I bet most people laugh at the thought, safe in the knowledge that they are totally insulated from ever starving to death. 
In reality, most of us in the western world are as close to starving as any person in a third-world country wracked by war and famine and chronic corruption – plus three days. The ‘plus three days’ is important because that is just how long it would take for our system of food supply to break down irretrievably should just one link in our fragile supply system snap.
The ‘Just in Time’ system of food deliveries applies to many of our modern life’s necessities, whether petrol for the cars or power for our homes or medical support to save our lives. Coupled with aging and rust-ridden infrastructures, the danger of one little thing going wrong and the entire system collapsing is very real – remember Victoria’s gas crisis some years ago. One accident and the state was without any natural gas for weeks. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses without heating, hot water and cooking facilities.
Reflect also on our Australian and every other global authority’s complete inability to stop the spread of a simple virus. And it is just a flu virus, for God’s sake.
Disastrous breakdown could happen any time, anywhere, to any one of the fragile life-support systems trying to keep our society alive.
What makes the entire problem critical is the fact that, coupled with the fragility of our supply systems, very few of us have the ability to help or save ourselves. We pay others to do everything for us. We pay others to put food on our tables, provide us with heat and light, take away our rubbish, and soothe us with hours of mindless entertainment in front of glowing rectangles.
We are, as a society, a group of people who can no longer do anything for ourselves. We could not, for instance, provide our families with the basic stuff of life – food, warmth, shelter – should we be required to do so. We call this convenience. We call this civilization.
In the mid-1970s (when most people were still only one or two generations away from forbears who could actually do things for themselves) Dr E. E. Schumacher remarked in the forward to the first edition of John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency (1976) that “people are becoming less self-reliant and more dependent than has ever before been seen in history. They may claim to be more highly educated than any generation before them; but the fact remains they cannot really do anything for themselves.”
Imagine if Dr Schumacher were to see today’s society. If he thought it bad in 1976, what would he think, now? We are a society who believes with a quasi-religious fervour that it is someone else’s responsibility to put food on our tables, and we grow angry, our anger fueled with our deep sense of entitlement, should the supermarket’s shelves be even a teeny bit bare, or if the petrol bowsers are just a little bit dry, or if we don’t have instant access to all the products and appliances that make our busy-busy lives just a little bit more bearable. In the name of modernity and convenience we have rendered ourselves utterly helpless – and if something does go wrong, then, by God, we expect ‘them’ to come save us (’them’ being a vague concept of authorities who should instantly arrive with lots of bottled water, microwaveable food parcels – and the microwaves and generators to process them of course – and, please, please God, some wi-fi so we can get back on Twitter and tell everyone how awful it was without air conditioning).
We are helpless. We have all been programmed to rely on ’someone vaguely in authority but we aren’t quite sure who’ for the necessities of life (food, warmth, shelter) while being given total freedom to self-indulge in everything that doesn’t matter a whit. Yummy mummies teach their children everything and everything and provide them with everything and everything money (or should that be credit??) can buy … but don’t teach them how to turn a seed into a meal. Because that’s OK. Someone else will do that for us. And because, of course, they have no idea how to do it for themselves. Increasingly, said yummy mummy is lucky if she knows how to take half a kilo of flour, a cup of water, a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of yeast and turn it into the staff of life.
If anything goes wrong in our lives, we are preconditioned to sit and wait for ‘the authorities’ to turn up and fix it for us. Witness what happened after Hurricane Katrina. The majority of people simply sat and waited, helpless, until someone turned up to save them … or until they died. That is what modern society has taught us to do. Fortunately, all the victims of Hurricane Katrina were lucky to have ‘authorities’ who leaped into action and were there within moments to shelter, feed and calm their fevered brows. (What? They weren’t? Oh …. geez, who woulda thought?)
Closer to home, witness the impact a simple novel flu virus has had on our hospital system – and a flu virus that has, for the most part and for most people, mild symptoms. I keep seeing reports in the papers that elective surgery is likely to be cancelled, states are flying in extra life-support systems from overseas, hospital systems are being strained almost to breaking point.
For a flu virus with mild symptoms for the most part.
Just as well it wasn’t a highly contagious virus from the Ebola family, huh? Not only have our authorities proved they cannot stop a virus from spreading, I am not laying bets that our just-in-time medical system will save us once we got infected. At that point all of us would be standing shoulder to shoulder with every third-world peasant staring death in the face.
We live in a dream. We think we are insulated from all hard knocks. We think ‘the authorities’ will always be there to save us. Very few of us want to wake up from that dream. (Do you want the blue pill or the red pill? Do you want illusion or reality?)
The reality, of course, is that we are all just three more days further away from starvation than the poorest person in the poorest third-world country.
Anyway, that’s just some Sunday ramblings from me, written in rest periods between shovelling soil and sorting seeds. Gosh, all that work makes me grumpy …
I think you might find most people could live for more than three days on what they have in the pantry and freezer. When they run out they can do what the Hurricane Katrina victims did and start to loot!! Although some people didn’t seem to need to wait till they ran out.
