It doesn’t matter how much food you store in your survival reserves. preparatoryIf there is a nuclear war, sooner or later you will run out of food. What are you going to do? If you’re in an area with few survivors, a trip to local shops can be helpful. It will be safe to eat food in closed containers: radiation does not make such food dangerous and only slightly alters it so that it loses little of its nutritional value.

Even if you are fully prepared at the moment of attack, time is working against you. Foods have a limited lifespan where their nutrient content remains high. After this period, the nutritional value of the food gradually decreases. Food will remain edible for a while, but will not necessarily meet all your nutritional needs.

Stored foods have a short nutritional shelf life: most canned foods have a shelf life of only 6 months. Canned meats and non-citrus fruits will last a little longer (up to a year). The nutritional life of evaporated milk is 6 months; broth, instant cream, nuts, cereals, and hydrogenated vegetable oils/oils have a nutrient shelf life of one year.

And after that, what?

a nuclear winter. A group of researchers from Penn State University, USA, set out to investigate possible food solutions to a global catastrophe that jeopardizes our survival. Daniel Winstead, a research technologist, and Michael Jacobson, a forest resources professor, studied what food we would have left in the event of a nuclear war. Your research: Food resistance in a dark disaster.

Although similar natural events have happened before, the probability of such a thing is low. If Russia and the United States decide to use all their nuclear warheads (about 11,500, over 90% of the world’s nuclear inventory), they will darken the skies, as well as cause an unprecedented catastrophe that will take the lives of millions of people and animals. It was covered with more than 165 million tons of dust. These effects were first described by Carl Sagan and other scientists who called it the “nuclear winter.”

Coup. The team calculates that such a cloud would reduce the incidence of sunlight to less than 40% near the equator and less than 5% near the poles, compared to normal levels. They also say that permafrost will cover the surface of most of North America, Europe and Asia. And in humid tropical forests such as the Congo or Amazonian basins, precipitation can be reduced by 90% within a few years.

With this scenario, it would take up to 15 years for Earth to fully recover. Meanwhile, the survivors would see how crops would be lost on the planet over the next five years. Only the tropics closest to the equator, where the temperature changes are less, may allow some species to be grown.

What would we eat? Not meat, of course. In the study, they identified populations near the tropics with the most vegetation, both dry and moist forests, and compiled a list of 247 wild edible plants. From this list, they selected 33 that could feed us in the post-nuclear war years: leafy vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts, roots, spices, sweets, and proteins plentiful enough to provide high nutritional value, essential vitamins and vitamins. minerals. Most important? They can be stored for a long time without being refrigerated, and they are harvested most of the year.

One of the most promising foods for scientists is palm aphid, a fat- and protein-rich larva that can be roasted and made into breads and soups. “The amount of calories in the fat and protein concentrated in these worms is huge. You can fill a person’s entire caloric needs with 30 or 40 pans of palm bits and all you have to do is harvest them continuously. That’s it. “It can fit in the corner of a room,” explained the authors.

collectors again.. Other interesting foods are: konjac, an edible starchy root vegetable, cassava root, wild oyster mushroom, safou, an oily fruit known as ‘plum’, various wild spinach species and amaranth vegetables or pork grass, a vegetable consumed in Africa. too much, and it has a tremendous nutritional contribution.

In addition to the foods to grow, the researchers also made a list of foods that are safe to harvest immediately after a nuclear attack. These include the fruits of date palm and tamarind, seeds of dilo and acacia, mopane worms, baobabs, potatoes, a tuber and enset, a plant very popular in the Canary Islands. Ethiopians during the famine and it is basically a banana that is eaten on a tree instead of a banana.

Is farming possible with radiation? Yes, the fallout from a nuclear weapon is different from commercial radioactive waste. While waste from a nuclear reactor can last for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, radiation from a nuclear weapon drops to a safe level very quickly. Duncan Lung, in another study, found that radioactive fallout is initially more dangerous than radioactive waste because the levels of radiation it emits are higher.

Also, radioactive fallout is like sand or dust. It is not a liquid flowing towards the ground. With care, even in areas with maximum rainfall, with precipitation the topsoil can be removed and the land used for landscaping. Even large-scale farming could be done after a few inches of topsoil has been removed if you had access to heavy earthmoving equipment.

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