dandelion

this is the best response ✅

Yes, I also used “lazy gardening” and permaculture oriented techniques - I don’t know how to tell you that for most people this is an unreasonable amount of labor. Even if you do no labor on weeding and digging, you are left with significant labor managing harvests, storing your harvest, etc. - for people who work full-time or don’t have much time or energy to give, or for people who are differently abled or become injured or disabled, farming can be inaccessible. It is better to think of it as a full-time job, even when approaching it with permaculture and “one straw revolution” style techniques.

hm, I’m not sure in what way you think I avoided the subject 🤔

sunchokes are a low-calorie food, which is why I specifically don’t suggest them as a famine food. It would be better to grow sunflowers that produce seeds, as at least those have oils and will provide calories.

Potatoes are a much better option than sunchokes, but require much more attention and effort, to prevent blight and ensure a good crop, etc. - it’s not trivial to produce your own calories.

I’m fine with suggesting you can pick up producing some of your own food or calories, but as someone who has actually tried doing this in a suburban context, I want to warn people about the intensive time and labor involved.

Farming is best done on a farm, by farmers; more people should think about whether their time and effort is best spent on farming or not, whether they want to farm full-time or not, etc. We need to be clear-sighted that nobody can achieve self-sufficiency on their own, and that everyone has limited time and energy.

We also need to be clear that having a victory garden is not going to replace the reliance on farmers for calories or prevent famine or save people from catastrophic collapse of food production systems or supply chains.

Which is why I am emphasizing our reliance on farmers rather than telling everyone to become a farmer.

I guess my point was more that in both cases of the Great Famine and the Late Victorian Holocausts, there was sufficient food in storage to feed the people dying of starvation - it was the introduction of markets and the resulting false austerity that prevented the otherwise typical food distribution systems during times of famine from happening, and then lots of deaths occurring. In a sense markets are a policy choice to let the poor die. If you can’t afford food, you do not deserve to live. That is the logic of capitalism.

So my point is that even if we see food production as “solved”, we shouldn’t forget the problems of food distribution - and sure, they’re related, to your point over-production (through the development of fertilizer and other industrial methods of food production) under capitalism we can reduce prices and make distribution more accessible, … but when production occasionally fails, it is the economic system that starves people first (not necessarily the lack of food, which can also happen as in the cases of many other famines).

In pre-capitalist societies when food production failed, stocks of food were usually released and distribution was ensured in ways that marketized & capitalist societies have not done (where for example in Syria around the time of the Arab Spring, we saw grocers dying from starvation because they couldn’t make enough money selling food to afford to buy food for themselves).

And yes, starvation when food is abundant is a monumental policy failure - this is something we should be driving home more to people, that the US chooses to have starving and homeless people as a policy choice.

Completely agreed that social solutions are the only way to solve food insecurity, individual action like doomsday prepping is a distraction that primes us to victim-blame people who die for not “preparing” adequately.

sunchokes are fairly weedy and hard to get rid of, and don’t really produce enough calories to be worth it in a survival situation.

Also, you should grow stuff you already eat - don’t expect to grow a bunch of food that you aren’t used to cooking or eating and to enjoy it.

tbh, it might make most sense to identify what you spend the most money on and what’s easiest to grow that would replace the money you spend with time tending - usually that’s fresh herbs. Growing sage, thyme, rosemary, green onions, basil, etc. is usually fairly easy and will save a lot of money (a bundle of fresh herbs can cost like $5 for a very small amount).

Garlic is also fairly expensive per 100 g, and I found it not too hard to grow - I managed to grow enough garlic in one season in a small area on a suburban plot to not have to buy grocery store garlic for over a year.

But on the other hand, you don’t tend to buy a lot of garlic by weight, so it may or may not make sense given the amount of time it takes to garden.

People need to understand that gardening is a huge amount of labor and time spent - it’s not economical compared to working a job and buying what you need.

So, if you’re unemployed and unable to work, but able to garden, it’s unlikely to be a great way to spend your time if your concern is saving money.

If your goal is to survive a catastrophe, I think it’s delusional to expect gardening to fully provide for your calories, and the same calculus applies: your time will be better spent making yourself valuable to someone who has excess food to give away (like your local CSA farmer friend); even just volunteering on their farm is a better use of time than trying to provide for your own calories by making your small urban or suburban lawn into a food production system.

