Red State Green has yet another very interesting article, this time about the availability of our food supply.
The average person has about a week’s worth of food in their house at any given time. So what if something happened that made the problem worse? Suppose we had another OPEC oil embargo, like in the 70’s?
Gas stations ran out of gasoline quickly, and the price almost doubled overnight. Could you pay $6.00 a gallon tomorrow? That’s if you found a station open that still had gas.
This is an important issue. Think about it. Where does your food come from? Most is trucked in, some from other countries. Trucks run on diesel.
If the price of oil goes up, the price of food goes up too. People panic and empty shelves just like they do in any disaster or coming storm. Once you found an open station and paid double the price, you might get to the store and find nothing there. Now what?
Read the rest of her excellent piece here.
She makes an excellent point, if anything things would be even worse than there were in the 70’s. America has sprawled out into a vast nothingness called the suburbs. We live miles and miles away from where we work, where we shop, where we go to school. Without cheap gasoline all these super-burbs would become large groups of people with no food and no way to get to work. What would you do if the gas ran dry next week?
I find it interesting that farming and whatnot is considered “counter-culture” and odd nowadays. I was listening to a radio show about a month ago, I still need the reference, but they were talking about all these hippies back in the 60’s and 70’s living on communes that learned to do everything in a self-sufficient manner. A bunch of these old “counter-culture” types are now feeding yuppies with things like gourmet goat cheese and other goods that people took the time to make in the past. It’s an interesting corollary, at least.
Joe: I agree, everybody should have a garden, if only a window box with some herbs and beans in it. Making something grow and eating your own food helps to connect you to the weather and the earth. Those hippies are making a lot of money now to boot :)
Definitely. I may not have a garden now, but thanks to my parents and grandparents it won’t be too hard to start – we had a strip that we grew fruits and veggies in when I was younger, and my grandparents had a farm with not only a full acre worth of garden, but he also kept chickens and bees. I find that fairly funny with the current perspective mentioned in the blog, because my grandparents are much more straight-laced than most people today. Good churchgoing folk.