When It Hits the Fan/Personal Strategies and Know-how/Food

Food

Food preservation

Food preservation in today's world is mostly a forgotten technology. Most of us have not only lost the capability to produce our own food but even the knowledge on how to preserve it. The household refrigerators (colloquially fridge) were introduced in 1915 , and soon after the practice of using a larder and even creating your own preserves become something of the past. The industrialization and the move from the agrarian culture to the city allied with industrial canning has also contributed to out general loss of knowledge regarding storing food.

When storing food it must be kept in mind that each item reacts to the chemical composition of the environment the other items. It is not only a matter of temperature.

Famine

What was previously a natural disaster, famine at a large scale today is a human created disaster, lack of planning and support to avoid a widespread lack of food in a region. It can be characterized as a lack of access or capacity to produce agriculture foodstuffs, a lack of livestock (by disease, weather or other factors. It is a generalized lack of all foodstuffs required for basic nutrition and survival.

Generalized famine is is a slow process, almost always caused by pre-existing conditions, such as drought, but its effects may be exacerbated by social factors, such as war. Particularly devastating examples include the Ethiopian famine and the Irish Potato Famine.

Cannibalism

Cannibalism is the consumption of members (or specific parts) of one's own species. Cannibalism is also practiced by humans, referred as anthropophagy, and is practiced even in the present days in human society, for survival or even by choice.

Cannibalism of human beings is nearly universally seen as taboo, however there are societies that condone cannibalizing deceased people and cultures that incorporate it into rituals where family members consume the flesh of their departed relatives. The practice of eating dead members of one's own culture, tribe or social group is called Endocannibalism. Cannibalism of healthy individuals is generally frowned upon due to the seemingly universal ethical belief in the sanctity of life, and is considered a punishable offense by most modern societies. Only in extreme cases do most modern societies condone taking the life of another human being.

Placentophagia, eating the placenta, is practiced in some parts of the world.

Exocannibalism is the practice of eating human corpses from people outside one's own community, tribe or social group.

In this book you will learn how cannibalism is practiced, what the potential risks and dangers of practicing cannibalism are, the moral and ethical issues involved in practicing cannibalism, and why people practice cannibalism.

Moral and ethical issues

History Mythology Religious practices