Another excerpt from Dmitry Orlov’s book.
In addition to small-scale farming, forests in Russia have always been used as an important additional source of food. Russians recognize and eat just about every edible mushroom variety and all of the edible berries. During the peak mushroom season, which is generally in the fall, forests are overrun with mushroom pickers. The mushrooms are either pickled or dried and stored, and often last throughout the winter.
In spite of the monumental failures of Soviet agriculture, the overall structure of Soviet-style food delivery proved to be paradoxically resilient in the face of economic collapse and disruption. The combination of local food stockpiles administered by politicians conditioned to treat bread riots as career-ending calamities, the prevalence of government institutions that attended to the sustenance of their employees and plenty of kitchen gardens, meant that there was no starvation and very little malnutrition. But will fate be as kind to the United States?
Probably not. Europeans may be a little better prepared, although the UK is in the same boat and same corporate stranglehold as the USA.
In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket, which is supplied from far away using refrigerated diesel trucks, making them entirely dependent on the widespread availability of transportation fuels and the continued maintenance of the interstate highway system. In an energy-scarce world, neither of these is a given. Most supermarket chains have just a few days’ worth of food in their inventory, relying on advanced logistical planning and just-in-time delivery to meet demand. Thus, in many places, food supply problems are almost guaranteed to develop. When they do, no local authority is in a position to exercise control over the situation and the problem is handed over to federal emergency management authorities. Based on their performance after Hurricane Katrina, these authorities are not only manifestly incompetent, but also appear to be ruled by the ethos that it is better for the government to deny services than provide them, to avoid creating a population that is dependent on government help.
Many people in the United States don’t even bother to shop and just eat fast food. The drive to maximize profit while minimizing costs has resulted in a product that manipulates the senses into accepting as edible something that is mainly a waste product. Under strict process control procedures, agro-industrial wastes, sugar, fat and salt are combined into an appealing presentation, packaged, and reinforced by vigorous advertising. Once accepted, it beguiles the senses by its reliable consistency, creating a lifelong addiction to bad food. The chemical industry obliges with an array of deodorants to mask the sickly body odor such a diet produces. Immersed for a lifetime in a field of artificial sensory perceptions, dominated by chemical, man-made tastes and smells, people recoil in shock when confronted with something natural, be it a simple piece of boiled chicken liver or the smell of a healthy human body. Perversely, they do not mind car exhaust and actually like the carcinogenic “new car smell” of vinyl upholstery.
When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch, but simply re-heat prepackaged factory-produced meals. When they do cook from scratch, the supposedly fresh ingredients come from thousands of miles away and are selected for ease of shipping rather than any actually desirable qualities, making them woody or pulpy and only barely edible. Since good taste is no longer on the menu, the focus shifts to quantity, resulting in appallingly sized portions of undifferentiated protein and starch drowned in fat, administered in national festivals of pathetic gorging, of which Thanksgiving seems to be the main one. But this is all good for business and keeps the cancer, diabetes and heart disease industries humming. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the nation’s girth is visible clear across the parking lot. A lot of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what is coming next. If they suddenly had to start living like Russians they would blow out their knees. Most of them would not even try, but simply wait, patiently or impatiently, for someone to come and feed them. And if that food arrives and consists of a styrofoam box containing a puck of pseudo-meat between two pucks of pseudo-bread and a plastic bottle of water laced with pseudo-syrup, they would be satisfied.
But the food may never arrive. There is already a fair amount of hunger in the United States and many families are forced to choose between food and gasoline. Gasoline is the greater of the two necessities, because it is necessary for them to drive to buy food: their car always gets to eat first. In the future, the choice will be made for them: they will be priced out of the market, their food used to produce ethanol, so that the more fortunate can keep driving their cars a tiny bit longer. The process of starving them out might go by one of the euphemistic terms economists seem to favor, such as the somewhat sinister “demand destruction,” or the more bland “load shedding.” This process is already underway in Mexico, where corn masa producers who provide a staple purchased by the poor are squeezed out by the ethanol producers. The United States is next. Who is that skeleton driving a pickup truck? Let us hope it is not you, but someone else — someone less fortunate than you, with whom you are not acquainted.
