Learn skills now, and what's with potatoes?
Dec 27, 2014 8:33:05 GMT 10
SA Hunter, You Must Enter A Name, and 4 more like this
Post by graynomad on Dec 27, 2014 8:33:05 GMT 10
I'll start with an article I found on Quora (link: www.quora.com/Irish-Potato-Famine/Why-did-so-many-people-starve-to-death-during-the-Irish-potato-famine), dunno where the "physics" comes into it but whatever.
Irish Potato Famine: Why did so many people starve to death during the Irish potato famine?
Couldn't they fish, hunt, trap birds, or eat wild greens?
It comes down to a simple intersection of physics (well, chemistry but bear with me) and politics.
Imagine if you were a parent of a family of say seven kids. Seven kids, two parents, 9 mouths to feed. You are doing ok, fine-ish, not rich, but not saving capital.
Then tomorrow morning, all your reserves and all your bulwark against the future, not only a month from now, but that evening is wiped out.
Are you going to learn to fish in that time if you didn't already do it? Trap birds? Really? How are you going to go about that? Do you, reading this, actually know how to "trap birds"? One in a thousand of you does. One in ten knows how to fish - IF - you are allowed access to the rivers and lakes (which we were not).
How many reading this know how to fish in the sea? Navigate a boat on the ocean? One in twenty. Recognise an oak tree (for acorns)? One in three.
But you don't have the leisure time to learn. Your food for tonight is rotten and so is your food for tomorrow and the day after and the weeks after that. In fact, the sprouting potatoes you were counting for the next crop are blighted in the ground. And the kids are crying hungry now.
But you should have learnt all those crafts mentioned in the question. Yes. We should have. But who has time for a hobby when you have kids to feed. Rich people. Irish people in 1847 were not rich.
And who has time to put something aside when the - often Irish - rack-rent landlords kept people poor and small-holders small? For reference, when I say "small holder", I mean "talamh dhá bhó" - room, lit., for two cows.
The simple truth is that those who had those skills referred to in the question did indeed survive by those means. For those who did not already have the skills (or the access to protein - don't forget it was a capital offense to poach the "Queen's Deer" etc.), they expended more calories trying to learn how to get food then they got back from eating whatever they scavenged.
There were a lot of political reasons for the famine as well it seems, but that is irrelevant, it's the end result that counts, a SHTF event. I think there are a couple of take aways for us.
1) When the SHTF it's too late to learn any required skills. You might have a $1000 compound bow and figure you'll just go bush and shoot a camel. That won't happen unless you've already been shooting camels for some time. Same with growing food, learning a skill that might get you accepted into a safe community etc etc. Whatever it is you think will be important post SHTF, learn it now.
2) Some tasks use more energy than they return. There is little point spending all day wandering around in the bush in 40-degree heat and returning with a single mushroom. So foraging won't help most people unless they know what to look for and of course there is something worth finding in the area.
3) Have a plan B. One problem they had was monoculture, ie they relied entirely on potatoes. Translated to our situation, if you intend to bug in also have a backup plan to bug out, and vice-versa because if you live in an inner city location maybe you won't be able to bug out. My plan A is to sit right where I am, but I have 4 BOVs as well, all very different and appropriate for different scenarios.
Anyway I'm preaching to the chior here I think, but I thought it was interesting. A heck of a lot of people with no reserves (ie non-preppers) died in the famine, not their fault because for many reasons they didn't have the option to prep, we do.
And now something else.
In one of the comments on that link someone said that the potatoes is the only vegetable that provides enough nutrients to be able to live off it alone, and there's this as well
So my question is, can one live entirely (or even mostly) off potatoes?
Irish Potato Famine: Why did so many people starve to death during the Irish potato famine?
Couldn't they fish, hunt, trap birds, or eat wild greens?
It comes down to a simple intersection of physics (well, chemistry but bear with me) and politics.
Imagine if you were a parent of a family of say seven kids. Seven kids, two parents, 9 mouths to feed. You are doing ok, fine-ish, not rich, but not saving capital.
Then tomorrow morning, all your reserves and all your bulwark against the future, not only a month from now, but that evening is wiped out.
Are you going to learn to fish in that time if you didn't already do it? Trap birds? Really? How are you going to go about that? Do you, reading this, actually know how to "trap birds"? One in a thousand of you does. One in ten knows how to fish - IF - you are allowed access to the rivers and lakes (which we were not).
How many reading this know how to fish in the sea? Navigate a boat on the ocean? One in twenty. Recognise an oak tree (for acorns)? One in three.
But you don't have the leisure time to learn. Your food for tonight is rotten and so is your food for tomorrow and the day after and the weeks after that. In fact, the sprouting potatoes you were counting for the next crop are blighted in the ground. And the kids are crying hungry now.
But you should have learnt all those crafts mentioned in the question. Yes. We should have. But who has time for a hobby when you have kids to feed. Rich people. Irish people in 1847 were not rich.
And who has time to put something aside when the - often Irish - rack-rent landlords kept people poor and small-holders small? For reference, when I say "small holder", I mean "talamh dhá bhó" - room, lit., for two cows.
The simple truth is that those who had those skills referred to in the question did indeed survive by those means. For those who did not already have the skills (or the access to protein - don't forget it was a capital offense to poach the "Queen's Deer" etc.), they expended more calories trying to learn how to get food then they got back from eating whatever they scavenged.
There were a lot of political reasons for the famine as well it seems, but that is irrelevant, it's the end result that counts, a SHTF event. I think there are a couple of take aways for us.
1) When the SHTF it's too late to learn any required skills. You might have a $1000 compound bow and figure you'll just go bush and shoot a camel. That won't happen unless you've already been shooting camels for some time. Same with growing food, learning a skill that might get you accepted into a safe community etc etc. Whatever it is you think will be important post SHTF, learn it now.
2) Some tasks use more energy than they return. There is little point spending all day wandering around in the bush in 40-degree heat and returning with a single mushroom. So foraging won't help most people unless they know what to look for and of course there is something worth finding in the area.
3) Have a plan B. One problem they had was monoculture, ie they relied entirely on potatoes. Translated to our situation, if you intend to bug in also have a backup plan to bug out, and vice-versa because if you live in an inner city location maybe you won't be able to bug out. My plan A is to sit right where I am, but I have 4 BOVs as well, all very different and appropriate for different scenarios.
Anyway I'm preaching to the chior here I think, but I thought it was interesting. A heck of a lot of people with no reserves (ie non-preppers) died in the famine, not their fault because for many reasons they didn't have the option to prep, we do.
And now something else.
In one of the comments on that link someone said that the potatoes is the only vegetable that provides enough nutrients to be able to live off it alone, and there's this as well
A single acre of potatoes and the milk of a single cow was enough to feed a whole Irish family a monotonous but nutritionally adequate diet for a healthy, vigorous (and desperately poor) rural population.
