Posted on 12/25/2021 11:11:46 AM PST by Eleutheria5
People already are prepared for lesser issues. They have a car. They leave.
With a right and proper disaster, there’s nowhere to go.
This isn’t about flexibility of market, it’s about basic math. If somebody was hoarding 50% of ANY physical market it would crash because retailers would have nothing to sell. Not the 1st world not ANY world.
The third world isn’t starving any more than usual.
The basic reality is this:
If you want to cause inflation you only need to hold about 5% of a market
It’s not actually possible to hoard 50% of the food market, that would cost the ENTIRE Chinese GDP
If such a hoard was hoard was possible (again it’s not) it would be painfully obvious in every store
Your source is a liar
And if you believe a word he says you’re qn idiot
Buh bye
I have nothing against the Chinese people, but the communists are another thing all together. They are not my friend and I do not think our nation should do any business with them whatsoever.
...100s of techniques for preservation were invented.
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The populaton grew even before electricity.
Look at the DIY food preservation vids from the Turkish areas. These folks often still are subsistence farming in areas with little or no power.
Fruit: Cover w/boiing water to blanch. drain. Add sugar (a moderate amount) and boiling water. Seal, cool, will last 1 year in cool storage.
Fruit and veg can be preserved with lacto-fermentaion. Can use just salt or add garlic and pickling spices. Will keep harvest-to-harvest if kept cool.
I’ve tried lacto-fermentation. Works well. Tomatoes with just salt tasted about as good as canned, but the cherry tomatoes became fizzy, which is an acquired taste. Fruits form a syrup with the above process. The meat relies on the fat, so just venison or just rabbit needs something added.
In ancient Europe, duck and chicken were preserved ala confit, which is cooked in fat and covered with a layer of fat which keeps out the air. Good for months at a time if kept cool.
Humans have been surviving winter in the Northern Hemisphere for eons and all we hear is how there are too many of us.
I’ve lived in the country for nearly 50 years and never saw a rat, just field mice. Cats or terriers help and I haven’t even seen a mouse this year since we had a bumper crop of acorns in our woods. And I experimented with those: not that difficult to extract the tannins and make them edible. High in protein. Pretty bland, but porridge of all types is also bland.
And no tubercular patient managed to populate the West. That took stamina and strength.
I think all the gardeners and hunters and farmers will have a more optimistic approach to preservation. Not everyone will survive. But we likely are not going back to the stone age everywhere and not FOREVER (!).
I figure if the voyagers survived the northern winters out in the bush, as did the native peoples, lots of present-day Americans will, as well.
Meat (needs fat): cut into small pieces, top jar with fattiest pieces. Place in bottom of deep cooking pot, on top of a folded towel. Keep pot covered and simmering 6-8 hours, replenishing with boiling water as needed. Can be done over an outdoor fire. The fat will cook out of the meat and join with the fat pieces at the top of the jar, acting as a seal. Will last a year if kept cool.
Keep cool in a dugout or natural root cellar purpose-built on the North side of a house/out-building or hill. Otherwise, you need sugar, salt, canning jars, garlic/spices.
Besides food preservation, there are DIY vids showing how poor people in remote areas today still utilize 18th/19th century techniques to produce machinery that works. Not for everyone, but can be done.
All the preserved food was edible.
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I saw that article. The food retained 1/2 the original nutritional value.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/plague/
The Forgotten Plague, a layout of Tuberculosis and how it defined many things, among them western expansion in America.
You started out your description with a comment about population.
A look at historical global population finds only one period of history when population declined. Not during war. Not during natural disaster.
Black plague. Yersenia Pestis. It never reached South America during the 1300s-1400s, if it had we would have been looking at a global population crash of 80% instead of 50% incl China and India.
But the key point of plague was population recovery. It simply did not happen. The calorie balance was badly damaged. It turns out Europe population did not return to 1340 (1348 plague arrived in England) levels until the early 1500s. Over 100 years.
And what did it? The potato. Columbus brought potatoes back to Europe from the New World in 1493. Potatoes are a solid calorie total per acre. Not much distance hauling to harvest them. Very long growing season in the context of “early potatoes” in July and then the main crop towards autumn, and yes, that reduced storage reqmts from 12 months to about 8 or 9.
The matto grasse in southwest Brazil gets 3 crops per year. THREE!! That country will never starve.
Bingo. Petroleum is the issue. It’s needed for fertilizer, production, and distribution of food.
