5 ms·

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

by 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.
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      Sure, but this presumes that you've already done the prepwork - my comment was based on my current status, now. I don't have anyplace nearby I could retreat to. I'm also not sure how much of a game-over New York is - sure, I don't have a gun to defend myself, but statistically, how many of us own guns anyway? If I were still living in Dallas, or Austin, the number of guns I have at hand would be the same as now - zero. And one small advantage of NYC is that my neighbors probably won't be coming at me with rifles and shotguns, either. I think that all these equations change very rapidly based on how much preparation you've done. I've done zero.
      - hga 12y ago
        Presumably some of those neighbors you know, if you were in Dallas or Austin, would legally own guns. Statistically, at least half the country owns guns (add survey results to reasonable estimates of "none of your business" non-responses, double check with NICS sales plus new firearms production and imports, which are closely tracked for tax reasons, vs. the New Math of gun grabbers which would have the average gun owner's armory at around $100K per my estimate). It's estimated there are at least 2 million illegally owned guns in NYC, and while plenty are not in the hands of true "bad guys", plenty obviously are, and unless your group can stay off the radar while everyone else around you is starving, which will get hard as people get thinner ... someone better armed will come knocking sooner or later. And agreed to the preparation. But do you truly know no one in "flyover country" who might take you in?
        pavel_lishin 12y ago
        The problem with flyover country is that you typically have to fly into it - in case of a great disaster, my odds of walking to Indiana aren't great.
        hga 12y ago
        It's been my personal observation that "flyover country" includes upstate NY, which doesn't feel materially different from my corner of SW Missouri. But of course what really counts is where those relatives or friends are in comparison to you, and if you're alert and decisive enough to not miss "the last train out", assuming that's a possibility.
- Nzen 12y ago
  James Burke's 1978 TV series, Connections, starts with just that quandry. He starts with the question [what do we do if all the electricity goes out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw) and uses that zombie escape as a path to our bedrock tool: the plow. The article reminds me a lot of Randall Monroe's What If? site when he answers questions like, [What if all the water disappeared](http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/). And finally, I have lots of sympathy for the bug eating movement. I would totes eat cricket mcnuggets. But, when I went to buy some insects to make some, all I found was fish bait (unless I rear my own). I felt a bit dizzy and questioned my motives a while, before I remembered that those suppliers are targeting their predominant market.
nate_meurer 12y ago
Yep, just-in-time logistics are highly efficient, at the expense of low inventories. The oft-repeated advice to vacate cities is complete bullshit. No matter what "countryside" means, there's less food there in almost every case. Go to any small town and what do you find? Smaller grocery stores, with inventories just as tight as in the cities. Same suburban-style communities of people just as unprepared as anyone else. Emergency provision of supplies is made efficient by the same things as normal delivery logistics: densely clustered populations and major infrastructure, exactly the things that make cities what they are. Just look that the slow-motion SHTF scenario of the Great Depression of the '30s, when the American countryside was drained of its population, never to recover.
- hga 12y ago
  While I agree with your general point, outside of course grain growing regions, there were too many things going in the '30s to ascribe the rural depopulation you note to just this. Biggest example would be the federal government suppressing food production and trying to keep prices high, at the same time the same Department of Agriculture estimated 1/4 of the population was malnourished. As was confirmed by the WWII draft, and I've read that was one of the inputs into the Truman school lunch law. As an extreme example, see Wickard v. Filburn where in 1942 the Supreme Court ruled the Federal government could prevent you from growing wheat on your own property for your own consumption. Get back to the price supports, a big problem was an inability for all farmers/farms to make a living on what they could produce. Specialization meant it was much harder to try to provide for yourself everything you needed, and people responded to these incentives and opportunities in more urban areas, real ones at least once WWII production got started and the draft drained the manpower pool. And of course a large part of this was increased mechanization, which pretty much never stopped replacing farm labor with machines. My parents are from farms and the Silent Generation, so they experienced the tail end of this. And they made very sure to "get off the farm", the work is brutal, a lot more so back then.
  - nate_meurer 12y ago
    Grain-growing regions have grain, not food. Short term survival in oft-fantasized SHTF scenarios depends on easily accessible calories. A grain elevator full of maize is not accessible calories. Less so a cow. So while you're in the country trying to break in to a grain bin so you can chew on some raw millet, I'll be cowering (and crying) in my suburban basement waiting for the National Guard to set up a food distribution center close enough for me to fight my way to it with two mags of 9mm and a sharp stick. See how absurd these discussions get? BTW, I have family in a small Kansas town a with couple thousand people, four dipshit cops, roughly equal amounts of meth and ammo, and one giant grain elevator. If SHTF I bet you my mano&metate that they show up at my house in the city within days or weeks.
Houshalter 12y ago
Cities often have large elevators full of grain. Much of it is meant to be fed to animals which would no longer make sense in a disaster. This article is more concerned with the long term. What do we do when the grain runs out?

