When All Hell Breaks Loose (45 page)

Pets
. Don't forget about Fluffy and Scrapper when storing food. Like human canned food, canned pet food is a no-brainer to store. Dry dog and cat foods can be stored in the same way as dry human food. If you have finicky pets, they won't be if they get hungry enough. Jillions of unwanted back-alley feral dogs and cats in the country are proof to the fact that animals will eat about anything to stay alive. Although I can't imagine that your family would have any wasted leftover food on their plates after an extended crisis, any leftovers that for lack of safe cold storage can't be saved should be given to Peaches and Fido. I once lived at a radical hippy commune that made their own dog food from scratch. The pets ate like the people, who were all vegetarian. While many will argue that this is not healthy for a dog, and they may be right, the commune dogs were as obnoxiously healthy as ever. Maybe they cleaned up on supplemental mice and rats, too. In a serious pinch, eat the pet food. While it's not for human consumption, neither is the weird stuff written about later in this chapter that humans all over the planet have eaten in dire need. When I was a little boy, like most little boys, I experimented with eating many things. I specifically remember how the dog food tasted that day long ago because my mom whipped my butt when she caught me with my face down in the doggie dish. One morning, years later, I ate a common breakfast cereal and instantly flashed back to the dog food incident. Yup, one of those popular, "healthy" breakfast cereals tastes just like dry dog food—without the milk.

Junk Food Junkie

Although I love, appreciate, and recognize good-tasting food when I eat it, I'm not attached to the whims of my taste buds. After all, I drank blended tuna fish for years. Although you probably won't choose to get your protein in this manner, when push comes to shove, food is nothing more than fuel for your body. The more food you eat that has the desired nutrition your body demands, the less food you'll require to get your nutritional demands met. Translation, you will need to buy and store less food for your family. Junk food is just that, junk, and you will require much more of it to fuel your body during times of stress. High-quality simple foods, such as whole grains, possess much more burn time for the buck (and are typically much cheaper than processed foods) and are great additions to any survival pantry. You would require cases of sugary snack cakes to achieve the equivalent in nutrition of a few pounds of whole wheat.

Here's one more thing on the "my food needs to taste good" school of thought. If this last statement is true for you, so be it, but plan now for having the proper culinary training and ingredients required to make your food taste wonderful long after the grid goes down. For hundreds of years, the spice trade was one of the most lucrative on the planet, as our ancestors were all tired of eating bland, crappy-tasting food. Who can blame them? My concern, as a survival instructor, is not how your food tastes, but that you have food to taste at all. I have eaten many things in the wilderness that would make most people vomit, all in the name of survival nutrition, and because we didn't have any other options. My point is this: please don't get too picky with your food if supplies run thin. Necessity might require from you someday that you ingest things that you didn't think were edible. Many, many people all over the earth have been reduced to eating the greatest of all taboos, each other. This book will not include ideas for barbecuing Uncle John, but it will include bare-bones survival fare that is cheap, easy to store for long periods of time, nutritional, and, with a little bit of ingenuity, good tasting.

What About Fasting?

I know many people who have fasted for more than three weeks and they are still breathing air. While hunger is a bummer, especially when combined with the stresses of a survival situation, food-deprived folks can still function for long periods of time. Fasting (deliberately not eating) has been around for thousands of years, and in some world religions it's standard practice. Fasts lasting longer than two or three days use up liver glycogen completely and consume nearly half of the muscles' glycogen stores. After this, if the body is still without food, the body synthesizes glucose through a process called
gluconeogenesis
. Ketone bodies are then formed by the oxidation of fatty acids that are utilized as energy by the muscles and brain. In a normally fed individual, ketone oxidation accounts for less than 3 percent of the total energy bill for that person. Longer fasts produce so many ketone bodies that they provide for more than 40 percent of the body's energy requirements and up to 50 percent of the brain's glucose needs. Eventually, the longer the fast, the less glucose the body uses, therefore reducing the amount of cannibalization the body must undergo to support gluconeogenesis. Fasts lasting more than fourteen days cause the body's basal metabolic rate (BMR) to decrease by 21 percent as the body becomes superefficient with its resources.