This is going to be grim the next year or two.
“Think hardtack and pemmican saves the day? The rats will be grateful.”
I’m eating home canned food that’s two years old. Still tasty and nutritious and nary a rat to be found.
L
I find it disturbing that folks are assuming because their grocery store is reasonably well stocked now that this will continue. As if the food shortages during the early days of covid couldn’t happen again.
As long as you’re calling me an “idiot,” I’ll have to return the favor and call you a pontificating jack-ass.
Global food supplies are not a static thing. Even if the Chinese have 50% right now, they are still growing wheat in Canada, the Ukraine, the US heartland, etc. Food is a renewable commodity. Put a bull and a cow together, and they make veal and milk, or, if you let the calf grow and don’t shut it up in the basement to tenderize it, it will in turn grow to an adult bull, cow or steer. Wheat, rice, barley and beans are planted every year, and the harvests occur at different times in different hemispheres.
The only way that the Chinese could keep their 50% hold on major food commodities would be if they controlled the means of producing more food. As for the possibility of controlling 50% or more of a commodity, the Hunt Brothers gained control of 100% of silver back in the ‘80s when nobody was looking.
“The third world isn’t starving any more than usual.”
And you’ve been to Romania, Zimbabwe and Indochina lately to verify this? The third world is prone towards starvation, and China is conspicuously callous towards the third world, especially that part of it that is in the way of its Belt and Road project. Ask the Balluchis in Pakistan who are being deprived of a livelihood and displaced by Chinese ‘settlers’. The third world does not happen on TV. One of the few reliable sources as to what goes on outside your TV set is the ION Network out of India, with its Gravitas program and Sky News out of Australia. So you don’t know what the “usual” level of starvation is in neglected parts of the world. You just pontificate like a jack-ass about what you have not seen on American TV, so assume is not happening.
America, Canada, et al., have an in-depth supply of basic commodities, so will not feel the pinch until much later, and by then it will have been made moot by the next year’s harvest. China, for that matter, has a huge manufacturing base, and can afford to obtain and stockpile 50% of the food supply. They consume 20% every year, so it’s not as far a leap from 20 to fifty, just increase purchases during a given year, either through the futures market, as the Hunt Brothers did with Silver, or in outright purchases at the storehouses and docks, where there are daily bidding wars. The two are related.
Ranchers and farmers had to kill huge quantities of pigs, sheep and cattle, because they could not sell them at the right age to restaurants, which were all shut down because of the con-demic. Who is to say that China did not step in and buy some stock at rock-bottom prices, and thereby mitigate the farmers’ losses. Chinese, as is well know, will eat any damned thing, including over-ripe beeves, chickens and pigs that restaurateurs would turn their noses up at. Tough, gamy? It beats bats and snakes. So you have a part of the puzzle right there.
Another part of the puzzle is Chinese buying farmland. There was a bit of a stink about Chinese companies buying US farmland recently but that’s missing the point. Farmland in the US is expensive and the Chinese aren’t going to be major players here. Where they are becoming major players is in subsaharan Africa which has plenty of arable land, but no capital, infrastructure, or know-how to make use of it. The Chinese have a generational outlook on this and are buying up land and infrastructure elsewhere. They seem to be determined not to starve.
Contrast that with the US where a lot of our farmers are elderly and not being replaced. And those remaining farmers sure aren’t branching out to new areas outside the US.
How do you say "Lebensraum" in Mandarin?
The real farming in the US isn’t done by good ol’ boys in overalls anymore. They are industrialized enterprises with highly qualified management teams on top of the operations, and, well, in my experience anyway, illegals doing the grunt work. That’s what I saw in the Florida panhandle dairy farms, anyway, back when I worked on a couple of them.
Basically Collective Farms, run more efficiently than the Soviet ones.
棲息地
Qīxī dì
For the profit of shareholders.
But still taking land away from the independent farmer.
Paying market prices for the land, or snapping up foreclosures.
Depends on the sector. Family farms are going away, but are still significant. The industrial farms are more profitable, but even so it’s a tough dollar without a great ROI.
Big issue is the cost of land. Let’s say I want to buy a ranch. On arid land in Wyoming, I can get a small ranch, about 1200-1300 acres for about $1.7 mil. Or roughly $1,300 per acre. In Namibia I can get a 23,000 acre ranch for a little more than $1.3 mil. Or roughly $60 an acre. That’s a whole lot less capital being invested per acre to produce say cattle or sheep.
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