What is a famine like?

January 12, 2012
The weather has turned cold and icy and I heard that in a part of Alaska they’ve gotten 15 feet of snow from a storm that is still producing.  Think about how much snow that is!  Almost up to the eaves on a TWO story house. People will have to tunnel in it, rather than ‘dig out.’
But after a dusting last night that didn’t produce enough moisture to keep my fruit trees happy, (lawns in OK are dormant this time of year), a big ol’ pile of snow sounds rather nice. So I’ve sent in an order for half of Alaska’s snow.  Just six or seven feet, piled outside the garage door.  Plenty to play in. Too much to travel in.
   Sometimes that just sounds lovely. I know the unintended consequences of praying for moisture can be impressive, but we DO need it.
   And I’m ready, too.  I just finished reading a book called “The Secret Holocaust Diaries”.  It is a translation of diaries kept by a Ukrainian girl through world war two. I’ve read half a dozen similar accounts and I’ve come to realize something. When famine comes, whether from an artificial shortage, (did you know that the Russian govt. deliberately killed a couple million Ukrainian people by cutting off their food supply?) or from the genuine crop failure globally, or a war stopping the food supply chain, people become desperately brutal when they’re hungry. They become savage when they’re starving. There’s no such thing as property rights or anything else. 
The winter that the Germans marched into Russia, temperatures dropped into the minus 50’s. Starving German soldiers would come into the kitchen where a few Ukrainians were burning the last of their furniture and when their feet had thawed enough to remove their boots, their skin and muscle of their feet would stay in the boot, with only bone still attached.  When thier faces thawed, their noses and ears would fall off. Obviously, thousands of soldiers died from the elements.
   I recently posted about food storage. I’m much too young to have memory of a famine brought on by war, and there hasn’t been one that caused it here in the US since the Civil war. But the whole rest of the planet has had famine in their country for reasons beyond
the citizen’s control in the last hundred years. 
Make no mistake.  No matter how much you like the current US president, no matter who he or she might be, food can’t be legislated.
Right now, there is plenty of food all over the US. We should fill our pantries and store it under the beds and at the back of closets. If we had any notion of how fragile our food supply chains are, we would invest in food.
It might interest you to know that Ukraine is thought to be one of the very most fertile, protentially productive areas of the world. City dwellers mostly have little garden plots outside the city where they grow fruit and vegetables that they live off of in the cold months. But when a hostile government, (their own in that case) decided to starve them out, millions died! 
  The same story, with variations on which war caused the problem, has been told in Korea, China, all of Europe, Russia, and in the south during the Civil war.
If you’re still not convinced, go just 24 hours without eating. Most Americans have never been truly hungry.
The best food to store is 1. stored without moisture. (grains, pasta, beans, dry potatoes, dry milk)  2. nutrient dense, (grain, pasta, dry beans dry potatoes, dry milk). 3. Inexpensive (whole grains like oatmeal or bulk wheat, pasta, dry beans, dry potatoes). Dry milk is more expensive than wet milk, and also must be rotated. But you wouldn’t regret having it if you couldn’t get the wet milk.
  I’m troubled by the advertising that says “Why store food if your family doesn’t love the taste?”  The answer that fat Americans have lost sight of along with their toes is, “To keep alive and healthy!  Pre-prepared meals, like MRE’s and other ready to eat foods are at least 10 times more expensive than the true staples we need to keep healthy and energetic.
You don’t need to do it all at once, but start buying an extra case of spagetti noodles, (they store in the least space per pound) when you go to the market. Toss in a box of powdered milk each time you go. Buy one of each type of dry beans and peas on that grocery isle and as you try them all out, buy lots of your favorites.  If you do as I suggest, you’ll bless my name when the time comes that we all need it. 
Well, I have to go out this morning. . .into the cold, January day. Happy preparing!

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1 Comment

  • Reply Rob and Marseille January 12, 2012 at 9:43 pm

    i say the same thing every time I hear/see that commercial.

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