Scavenging in the Post-Apocalyptic World
The worst of the plague has passed. The vast majority of the world’s population is dead. Sure, there are still cannibalistic zombie-like creatures roaming around, but for the most part it’s safe to venture out of seclusion and thank God it is, because your carefully hoarded supplies are almost exhausted and you’re in real danger of starving to death.
But that’s okay, because assuming other survivors haven’t gotten to them first, grocery store shelves are loaded with non-perishables that no one is going to need. So you arm yourself with a small arsenal and make your way to the nearest supermarket. So far, so good. No plague victims to infect you. No cannibals to eat you. And you’ve managed to evade the other survivors who would shoot you just on the off chance that you were after theirsupplies.
The store is dark, of course; the grid collapsed months ago when all the people keeping it up and running died. But you have flashlights and batteries. The windows and doors are intact, so it hasn’t already been looted. So you break in and slip inside.
And that’s when the smell hits you.
All that meat. All that fish. All that dairy and produce. All without refrigeration for the last several months. The milk jugs have exploded because the milk inside has fermented. Flies are all over; the rotten meat in the butcher’s counter display is infested with maggots. Mealmoths flutter everywhere; all the flour and oatmeal in the bulk bins and grains that weren’t in airtight containers are full of weevils.
Cans and some of the boxes are intact, but first you need to brave the rats you hear scurrying around in the dark. And you don’t have much time to do it, because sooner or later those cannibals are going to find you. Better hurry.
But let’s say your hideout was rural. Plenty of farmland, but protein might be a problem. But hey, cows and goats survived the plague too, and there are deer to hunt, right?
Terrific. Do you know how to butcher the carcass without nicking the intestines and tainting the meat? Do you know how to preserve the meat you managed to butcher, or will most of it rot before you have a chance to eat it?
Or maybe it’s ten years after the plague, and you’ve had to leave your refuge and all your supplies behind. Only now the non-perishables in the grocery store (the ones that survived the rats and looters) have, well, perished.
These are the sorts of scenarios I had to consider when writing my post-apocalyptic novel Strain and its prequel, Juggernaut and their upcoming sequel, Bane (all available from Riptide Publishing.) It’s easy to imagine that there will be plenty of non-perishable food around in the event of the end of the world, but the logistics of survival are a lot more complex than one might imagine.
Juggernaut takes place immediately before and after the world-ending plague, while Strain is set ten years later. For Strain and Bane, I had to imagine a world in which all the grocery stores had already been ransacked, and most clusters of survivors have already begun to relearn farming and herding livestock. Preserved meats—salted, smoked, jerky and so forth—would be common. For those who didn’t have supplies and know-how to preserve fruits and vegetables, produce would largely be a treat for the warmer months. This is why, sometime around the last major ice age, human beings evolved to be primarily carnivores.
Yes, you read that right; the claim that humans evolved as omnivores is actually quite misleading. We have the ability to eat vegetation and we require certain nutrients that are mainly found in fruits (such as vitamin C, lest we develop scurvy), but our digestive systems are actually far more similar to carnivorous animals than to omnivores. So in Strain, there’s more of an emphasis placed on seeing the characters eating fresh and preserved meats.
For Juggernaut, the logistics were quite a bit more complicated. I was dealing with characters who were still immediately accustomed to having endless quantities of food available to them with just a quick trip to the market. They wouldn’t know or have had time to relearn anything about farming or animal husbandry. Luckily the libraries will likely have gone unlooted and there will be books to read to learn about the subject. It will just take time.
But, for the most part, farming is a little more intuitive, and easier to accomplish for people who are still largely keeping themselves sequestered to avoid contagion. They wouldn’t dare venture out to hunt or try to round up the livestock that had managed to survive the neglect of not being fed and cared for by humans who had died. The survivors would probably focus most of their animal husbandry attempts on chickens, who are portable enough to make the journey to safety with the people in question. Their eggs could be a primary source of fat and protein and they’re small enough to maintain in quarantine pens and small enclaves of survivors.
Alas, gourmet cooking is likely to be an art form that will likely die out with most of the population. Fare will be simple and straightforward. Surviving takes enough effort without diverting energy to producing complex or time-consuming meals, especially since most cooking is going to happen over open fires. The electric grid, we’ve already established, has collapsed, and natural gas pipelines will only last as long as there are people to maintain them as well. Once they lose pressure, that’s gone too.
The same applies to the water supply. The only places that will have running water or indoor plumbing are places that have windmills to power pumps that will pressurizes pipes from in-ground wells. The digging of latrines will have to be strategic and most people used to indoor plumbing won’t realize that. We can probably anticipate a “second plague” of people dying from problems with sanitation and inadequate/compromised food supplies.
It’s almost enough to make one want to start stockpiling supplies and become a survivalist, isn’t it?Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Amelia!