I think this somewhat ignores the way markets kill people during times of famine - see the Late Victorian Holocausts or the Great Famine, in both of which there was plenty of food available, but the problem was the introduction of markets and artificial austerity measures that failed to distribute food to people dying of famine

so, food production might be a solved issue (I think that’s a bit more debatable given soil degradation and the threats to supply chains necessary for the industrial inputs needed to keep those food production systems going in their current, post-Green-Revolution format), but the distribution issue has not been solved and will likely result in many of us dying due to lack of economic power to afford food that will simply expire and rot in storage and then be destroyed and disposed of in a way that denies us access to the waste

here’s the study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032725024346

all the co-authors are Chinese and the main author is associated with:

Department of Nutrition and Food Hygiene, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Public Health Safety, School of Public Health, Institute of Nutrition, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200030, China

They don’t seem to disclose who funded the study, they claim the funders did not influence the design of the study, but then they also claim they did not have any specific grants from any public, private, non-profit, etc. sources.

The study just analyzes an existing data set, and all it does is show the same J-shaped curve that is commonly found with many things, e.g. the same thing they found in this study with coffee consumption is found with alcohol consumption:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2443580

Setting aside population risk, any clinician who has tried to counsel a patient about alcohol use has encountered the question: “But I thought a couple of drinks a night is good for my health?”

…

Three examples—alcohol consumption, body mass index (BMI), and blood pressure—help elucidate the challenges posed by J-shaped curves. With respect to alcohol consumption, a meta-analysis of 34 prospective studies, pooling findings from more than 1 million individuals and almost 100 000 deaths, showed a J-shaped relationship between alcohol intake and total mortality.1 Consumption of up to 2 drinks per day in women and 4 drinks per day in men was associated with lower mortality than zero consumption, with about one-half drink per day associated with the lowest mortality risk.

BMI and blood pressure are more complex risk factors not solely based on consumption, as with alcohol. BMI is a simple, if imperfect, proxy for energy metabolism—and therefore the current standard for representing healthy weight. A prospective study of 1.46 million white adults demonstrated a J-shaped association between BMI and all-cause mortality after adjusting for potential confounders, including smoking and alcohol intake.2 All-cause mortality was generally lowest among those with BMI of 20.0 to 24.9 and higher on either side of that interval.

tl;dr it’s not that it’s healthy to drink a couple drinks a day, or to drink a few cups of coffee a day; it’s more like because the average person consumes that much alcohol or coffee, the data we have is skewed and the outliers who fully abstain or over-indulge also happen to have worse health outcomes

being average is what is being tracked here, not that moderate alcohol consumption actually improves health outcomes

this is like the finding that any running no matter the mileage or time spent running massively improves health outcomes - that’s based on correlation studies that found people who identify as runners tend to be more healthy (because being a runner is associated with people who have higher income, better access to healthcare, etc. - not because running an insignificant amount actually massively improves your health).

This is a science and medicine communication issue. The take-away is absolutely not that drinking 2 - 3 cups of coffee is better for your mental health.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032725024346

looking at the study, basically they just found the same J-shaped correlation as found with other drug use like alcohol consumption

that is, the minority who fully abstain from alcohol have increased mortality risk and the minority who engage in excessive drinking also see increased mortality risk, but the majority who engage in moderate alcohol consumption tend to have the lowest mortality risk

The same is found here with caffeine consumption: in the dataset they looked at, most people drink 2 - 3 cups of coffee per day, and there are minorities on either side who drink much less or abstain from coffee, and a minority on the other side who drink much more than 2 - 3 cups a day.

Because most people don’t suffer from mood disorders, the people who do suffer are over-represented on the margins and diluted by healthy people in the category of average consumption.

It’s unlikely that actually drinking 2 - 3 cups of coffee is responsible for the positive outcomes in mood (just like we could say drinking moderate amounts of alcohol are not likely responsible for improved mortality rates), instead it’s probably fair to say that the average, healthy person tends to be like everyone else and engages in socially acceptable, moderate drug use. Why they are healthy probably has less to do with their drug use and more to do with other factors like diet, exercise, economic status, access to healthcare, environmental factors (like not living in a heavily polluted place, like the way ghettos are built next to a major interstate, or rather how interstates are often built through the poorest neighborhoods), and so on.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00700-y

The American Academy of Dermatology recommends washing the face twice a day with a gentle cleanser, applying a moisturizer and — during the day — putting on sunscreen and protective clothing.

skincare is simple: just wash your face, use moisturizer, and wear sunscreen (and keep out of the sun).

just a reminder that none of us can sufficiently “doom prep” and avoid the consequences of large catastrophes like those being discussed

beyond typical disaster preparedness: https://www.ready.gov/

probably the best thing would be to develop community ties - get to know your local weirdo farmers doing a CSA, make friends with EMTs, get to know your neighbors, get connected with a local community garden, etc.

We will survive or die together, individual prepping is not going to save you.

EDIT:

I would think lowering stress would be maximized by just not taking stimulants 😅

sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?