Krueger situations that allows one to limit or avoid the negative consequences of misjudgement? It strikes me that perhaps situations analogous to the one in which a hypothetical Peirce and Denkenburger are required to figure out how to feed the entire world after an apocalyptic event are not in fact rare, but actually occur all the time, and that it is a routine problem in design and engineering that one needs to find solutions in a problem domain that one understands poorly or not at all. I have no expertise to support this notion; there is a question mark hanging on the end of the assertion. But one could regard this as occurring in the course of ordinary life as well. How does one systematically make the best possible decisions on the basis of incomplete and possibly erroneous information, given that computation is itself a cost? In that context, a Dunning-Krueger epistemology starts to look like a reasonable strategy.
hga 12y ago
Let me elevate a comment in a subtread to the top level: nuclear winter is bunk, real effects would be on the scale of historical volcanic eruptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768412 BUT, if you want a disaster of that scale, nature will be happy to provide! Just have a big meteorite hit an ocean; hitting a big and deep body of water is critical, because otherwise "too much" of the heat radiates back into space. That's a big reason the vast majority of fielded nuclear weapons never got very big, there effects doesn't scale well. There's some good science fiction that covers this and how to respond, email me at my contact address if you want a recommendation that is necessarily a spoiler.
carsonreinke 12y ago
Nice to see Michigan Tech!
Adam503 12y ago
Braiiiiins, of course. Jeez.
crabhapple 12y ago
> The Great Famine, as it came to be known, could have been avoided in any number of ways, not least by ceasing the export of food from Ireland to Britain. But the British government failed to take effective action. "...the British government failed to take effective action" That's one way of putting it!

104 points by pmcpinto 12y ago

So the article inspired me to try some white pine tea for the first time. I'm sipping it right now, and it tastes quite good. If you live in the north try it out. Here's the recipe that I followed: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle-Tea http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle...

rglover 12y ago
Good lord: Ponderosa Pine; also known as Blackjack, Western Yellow, Yellow, and Bull Pine. This pine contains isocupressic acid, which is known to cause abortions in cattle.
- lbenes 12y ago
  Nope, definitely was White Pine, 5 needles on each sprig and black bark. Ponderosa Pine doesn't grow natively in the North-East. Oddly, people do make tea out of Yellow Pine too! Give you an idea, this stuff is pretty good. Going help myself to a second glass once I'm sure I don't have any weird reactions. [1] http://rockymountainbushcraft.blogspot.com/2012/11/rocky-mountain-tree-identification_19.html http://rockymountainbushcraft.blogspot.com/2012/11/rocky-mou...

subbz 12y ago

Some dark force made me read "Where to Eat After the Apocalypse".

staz 12y ago
Still better than "Who to Eat After the Apocalypse"
- headShrinker 12y ago
  ... And with that comment being upvoted, HN became reddit
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deleted 12y ago
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fit2rule 12y ago
I heard from some dude in a black jacket that there's a nice burger place run by a guy with a brain the size of the planet, just near the restaurant at the end of the universe.. ;) Seriously though, it does seem like we ought to be switching over to mycoremediation as quickly as possible, in order to prevent the apocalypse, not just survive it. Also, the last paragraph of this article .. the feels .. seems like there should be ways to deliver survival shroom-kits to the poor and needy. If only it weren't all being used, instead, for war.

crpatino 12y ago

Slimy yet satisfying.

yabs 12y ago
hornworms, you mean?
- crpatino 12y ago
  I don't think the article mentions specific species of insects, but... I have tasted maguey worm and crickets, and they are both quite good. So, unless it is poisonous, I think hornworm would do, too.

jessaustin 12y ago

This person ought to understand ocean ecology better. If there's not enough sunlight for agriculture, fishing is unlikely to be more productive than it already is now with normal sunlight.

Semiapies 12y ago
I think they have a general problem with ecology in general. Knock out the plants, and you can't sit pretty by eating bugs and rats, either.

Zarkonnen 12y ago

So this is "what to eat after an apocalypse that is not the one we're actually facing". I would be far more interested in knowing how we deal with a "soft apocalypse" of fossil fuel depletion, drinking water scarcity, high ocean acidity, etc.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago
Fossil fuels will not run out anytime soon. Depleting all the deep gas and coal deposits will take centuries.
- sbierwagen 12y ago
  Yes, that's not the point. We haven't run out of gold, either, but if you invented an engine that could burn gold it sure wouldn't be too useful for powering cars. Oil doesn't need to run out to be economically useless for powering the world economy.
- hawleyal 12y ago
  Let's burn more coal.
jmnicolas 12y ago
Store food, medicine a few guns and then enjoy the good life while it last. As our "leaders" are blind or don't want to see what's coming, I don't have anythin better than this advice.
- proveanegative 12y ago
  I imagine people with children, among others, would have a hard time agreeing with this advice.
  - bmelton 12y ago
    If you mean to say that people who don't like guns would have a hard time agreeing, then just say that. There are plenty of people with children who have no problems with guns. Unless I missed the point, and there's some reason I can't fathom why people with children would have a hard time agreeing with a reserve of foods and medicine.