Real-life starvation scenarios, such as the Donner Party in which far more women survived than men, show that women may have a metabolic advantage over the guys. As an important side note, medical research has found that ketone production may come to a screeching halt after eating only 150 grams of carbohydrates per day. This means that if you have fasted, and then eat a very small amount of food, you lose your former ketone production advantage when the food is gone. I have talked to people with a lot of field experience who feel this is nonsense, so the choice is yours in how your body may react to the effects of fasting and food.

If you haven't tried fasting, do so. Your family may hate you for a few days but feel free to blame it on me. The best time to find out that you become a raging ass with low blood sugar is not when your food supply is running low. Fasting will give you a broad look at how you and your family, physiologically and psychologically, deal with the stress of a no-calorie meal plan. Unknowns are scary so anytime you can cut down on the fear factor with simple training and hands-on experience, do it with enthusiasm.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment: A Window into a Hungry Person's World

Wow! My clothes look sloppy! My belt buckle is in the last notch—a decrease of three notches since the starvation began.

—Lester Glick, Minnesota volunteer, March 16, 1945

 

In the early 1940s during World War II, thirty-six young male conscientious objectors participated in a human semistarvation study for six months conducted by Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota. The intention of the study was to learn the physiological and psychological effects of semistarvation in the hopes of dealing with the rehabilitation of refeeding civilians who had been starved during the war. As the psychological ramifications of the study were just as important as the physical, all participants were heavily screened for extraordinary psychological stamina. Overall, the participants lost 25 percent of their total body weight in a controlled, clinical setting.

For the first three months of the semistarvation experiment, the men ate normally while researchers documented their personalities and eating patterns. For the next six months, the volunteers were fed half of what they normally ate. The study ended with a three-month rehabilitation time in which the men were gradually refed to prestudy levels. In all cases, the volunteers experienced radically altered physical, psychological, and social changes.

I'm beginning to want to isolate myself from the other subjects who are developing all kinds of weird behaviors. . .and the starvation is less than half over!

—Lester Glick, June 24, 1945

 

Predictably, all of the men fantasized about food: in their conversations, readings, thoughts, and actions. Menial tasks during the day were harder and harder to accomplish as the volunteers' concentration remained solely upon food. As the experiment continued, and sex drives plummeted, the men smuggled food, made bizarre mixtures of food which were eaten in long, drawn-out rituals of two hours or more, and collected cookbooks, menus, and educational literature on food, including basic agriculture. As the calorie cut continued, they hoarded food memorabilia such as kitchen utensils, hot plates, and coffee makers. The "collecting" progressed to nonfood items as well, such as old clothes and garage sale junk. Chewing gum was limited after one subject was found chewing more than forty packages of gum per day, so much that he developed a sore mouth from the exercise. All achieved extreme pleasure by smelling food or watching others eat.

Books on starvation tell us that hungry people eat clay, wood, bark, unclean animals, and often become cannibalistic. Yesterday I took the lead out of a pencil and began chewing the wood. I think about how cannibalism is a terrible option for a starving person, and try to put it out of my mind, but I can't seem to stop thinking about it. People are a terrible bore. I don't know what I'd do without my private room and my stack of cookbooks.

—Lester Glick, June 25, 1945

 

During the refeeding phase, as had been the case for some of the men who had binged during the experiment, some continued eating to the point of vomiting, only to start all over again after the vomiting ceased. After three months of normal meals the men still complained of increased hunger after eating. Some men, whose daily estimate of calories topped 10,000, would start snacking within a half an hour of eating. After more than five months of refeeding, most of the volunteers reported somewhat normal eating patterns but some continued to eat much greater portions than when the experiment began.

Today Jim and I made a routine visit to a restaurant to watch people eat. We bought our usual black coffee and directed our attention to a well-dressed lady who had ordered a beautiful pork chop dinner. She tinkered with the chop, eating less than half of that wonderful looking tenderloin. She nibbled at the string beans, embellished with nuts and bacon. Finally she ordered a fantastic coconut cream pie, which appeared to us as God's prize creation. She pushed off the wonderful whipped cream on the top, nibbled daintily at the filling, leaving the crust untouched. What a stupid woman! She paid her bill and left the restaurant, with Jim and I close behind. Jim stopped her and proceeded to lecture her on world hunger and how she was contributing to it. She shrieked an exclamation and took off running.

—Lester Glick, July 6, 1945