It takes a person of poor nutrition about 60 days to starve (if they have water). We’d last 63 days. If we had water.
That was my point, all of us would survive only three days longer than a person in the third world. Three days is how long it would take our shops to run out of food (less if there was a panic, or looting – don’t think there is anything much stored in the back rooms of our supermarkets), and most people have less than a week’s supply of food on hand and no supply of water.
So from Point Disaster we’d live about 63 days while a third world person might live only 60 days.
Which is arguable because most third world inhabitants know how to find food in the landscape or have food growing close to hand and often have a natural water supply close by, too.
So they might actually outlive us. 😉
Sprawling suburbia is a death trap for most people. If we hit Point Disaster power and water would be gone within the week (if not earlier). Most people have little to no means to cook without power. (After all, why do we need it?) Most people have no access to an alternative source of water.
In 1930 (I am using American statistics here, but it would apply pretty much to Australia as well) about 80% of people had family living on land to which they could retreat if needed. Now? Now that percentage is down to 2%. Now, also, most people would not know what to do with land if they found themselves standing on it. That is the real disaster. We’ve voluntarily given up knowledge of anything real.
I sometimes wonder if someone (not human) was studying us the way we study other animals what would they think of us? Our silly way of living and interacting, our sense of community, feeding, and courtship. Because when it comes down to it we’re such an intelligent species (as much as we sometimes don’t seem like it 😛 ) but as time has gone on and life has become more ‘convenient’ (as you’ve mentioned before) we’ve turned our back on our most basic instincts. We have those instincts, or gut feelings, for a reason yet because of social conditioning we ignore them far too often. So often that it seems we’ve all but snuffed out the basic survival instinct our ancestors had. We don’t see a bag of flour at the supermarket and see all the hard work that’s gone into it, the fact that it started out as something tiny and was nurtured for a long time to get to an edible state. We see a bag of flour. We don’t see a dining table and see a once great tree that started out as a seed. We see somewhere to lean our elbows on and eat dinner. I think we often forget we’re animals, we could actually learn a lot from animals we see as less intelligent than us.
Your post has given me much more to ponder!
Good food for thought! It’s already made me start thinking about my survival plan and how I would cope – thanks for making my quiet afternoon more interesting 🙂
Wow, so true. You just woke me up, for some silly reason I thought self suffiency was something for an enthusiast and one to save money. Well, it would be best to improve my sad state of skill and knowledge. I have more time for it now that I no longer work as I’m a new mum (even though I do complain on where the day goes). And just that thought if anything, power failure or any disaster and I am unable to feed my family, that is the real tragedy right there.
Thankyou.
Oh how sadly true it is!
I live in “the Garden State”, but so few people really have gardens.My mother taught me to make my first batch of applesauce using the apples from our yard when I was old enough to stand on a chair. I was raised by Dad’s motto “DIY or DWO”: “do it yourself or do without”. It’s a good way to learn, today more than ever. Not that we didn’t shop, mind you, but before we bought something we used what we had or built it ourselves if possible, and grew for ourselves or learned to use whatever grew nearby.
In those days, worrying about the ecology was in it’s infancy. Saving money, though, was always important. It turns out that they really go hand-in-hand. And if you grow up this way, you learn how to do for yourself and be independent. In the book “Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens” by Kathy Harrison, she writes: “Our kids have lessons in every subject imaginable but are…the least competent creatures ever to populate the planet. They can work a microwave but can’t cook;…they know fashion but can’t replace a button; they can drive fast but can’t change a tire; the evening news has taught them about danger but not about how to survive…”
Hurricane Katrina and the terrorist attacks proved that, whether you can see them coming or not, things will happen that can’t be prevented, but we can prepare to survive them. I stood on my beach and watched the World Trade Center fall across the bay. I knew so many people in those buildings & I cried. We’d have lost my brother-in-law if he hadn’t been at a funeral. I was sad and shocked that day, but I wasn’t afraid for myself.
I am prepared to be of the grid for at least 3 months with no help from “them”. We’ve got enough food/dry goods, etc. which I rotate to keep fresh; alternate sources for heating, cooking, water; crank-powered radios & chargers; carpentry/plumbing/electricity, gardening, first-aid skills. I’m always reading some kind of “How To…” book. My husband was in the Marine Corps so now I also know self-defense and I’m a damned good shot with handguns and high-powered rifles.
Isn’t it just typical that our friends and family think we are nuts? They tell us we are just feeling paranoid. We accept their jokes and have stopped trying to explain ourselves. We don’t tell them what we really feel is liberated. It’s liberating to know that we can go off the grid any time we choose and are more than ready for a crisis. Of course, we’d be the first ones they’d run to if the shit hit the fan. We don’t even tell them that we have included them in our planning.
Sorry to go on and on but, clearly, self-sufficiency and independence are topics close to my heart. Besides, the occasional rant feels good! I’ll climb off the soap box. For now.
Oh Bravo! Well said. I’d like to quote part of that. Can I? (with attribution of course).
There is of course also an enormous satisfaction in living off your own food. On the other hand a lack of medicines would kill me quite quickly, and the internet being dead would probably make those around me wish I’d hurry up and die.