jmnicolas 12y ago

> What kinds of disasters do you think about? > Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case. The nuclear winter is pretty low in my list. Financial meltdown and climate change are at the top.

wanda 12y ago
Yeah I can't take this article seriously. It reads as though written by some nutrition/health food fanatic who distorts reality to suit their conclusions. There's just something not quite sane in the writing. The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually. I mean this is nitpicky, but what?
- Ntrails 12y ago
  He's decided that nuclear winter involves a very very small nuclear war hitting a few large cities. Which means the vast majority of humans live. If US and Russia unload, say, 75% of their arsenals I'm pretty sure that is inaccurate. Not to mention there seems to be no consideration of the radiation levels in various foods?
  - hga 12y ago
    The earth is very big, and we are very small in comparison. Even back when the warhead and delivery inventories were much larger (100 times or so if my memory serves), a LLNL 3D simulation of "nuclear winter" resulted in a single nuclear fall (TAPPS, which I read when it came out and studied, was fraudulent, especially in it's use of a 1 dimensional model of the atmosphere (i.e. no winds, no oceans, etc.)). Not good, just like all too many volcanic eruptions in recorded or thereabouts history, but not the end of the world. An overall radiation increase would small to immeasurable, the effect immeasurable. It would suck to be close and downwind of a warhead explosion unless you're prepared, further away not so good, but even in Cold War targeted US 10s of millions would have survived without lifting a finger WRT to radiation.
  - bmm6o 12y ago
    I think GP's point is that the sentence "The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually" is pretty incoherent. It's hard to guess what he means by "eventually" and what specifically he means by "humanity" (vs "humans").

lultimouomo 12y ago

> You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. It’s all the same! It’s just the spices. We should really stop with this BS. There are a lot of delicious ways to cook vegetables; but a veggie patty does NOT taste like a sausage one. I'd bet the second part of the sentence applies to insect as well. I'm not sure I'm ready to find out about the first part.

hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
Some insects are delicious. Tarantulas taste like shrimp or lobster, without all the shell [1]. Ants taste great with flour [2]. You can't tell the difference after cooking and spicing. [1] http://www.thedailymeal.com/deep-fried-tarantula http://www.thedailymeal.com/deep-fried-tarantula [2] http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/recipe-ica-farofa.html http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/recipe-ica-fa...
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Congratulations, you've contested the point by completely ignoring it.
  - blisterpeanuts 12y ago
    So what? He provides interesting material. Why the need to attack?
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      The thread started with: > You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. The argument is not "insects can't be tasty", the argument is "insects may indeed be tasty but people can taste that it's not beef/chicken". Given that people can tell the difference between, say, grass fed and grain fed beef, the claim that an insect or vegetable-based alternative will be indistinguishable needs more evidence than "nuh uh!"

alinenache 12y ago

http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.ro/2013/02/food-and-sleep.html http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.ro/2013/02/food-...

wahsd 12y ago

> "...an invasive water mold ... reached Ireland, where, '... four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and … the rest were heavily dependent on them.' Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop . http://ensia.com/voices/its-time-to-rethink-americas-corn-system/ http://ensia.com/voices/its-time-to-rethink-americas-corn-sy...

Retric 12y ago
(roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. So, a 50% drop in corn production would not have nearly the impact you might think. Also, during the potato famine Ireland was forced to export a lot of food which made everything far worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#mediaviewer/File:Potatoes_Production_Great_Famine_en.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#mediavie... Note: Yield per acer does not stay down for that long but acerage under production does.
qwerta 12y ago
> Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop There would still be plenty of food to go around. Problem was that British did not allowed people to eat corn.
- Wildgoose 12y ago
  Rubbish. There was famine across the whole of Europe. The government imported millet to feed people and militant Irish Nationalists called it "Peel's Brimstone" (it's yellow, remember) and claimed that those eating it would put their immortal souls in danger. Yes, they could have done more. But that doesn't mean they actively plotted to starve people as modern Irish Nationalists like to claim.
yabs 12y ago
maybe we'd be better off? so much corn (and byproducts) not a good things for us.

aikah 12y ago

Apocalypse means "revelation". I hate when people use that word like it means "the end of society as we know it",or like it's "madmax time" or something. Apocalypse is of religious nature.It has nothing to do with a "global catastrophe.". Aren't scientists supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?How can they continue to spread that non-sense? PS:I'm not religious.But the word Apocalypse has a specific meaning.

