Recently I’ve been thinking about a possible fictional character in an apocalyptic setting who was a big foodie in life, and how they would deal or work to improve their meal situations when they can. I guess my question would be if you were in some long term survival situation outside your usual setup, what would you do for improving meals, etc?
I THINK ABOUT THIS ALL THE TIME.
So JIll and I are what we like to call “Practical preppers.” Stockpiling ammo and canned food is great and all, but it’s got nothing on knowing how to grow food (both of us), forage (me, mostly), reload brass (me), animal husbandry (her mostly), and so on and so forth. You can’t kill me for what I know, roving gangs of weirdos! Won’t help you!
Anyway I have given a great deal of thought to the state of my kitchen, post-downfall, and salt is my main worry. Salt is a major part of what makes food taste good, and would also be the hardest for me to get hold of. If there were a salt spring within a few days walk, depending on where we ended up, you could do that once or twice a year. But that’s the hardest thing for me.
Sugar? You can live without sugar. You go without sugar long enough, carrots and berries taste REAL sweet. I don’t worry about not making cakes, but also, i want to learn to keep bees! So we’d have honey, hypothetically. So once a year, we’d get honey cakes or something.
I do know enough about forage to get things like various herbs that live out in the country, wild onions and garlic, peppery herbs, etc. So there would be SOME variety in spicing, but a lot of the difficulty of life would be more or less learning to deal with blander food, which annoys me as much as anyone, trust, but in summer there would be more options.
Butter would be gettable because we’d aim for a herd of goats. Goats are THE apocalypse animal, friends. TRUST. They provide meat, milk, they live much more easily than cattle, they can survive on rougher things, they’re smarter than sheep, they’re just all around great. Ideally I’d love a fiber goat or two. Chickens are also easily kept, but not even I am stupid enough to think seriously about having cows in the end of it all.
So KNOWLEDGE is the big thing. KNowledge and the ability to trade, because you gotta get a baby goat from somewhere, right? They can steal your food, sure, but they can’t steal what you KNOW.