You can find Amelia here:
Sometimes what is considered edible is subject to a given culture or region of the world; what someone from Nicaragua would consider “local grub” could be entirely different than what someone in Paris would eat. How many different types of meat have you experienced? Are there some types of meat you would never eat? Below are nine different types of meat, listed in The Oxford Companion to Food, that you may not have considered trying:
Camel: Still eaten in some regions, a camel’s hump is generally considered the best part of the body to eat. Its milk, a staple for desert nomads, contains more fat and slightly more protein than cow’s milk.
Beaver: A beaver’s tail and liver are considered delicacies in some countries. The tail is fatty tissue and was greatly relished by early trappers and explorers. Its liver is large and almost as tender and sweet as a chicken’s or a goose’s.
Agouti: Also spelled aguti; a rodent species that may have been described by Charles Darwin as “the very best meat I ever tasted” (though he may have been actually describing a guinea pig since he believed agouti and cavy were interchangeable names).
Armadillo: Its flesh is rich and porky, and tastes more like possum than any other game. A common method of cooking is to bake the armadillo in its own shell after removing its glands.
Capybara: The capybara was an approved food by the Pope for traditional “meatless” days, probably since it was considered semiaquatic. Its flesh, unless prepared carefully to trim off fat, tastes fishy.
Hedgehog: A traditional gypsy cooking method is to encase the hedgehog in clay and roast it, after which breaking off the baked clay would take the spines with it.
Alligator: Its meat is white and flaky, likened to chicken or, sometimes, flounder. Alligators were feared to become extinct from consumption, until they started becoming farmed.
Iguana: Iguanas were an important food to the Maya people when the Spaniards took over Central America. Its eggs were also favored, being the size of a table tennis ball, and consisted entirely of yolk.
Puma: Charles Darwin believed he was eating some kind of veal when presented with puma meat. He described it as, “very white, and remarkably like veal in taste”. One puma can provide a lot of meat, since each can weigh up to 100 kg (225 lb).
Has this list changed the way you view these animals? Would you try alligator meat but turn your nose up if presented with a hedgehog platter?
Headline Image: Street Food at Wangfujing Street. Photo by Jirka Matousek. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr
The post Nine types of meat you may have never tried appeared first on OUPblog.
by Jen McVeity
Writing a story is hard work, even for authors. There are characters to create, dialogue to deliver, plots to plan, tension scenes to capture, endings to invent and starts that have to sizzle align=”left”so much they superglue your reader onto a chair.
Then you have to put it all into interesting sentences that flow smoothly. Whew! Breaking the complex process of writing into chunks makes helping kids with their writing more effective - and far more fun too.
Here are two ‘chunks’ you could try to help your child write with more impact.
Show, Don’t Tell
As we read words, pictures form in our mind. See what happens when you slowly read the lines below:-
• Snow glistens, thick and white on a mountain top.
• Orange and yellow poppies stand tall and cheerful in a vase.
Our job as writers is to create these pictures in the brains of our readers. That’s what Show, Don’t Tell is all about.
However, how can we do this when the idea is more abstract - like emotions? That’s much harder for kids to write as there is no picture. Therefore we need to show them how to create one. For instance:-
TELL: My brother is lazy.
SHOW: ‘Your turn for the dishes Tank,’ said Mum. ‘Yeah, later,’ he said, yawning, and turned up the TV louder.
‘No, now,’ said Mum. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed. She knew later in Tank’s mind meant somewhere between the year 2012 and infinity. Once, as punishment, Mum put all the dishes and saucepans Tank had forgotten on top of his bed. He just dumped them on the floor. A week later they were still there, a shoe in the spaghetti sauce, sweaty socks on the plates and a really bad smell wafting out the door.
Ah, now we have the picture for our minds. It takes much longer to write - but as readers we are far more convinced.
How to Write Tension Scenes
Imagine a birthday party, a top restaurant, friends and family - and a massive earthquake that ends in disaster.
Here’s the starting point by a 9 year old boy:
We were having fun in the restaurant when suddenly the ground started to shake. I didn’t believe it. Then glasses started to break all over my plate. My sister tried to stand up, she was afraid. The ground was trembling, there was noise everywhere…
Tension scenes are one of the hardest parts of a story to write. Kids often make them too basic and short. Why? Well, we say ‘write what you know’, but children often don’t have enough ‘emotional experience’ to imagine this sort of thing.
However, other people do - and their words are all in a dictionary or thesaurus.
So try this: Get your child to underline key words in the story - and then use a thesaurus to help bring the scene alive. You can actually do this BEFORE they write as well. Just ask, ‘what are some things which will happen?’ and make a list for them to use.
e.g.
fun - delight, enjoyment, amused, teasing, laughing, happy
shake - shudder, shiver, quake, quiver, buzzing, tremor,
break - crumble, disintegrate, collapse, crush, shatter
afraid - scared, fearful, terrified, panicked
tremble - quiver, shudder, beat, vibrate, grind
The idea is NOT to merely substitute one word for another. It is to give a greater variety of words/inspiration/ideas to the writer - and let their subconscious do the melding.