umsm 12y ago
The meaning of words evolve and are adapted. It clearly refers to "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale"
jtreminio 12y ago
> a great disaster : a sudden and very bad event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse
sanderjd 12y ago
Is there another word that better (or even similarly) captures what "apocalypse" has come to mean? I don't know of one, and I think it is a useful thing to have a word for. It is almost never worth fighting a word's widely-understood meaning. (Although I was definitely disappointed when dictionaries added an alternate definition of "literally" as meaning "figuratively"...)
- defen 12y ago
  The technically correct term is "eschaton", but no one uses that and everyone uses "apocalypse". I don't think this is a battle worth fighting.
  - pmoriarty 12y ago
    The Illuminatus Trilogy does.[1] Immanentize the Eschaton! [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

swamp40 12y ago

Most of the advice in the article is a bit silly; however, the question is vitally important. Most large cities only have 2-3 days worth of food available. If the daily deliveries stop for whatever reason, things will go bad fast. The best three pieces of advice I ever heard: 1) Get out of the cities. 2) Get out of the cities. 3) Get out of the cities.

personlurking 12y ago
It was just yesterday that I was discussing this question with some friends, ie, what do you do if shit hits the fan? Most said 'get out of the city' first so that's reassuring. But the scary part is I don't know how to build a house, cultivate food, nor do I have the property to do so.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Same here. I live in New York; if shit hit the fan in an hour, I'm not sure how much there is to be gained by leaving. At least here, I know the area, I can expect to stay reasonably warm in the current weather inside my building, I can work together with the neighbors that I know. We have enough food in our kitchen to last us a week, and we could immediately begin to stockpile water. We even have some medical supplies. Hell, there are always rats I could trap and eat if I were willing to risk bioaccumulating some poison. If I set out for New Jersey, or Connecticut, or even Long Island, I immediately lose shelter, I am limited to the food I can carry on my person, I don't know where the nearest stores or houses are, and I don't know anyone there at all. The only immediate advantage I can think of is that there would be less people around willing to kill me for my stuff.
  - hga 12y ago
    The textbook "survivalist" (the term prior to prepper, see the literature going back to the 1970s) answer to this is to have one or more "retreats", places you can flee to. Such as relatives living in less populated places, where you can offer skills and manual labor to help out. Or a "vacation home" that's a bit more than that. Sheltering in place can have its advantages, but if you're living in NYC, it's game over, you're not even allowed to effectively defend yourself (less than 60K each licenses to own handguns and long guns, numbers personally counted by myself after the lists were leaked). In any big city it sounds marginal (in sizing ammo required, one of the best survivalist, Bruce Clayton, asked "How many firefights do you expect to survive?"), then again, it actually takes much less than you might think to keep people alive. Not very many tractor trailers filled with wheat and corn (e.g. "downshift" and feed people what we've been feeding animals), so of course all this depends on the shape of the disaster.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

Why wait until after a world apocalypse? Insects are plentiful and nutritious and we should be eating more of them now. There's plenty of evidence that insects are high quality protein with low fat. In many traditional societies around the world, termites, grubs, grasshoppers, and other creepy crawly things play an important nutritional role. Years ago, my wife and I read a beautifully illustrated travelogue "Man Eating Bugs" written by a husband-and-wife team who traveled the world to see (and sample) insect cuisine in many cultures. Fascinating stuff. It's a generally well supported view among paleontologists that primitive humans ate lots of bugs. We were opportunistic foragers from way back. It's only in recent centuries, in "civilized" places, that we have regarded bugs as a repulsive thing to eat. I would imagine that in and after a nuclear winter, animal and vegetable life would dwindle to a tiny population that would take hundreds if not thousands of years to replenish. Probably we should be caching genetic material, sperm, and seeds of every species in some safe, underground arkology, so that two hundred years after the meltdown, whoever's left can restore some biodiversity.

pmoriarty 12y ago
I have sympathy for insects, and I do not want to harm more of them.
maxerickson 12y ago
There are many seed (and other types of genetic material) banks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault Is a famous one.
wyager 12y ago
If a major restaurant started using insect based meat products, the irrational public backlash would be tremendous.
IvyMike 12y ago
I supported a kickstarter to get these cricket protein energy bars manufactured. You can order a box now. https://www.exoprotein.com/ https://www.exoprotein.com/ To me, they pretty much taste like any other energy bar--in fact, it's kind of a letdown since you want something more exotic.

cowardlydragon 12y ago

The degree of cooperation the article assumes is untenable on a global scale. Perhaps more isolated countries could coordinate, or maybe after the initial chaos some coordination could develop... He ignores that the most plentiful source of food will be other people after a month or so...

