Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Knowledge of how to produce your own food. Unless you plan on having years worth of MREs, you’re going to run out eventually. Learn to garden so that you can just make more food.
MREs tend to sell online for about $4 a meal.
That would mean you would spend a little over $5,000 plus tax to get a year’s supply.
Technically, you can survive off of beans and rice and a few vitamin supplements.
You could also learn how to bow hunt to supplement your food with birds and wild animals.
Slingshot (or old-school sling but they’re much harder) is probably better for small game if we’re entertaining real dystopian collapse, unless you also learn how to make arrows.
I think if we’re talking about “real dystopian collapse”, as in a major population reduction, there are going to be more leftover bullets than you could shoot in a dozen lifetimes. If you’re thinking about hunting small game, get something that shoots .22 LR and don’t waste your time with slings and arrows.
And with that being said, trapping small game is more efficient than hunting with any kind of weapon, so if you wanted to learn bushcraft for hunting for food after the end, that’s where I’d start.
CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Producing food, year round, to feed yourself/family is actually insanely difficult. Small scale farming that provides year round is no small task and generally not considered “good” advice for prepping. Do that if you want to supplement sure but you’re going to die if your only source of food is the garden in your yard. Farming is a very labor intensive, highly contextual skill that requires highly specific knowledge with a huge variety of variables that can also just flat out fail through no fault of your own, it’s not a safe plan for survival.
Long term self stable foods like rice, beans, grains, pastas, canned goods, canned protein, dried goods all need to be stocked before you consider growing fresh food as part of the equation. Also canning/preserving food will be a huge task if you plan to rely on your own grown food, which is in and of itself a time consuming skill that requires the correct tools and knowledge to do well and safely.
If the time comes that your only food option is home grown food you’re as good as starved in basically the entirety of the US and I’m sure most other developed nations. If you happen to live in an agricultural valley that has actual real, dedicated farms with farmers who actually know how to produce food at scale you will survive longer but it will still be very difficult and social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul, go spend that time doing what the farmer needs so you can barter.
stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Join a community garden. You get both social connections and the yard garden experience - and as a bonus, your social connections are with people who know how to grow food and can give you advice 😆
That being said, don’t be too dismissive of “supplementing” your diet. If you know what you’re doing you can grow all the fresh veggies a person needs on a few hundred square feet per person. Fresh veggies are the kind of food most vulnerable to supply chain disruptions - like if, “hypothetically”, some toddler dictator decided to throw a tantrum for no apparent reason and start a war right on top of the shipping lane that the majority of the world’s fertilizer passes through - and they’re also the most beneficial kind of food to grow yourself, because you can grow varieties optimized for taste and nutrition instead of varieties optimized for shipping and appearance on grocery store shelves.
(Book recommendation: Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World. Read the chapter on how fresh Florida tomatoes are grown and you’ll never buy anything but canned tomatoes again 😆 )
Yeah, it takes knowledge and experience. Which is why you should start gardening now, so that you’ll have those skills when they become necessary.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I knew my hundreds of hours in Rimworld would pay off eventually
Sidyctism2@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Always have a psychpath in case you need to butcher people?