After:
The waiter smiled as he put down a hot chocolate pudding right in front of me.
‘You’re not going to eat all that!’ said my Dad. ‘Here, I’ll help!’ He reached across with his spoon, teasing me. I pulled my plate away fast. Everyone laughed.
‘Just a little bit,’ Dad begged.
I shook my head. It was weird, but there was a strange buzzing sound as if everything was not quite real. I lifted my spoon, my hands felt like they were shivering. Or was it really the floor shaking? It wasn’t possible, but now all the glasses were starting to clink. Suddenly one fell, shattering glass across my plate and into the dark chocolate. Then the noise hit me, harsh, grinding, vibrating right into my brain…
Get the idea? See how the word ‘fun’ has turned into something more specific - teasing and Dad trying to steal chocolate pudding. A simple ’shake’ now has triggered ’shivering’ and a ‘buzzing’ in the head. Best of all look at that last line; the words suggested from ‘tremble’ have now made this incredibly evocative and powerful.
If you want rich writing, give kids plenty of rich ingredients to work with.
********************************
© Jen McVeity, National Literacy Champion
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Jen McVeity,
literacy,
Seven Steps to Writing Success,
show dont tell,
writing tension scenes,
Writing Tips,
writing with children
HUP!
This weekend, I learned how swinging on a trapeze can make you a better writer. I was listening to
Australian author Jen McVeity give her hour-and-a-half audience participation workshop on writing when she put up
a picture of herself high on a trapeze platform.*
With her, we brainstormed everything a novice trapeze artist might be experiencing up there on that tiny platform, from the smooth white chalk on her hands to the pungent smell of her own sweat to the rising noise of the crowd to the blinding lights in her eyes. Then Jen played back to us, in words, the scene we had brainstormed, until each of us, too, felt we were up there on that platform with a bone-dry mouth, quaking hands, and a stomach filled with thousands of caterpillars. Then, in very slow motion, we jumped...and swung...and reached...and reached...and reached...and caught the hands on the other side.
The take-away was that even though the jump itself, and the ensuing swing through the air, and the exhilarating catch at the other side take just seconds, if we're going to experience it as readers, then the writer needs to SLOW DOWN.
Now, this is a technique Jen uses in
the writing classes she offers to kids and teachers, but my mind immediately flew to the climax scene in my novel under revision. HUP! The first time I wrote it, I had jumped, swung over the chasm and caught on to the next chapter without so much as looking down. Uh-oh. In my revision, I had to add
six pages to cover what I'd tried to swing by. And I'm pretty sure that I'll add even more.
I told Jen later that I had tried the art of the trapeze at a Club Med circus school. I had tried it three times. But when the third jump felt just as terrifying as the first one, and not one bit more fun, I had stopped asking myself to go back up the ladder. I even admitted to her that climbing the ladder was the worst part. I felt like gravity was trying to tear my body away from each rung, and that it pulled harder the higher I climbed.
The interesting thing is that although I quit the trapeze right then and there, the feeling of inching up that ladder didn't leave me. When my main character in
Letters From Rapunzel had to fight her way up a concrete pylon on a bridge and realizes half-way up that she should
not be doing this, I'm proud to say that I wouldn't let her quit, and I did not let her back down, and I calmly and deliberately stopped time.
*Jen also loves
rock-climbing, water-skiing, volleyball and snow-skiing.
This fellow is a bit SHAKY after a gluttonous bender. He has eaten his fill and is ready fly to the next level. Washed in the blood of the lamb (chop), he will be born anew. Welcome to a brave new world, maggot.
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Now-a-days kids are not liking to eat normal food and vegetables but they always wants spicy food like Chips, chocolate etc. Some says this is for vaccination. Are there any solution to it? What about your kids?
Dr. Currie
Children need to be shown the right way to eat. Children learn by example, if Dad is eating a whole bag of greasy chips and drinking a sugary cola so will the kids.
They also need to understand why some things are good for you and others are bad. When the dentist says they need lots of fillings, explain that the cavities were caused by lots of sugary foods and acid beverages that eat away their tooth enamel.
When they are very young you are in absolute control of what they eat. Make sure you are doing your job.
Thanks for stopping by.
Shari
It's all about moderation!
And making lifestyle changes is far more effective and permanent than going on any fad diet.
Great post, Shari.
It's all baout moderation.
Europeans cook most of their food in butter, yet they aren't fat. That's because they eat small. Quantity makes all the difference.
Thanks for your comment on Pets & Authors, by the way. :-)
I agree whole heartedly.
And, my name is Michele, too, by the way!
Now, that's common sense.
Wonderful advice!
Every why has a wherefore.........................................