vorg 12y ago
Yes, based on the litmus test of the recent lack of global cooperation in managing climate change, we can expect developed countries to look after their own citizens only, using their militaries to steal all available food from less developed countries. Immigration-based countries such as the U.S. will be better positioned to convince their citizen base that they owe nothing to other countries peoples by presenting their own population as "representative of the world's ethnic balance", and even as "the subset of the world that God wants to save". Expect to hear "the United States is the Ark of Noah for this day and age" broadcast on U.S. televisions as drone robots march through the Brahmaputra harvesting rice for loading onto ships destined for the U.S. as the local population starve. The leaders of developing nations with nukes such as Russia and India will be given U.S. citizenship en mass, Roman Empire style, in return for control over those weapons. English-language testing will be canceled for Chinese students wanting to study in the U.S., who'll be distributed around colleges in cities all over the U.S. to discourage their parents launching Chinese nukes at them.
Semiapies 12y ago
Well, where "cooperation" is "people kindly send us mushrooms out of the goodness of their collective heart", sure. North America and Europe paying elevated prices for food from the tropics, now, that could actually work. At least until someone decides it sounds more fun to just invade some of those countries (and ends up spending even more for the privilege).

escape_goat 12y ago

I am going to try to divert your minds away towards some questions that you might not be interested in, but nonetheless could be more productive than the game of hole-poking that this essay invites. I think many readers will have arrived at a similar set of conclusions, based on whatever assertions or citations may have inspired doubt; for me, it was Pearce's surprise that the world was unable to feed everyone despite having full agricultural production. Perhaps I have greatly misunderstood the matter, but I had believed that problems of famine and chronic hunger were entirely due localized logistic and political problems, and that the world was in fact handily capable of feeding everyone, even with the current (very inefficient) distribution and scale of agricultural production. This suggests to me that either I am very wrong --- something that does happen --- or that Pearce and Denkenburger might not have done a lot of what one could term 'peripheral' research on the topic they were interested in. This is a situation where two engineers are attempting to problem solve in a domain that might require, at any given turn, significant expertise in chemical or biological processes; or manufacturing processes, for that matter, or logistics, or economics, or international commerce. Consequently, this comes across as what one might term a 'Dunning-Krueger Study': facile, misinformed "solutions" to misunderstood problems in which the progenitor has an erroneous confidence. Given my own lack of knowledge, it would be hypocritical to label it thusly; the deposition of their suggestions should be placed in the hands of the various relevant domains. My question is regarding this type of research in general. I imagine the defence of it would be that it (at least) initiates investigation and problem solving, and that it (at least) arrives at useful suggestions, preliminary analyses, and approximate solutions. Does the Dunning-Kruger phase of knowledge have a discernible utility or application? Is there in fact a use or place for such investigations? Are they a form of deceptive mimesis, imitating research in pursuit of resources? Does ignorance of the domain of knowledge ever have a value? If so, how does one identify that one is in a Dunning-Krueger situation, and how should one proceed from there? Can one have knowledge about the meta-domain of Dunning-Krueger situations that allows one to limit or avoid the negative consequences of misjudgement? It strikes me that perhaps situations analogous to the one in which a hypothetical Peirce and Denkenburger are required to figure out how to feed the entire world after an apocalyptic event are not in fact rare, but actually occur all the time, and that it is a routine problem in design and engineering that one needs to find solutions in a problem domain that one understands poorly or not at all. I have no expertise to support this notion; there is a question mark hanging on the end of the assertion. But one could regard this as occurring in the course of ordinary life as well. How does one systematically make the best possible decisions on the basis of incomplete and possibly erroneous information, given that computation is itself a cost? In that context, a Dunning-Krueger epistemology starts to look like a reasonable strategy.

hga 12y ago

Let me elevate a comment in a subtread to the top level: nuclear winter is bunk, real effects would be on the scale of historical volcanic eruptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768412 BUT, if you want a disaster of that scale, nature will be happy to provide! Just have a big meteorite hit an ocean; hitting a big and deep body of water is critical, because otherwise "too much" of the heat radiates back into space. That's a big reason the vast majority of fielded nuclear weapons never got very big, there effects doesn't scale well. There's some good science fiction that covers this and how to respond, email me at my contact address if you want a recommendation that is necessarily a spoiler.

carsonreinke 12y ago

Nice to see Michigan Tech!

Adam503 12y ago

Braiiiiins, of course. Jeez.

crabhapple 12y ago

> The Great Famine, as it came to be known, could have been avoided in any number of ways, not least by ceasing the export of food from Ireland to Britain. But the British government failed to take effective action. "...the British government failed to take effective action" That's one way of putting it!