by swamp40 12y ago

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.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Sure, but this presumes that you've already done the prepwork - my comment was based on my current status, now. I don't have anyplace nearby I could retreat to. I'm also not sure how much of a game-over New York is - sure, I don't have a gun to defend myself, but statistically, how many of us own guns anyway? If I were still living in Dallas, or Austin, the number of guns I have at hand would be the same as now - zero. And one small advantage of NYC is that my neighbors probably won't be coming at me with rifles and shotguns, either. I think that all these equations change very rapidly based on how much preparation you've done. I've done zero.
    - hga 12y ago
      Presumably some of those neighbors you know, if you were in Dallas or Austin, would legally own guns. Statistically, at least half the country owns guns (add survey results to reasonable estimates of "none of your business" non-responses, double check with NICS sales plus new firearms production and imports, which are closely tracked for tax reasons, vs. the New Math of gun grabbers which would have the average gun owner's armory at around $100K per my estimate). It's estimated there are at least 2 million illegally owned guns in NYC, and while plenty are not in the hands of true "bad guys", plenty obviously are, and unless your group can stay off the radar while everyone else around you is starving, which will get hard as people get thinner ... someone better armed will come knocking sooner or later. And agreed to the preparation. But do you truly know no one in "flyover country" who might take you in?
      - pavel_lishin 12y ago
        The problem with flyover country is that you typically have to fly into it - in case of a great disaster, my odds of walking to Indiana aren't great.
        hga 12y ago
        It's been my personal observation that "flyover country" includes upstate NY, which doesn't feel materially different from my corner of SW Missouri. But of course what really counts is where those relatives or friends are in comparison to you, and if you're alert and decisive enough to not miss "the last train out", assuming that's a possibility.
Nzen 12y ago
James Burke's 1978 TV series, Connections, starts with just that quandry. He starts with the question [what do we do if all the electricity goes out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw) and uses that zombie escape as a path to our bedrock tool: the plow. The article reminds me a lot of Randall Monroe's What If? site when he answers questions like, [What if all the water disappeared](http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/). And finally, I have lots of sympathy for the bug eating movement. I would totes eat cricket mcnuggets. But, when I went to buy some insects to make some, all I found was fish bait (unless I rear my own). I felt a bit dizzy and questioned my motives a while, before I remembered that those suppliers are targeting their predominant market.

nate_meurer 12y ago

Yep, just-in-time logistics are highly efficient, at the expense of low inventories. The oft-repeated advice to vacate cities is complete bullshit. No matter what "countryside" means, there's less food there in almost every case. Go to any small town and what do you find? Smaller grocery stores, with inventories just as tight as in the cities. Same suburban-style communities of people just as unprepared as anyone else. Emergency provision of supplies is made efficient by the same things as normal delivery logistics: densely clustered populations and major infrastructure, exactly the things that make cities what they are. Just look that the slow-motion SHTF scenario of the Great Depression of the '30s, when the American countryside was drained of its population, never to recover.

hga 12y ago
While I agree with your general point, outside of course grain growing regions, there were too many things going in the '30s to ascribe the rural depopulation you note to just this. Biggest example would be the federal government suppressing food production and trying to keep prices high, at the same time the same Department of Agriculture estimated 1/4 of the population was malnourished. As was confirmed by the WWII draft, and I've read that was one of the inputs into the Truman school lunch law. As an extreme example, see Wickard v. Filburn where in 1942 the Supreme Court ruled the Federal government could prevent you from growing wheat on your own property for your own consumption. Get back to the price supports, a big problem was an inability for all farmers/farms to make a living on what they could produce. Specialization meant it was much harder to try to provide for yourself everything you needed, and people responded to these incentives and opportunities in more urban areas, real ones at least once WWII production got started and the draft drained the manpower pool. And of course a large part of this was increased mechanization, which pretty much never stopped replacing farm labor with machines. My parents are from farms and the Silent Generation, so they experienced the tail end of this. And they made very sure to "get off the farm", the work is brutal, a lot more so back then.
- nate_meurer 12y ago
  Grain-growing regions have grain, not food. Short term survival in oft-fantasized SHTF scenarios depends on easily accessible calories. A grain elevator full of maize is not accessible calories. Less so a cow. So while you're in the country trying to break in to a grain bin so you can chew on some raw millet, I'll be cowering (and crying) in my suburban basement waiting for the National Guard to set up a food distribution center close enough for me to fight my way to it with two mags of 9mm and a sharp stick. See how absurd these discussions get? BTW, I have family in a small Kansas town a with couple thousand people, four dipshit cops, roughly equal amounts of meth and ammo, and one giant grain elevator. If SHTF I bet you my mano&metate that they show up at my house in the city within days or weeks.

Houshalter 12y ago

Cities often have large elevators full of grain. Much of it is meant to be fed to animals which would no longer make sense in a disaster. This article is more concerned with the long term. What do we do when the grain runs out?