What to Do When the Food Runs Out
What will our world look like when the grocery stores run out of food?
The obvious answer is growing a garden and raising farm animals but that is not an option for everyone. For people living in the severely affected drought-stricken regions of the world, that ship sailed a long time ago. Crops are gone, animals are dead and gone, water is gone and the only people left are the ones who don’t have the means to leave.
For those of us in more affluent countries, that option is not a viable one either for a goodly portion of the populations living in the cities and suburban neighborhoods surrounding them. Some, like me, grow small kitchen gardens to supplant what we can’t find at the local grocer. We don’t have enough land available to grow enough to sustain us year-round, much less raise and butcher animals for food.
For most western civilizations right now, hunting is not much of an option either as there are too many of us for that to be sustainable.
The answer will be a great extinction event. Violent food riots that will kill off a large number of humans, starvation and dehydration deaths will kill off large swathes of the human population along with the diseases and pestilence that come with all of that.
Mother Nature has a way of winnowing the chafe when things become unsustainable. The Black Plague, typhoid, Cholera epidemics, Covid-19, and all of its variants for example. Between the humans killing each other off over resources and the pandemics spreading across the globe, maybe the issue of too many humans will correct itself eventually.
In the meantime, those of us who have the skills to survive all of this need to get creative and figure how to take care of ourselves.
We are trying to stock up, grow more and be ever mindful of what is available at the local grocer or not. We have already seen some shortages and adjusted our diets accordingly and will continue to do so going forward.
Once the grocery chains can no longer provide for us, I foresee a return to the old days when local farmers would set up open marketplaces and sell to the local people that way. Western countries have farmers' markets but few and far between.
It is still that way in second and third-world countries. Open markets on Bazaar days (in Muslim countries, this is usually Wednesdays) where shoppers go to do their weekly shopping for whatever is needed. These open markets are open on other days but fresh food is usually on market days.
My wife mentioned a while back that once logistics failed and the chain grocers ran out of food, we would likely revert to that type of system. We would lose the safety checks on our food but at least food will be available depending on the weather and other environmental issues.
Imagine the western world reverting back to medieval times with castles (of a sort) and open markets where you had to travel, maybe on foot, bicycle, or horse to do your weekly shopping.
Cars would be dead due to a lack of fossil fuel and repair parts. Electric cars would only be driven by the rich elites who could afford the high price of electricity and repair parts. Fossil fuel machines would be nothing but rusting hulks where ever you look.
Human populations would be drastically reduced by this time so resources may be enough for those that are left. Feudal systems would likely be in place with local warlords calling themselves Barons and Princes and what have you. Somewhere a person calling himself King trying to call the shots from one of the newly created castles.
Life will be a lot simpler with high-end technology largely a distant memory. No more cell phones and computers as there won’t be much in the way of electricity being produced due to the lack of water-powered turbines. No more water in the rivers and man-made lakes in the arid regions anymore. Dams shuttered over lack of water.
With radio technology sidelined like fossil-fueled cars, communications will be by courier like in the mid-19th century. Pony express riders and horse-drawn stagecoaches. The rich elites will still have their technology sparked by a minimally distributed electrical grid.
Try to imagine our world with little to no electricity due to lack of water. Electricity would come in the form of wind turbines and solar panels but the distribution would only go to the wealthy enough to afford it. Way above the average joe’s paygrade.
Without any widely distributed electrical grid, the average people will live life turned back to near feudalism. The haves and have-nots will be so widely separated on the economic scale that the haves will be just some distant unseen figures only heard of but not seen. And a large few of the lower classes will aspire and fight to achieve this class level of the haves as it has always been since the dawn of time with humans.
This is the near future of humanity on a global scale without rivers and lakes. Eventually, some bright scientists may come up with nuclear fission to generate energy but that technology is still way off in the future right now. In the here and now, rivers and lakes are drying up faster than we can keep up. Within the next 5–10 years all of the turbines in the western US dams will be idle unless something changes in the weather patterns.
Southern Europe will be right there with them. Great Britain may be a third-world country by then. Parts of the African continent are already there. Parts of Australia are keeping pace as well and so on around the world.
Countries are already failing due to high heat, causing crop-food shortages and starving people. Sri Lanka has been in the news cycles lately over this. There will be a lot more to come.
Wait for it. Most of us will still be around to watch the show from around the world and at home, wherever home is for you until we can’t anymore. Once the dust clears from all of the chaos of epic societal failures, things will settle into pseudo-feudalism. This is many years and a couple or three generations into the future of mankind.
My children and grandchildren will know this. I will try to prepare them as best as I can for this dark future. Unless some type of miracle mass energy-producing technology made without water-powered turbines arrives to save the day, this is our future.
If you are a farmer in one of the still wet zones, you will need to adjust to the new way of farming without fossil fuels and electricity. Break out the horse-drawn plows and implements like your forefathers had.
Those of us still left alive after the chaos will have to adjust to learning how to farm or develop a trade skill that can be sold. Horses will likely become the preferred method of transport and Blacksmithing become a much-needed trade skill again.
Skills like basket and barrel making will be popular again as factories will be shuttered due to lack of electricity. Plastic will become an outdated commodity useful until it isn’t and discarded with no more being produced.
All of those old pictures of the colonial days will become reality. Humans will revert back to all of those old needed skills. There will be some upgrades from those old days because some minimal technology can still be used but, by and large, colonial-style feudalism.
Welcome to the new age of man or the old age, depending on your viewpoint.
Without all of the factories spewing out toxic waste into the atmosphere, things might clear up a little over time. In time, the droughts might disappear as the atmosphere clears up but that is many centuries into the future.
Mother Earth doesn’t work on a human life cycle so those of us alive now will be long forgotten. Only remembered as the ancestors who wrecked the Earth.
