The Fallen Continent: Famine Foods
Examining recipes from across the country, dating back to the Starving Time.
Enter JACK POINT, in low spirits, reading from a huge volume:
The Merrie Jestes of Hugh Ambrose, No. 7,863: The Poor Wit and the Rich Councillor.
A certayne poor wit, being an hungered, did meet a well-fed councillor.
“Marry, fool!” quothe the councillor, “Whither away?”
“In truth,” said the poor wag, “in that I have eaten naught these two dayes, I do wither away—and that right rapidly.”
The councillor laughed hugely and gave him a sausage.
Humph! The councillor was easier to please than my new master the Lieutenant. I would like to take post under that councillor. Ah! ’tis but melancholy mumming when poor, heart-broken, jilted Jack Point must needs turn to Hugh Ambrose for original light humour!
Introduction
Welcome back, this is a follow-up to the article on the Starving Time, America’s period of nuclear winter and famine. This installment will explore some famine foods that Americans resorted to in times of crisis. Click here to read the background article, if you haven’t already.
Pemmican
In the absence of agriculture, millions of people turned to gun and bow to win food for the table. The most commonly-bagged game was deer, though it was open season on anything that walked on four legs or flew or swam. Some species were hunted to extinction or to the brink of it, though some like whitetail deer were never in risk of eradication. Even with the abundance of deer (to the point where they were considered pests in some environments), there was not enough to feed everybody and not enough to make it last the whole winter. Deer, too, were starving from the mass plant death brought on by the nuclear winter. This is where pemmican came in handy.
Pemmican is an ancient famine food devised by the Indians of the northern plains. Nations like the Cree and Lakotah readily eat it throughout the entire famine period, though it took some time for its consumption to diffuse throughout the wider North American population. This calorie-rich meal consists of dried meat and tallow that has been ground until it reaches a powder-like consistency and is hardened into pemmican. It stores well, and can be preserved for a very long time—over a decade, in cool, dry conditions. Venison is the main form of meat used, although beef, mutton, duck, and fish are all common ingredients. Berries were added when available to include additional nutrients and flavor.
For meals, pemmican can either be eaten raw, boiled into a stew known as rubaboo, or fried into what is known as rechaud. Indians could readily eat it raw, but only the pangs of hunger could convince most whites to stomach raw pemmican. While some foods remain popular even after the Starving Time, most northerners who ate pemmican in the darkest days of the nuclear winter despised the food and would not willingly eat it again. Today, it can be found on Indian reservations, in soldiers’ ration kits as meat bars, and throughout much of the Badlands, a desolate region where food insecurity remains a serious problem.
Bark Bread
Bread is the staple of American diets, but requires grain—a rare luxury during the Starving Time. Wanting for flour, people tried all kinds of fillers and extenders to create edible loaves. The infamous sawdust bread, the likes of which filled the bellies of the people of Leningrad in the Second World War, immediately comes to mind. Other fillers and grain substitutes were used. Chestnuts, plaster dust, sliced beets, minced leaves and straw, ground crickets—and tree bark. Tree phloem presents a preferable alternative to sawdust because it actually has some limited nutritional value, as opposed to none at all. Throughout America’s forests, people gathered the inner bark of trees, mostly pine, to bake into bread. By the end of 2031, however, there was little to no grain remaining, and phloem was no longer used as a filler, but as a wholesale substitute for grain itself.
The result are bark biscuits, also known as “Wagon Wheels” or “Poker Chips” by those who lived off of them. They are small, greenish-brown, circular slabs of extremely hard, extremely bitter bread, and are loathed by all who eat them. But when faced with starvation, they provide much-needed energy, as well as nutrients like fiber, starch, vitamin C, and even trace amounts of sugar.
In less forested regions or for those who were simply less inclined to bake bark biscuits, other grain substitutes as mentioned earlier were employed. Nuts, beets, and insects were all ground up and baked into loaves in a similar fashion to pine phloem.
Hominy
Hominy was once a staple of Native American diets in colonial times. In the 20th Century, it became a poverty food for pellagra-ridden Southerners, a dish of shame and embarrassment. The dish consists of dried maize grains which are cured with a solution of lye, (usually water and wood ash), or caustic lime (quicklime and water). Once converted into hominy, it can be eaten as individual kernels, ground into flour or sandy grits, or roasted into chips.
Hominy’s had a better go-around this time than it had in the 1930s, but there’s still a sore taste in people’s mouths. Like in the Great Depression, many Starving Time Americans prepared hominy with toxic industrial lye instead of naturally-available ingredients, either not knowing that wood ash could be used or wishing to conserve ash for other uses, like soap. Still, there are people who swear by this dish and continue to eat it to this day, both Indians and not.
Kudzu
Before the Great War, kudzu was perhaps the most hated plant in America. “The Vine That Ate the South” was originally introduced to North America by the Japanese delegation at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Introduced as an ornamental plant that was steadily cultivated for anti-soil erosion properties, the extremely robust and fecund vine developed into an invasive species that spanned the entire southeastern United States. It spread across vast expanses, swallowing up the land and choking all the weaker plants in sight. By the late 20th Century, the slow, unstoppable northward march of kudzu was accepted as a fact of life.
After the Great War, kudzu became a godsend for the American South. Although it thrived in hot weather, kudzu vines could still survive during the nuclear winter. Already regularly consumed as food in East Asia, Southerners grew to appreciate the many versatile uses of kudzu during the Starving Time. Kudzu leaves can be cooked with vegetables or eaten raw in a salad. The potato-like roots can be roasted, stewed, or dried up and ground into a thickening agent. The shoots can be eaten like asparagus, and the blossoms can even be fermented into wine. In a pinch, raw roots (inedible on their own) can be cut open in order to suck the nutrients out—though this is an unpleasant and non-filling last resort for the truly desperate. Both roots, shoots, and leaves also have medicinal uses, and the vine makes excellent livestock feed.
Indeed, so much kudzu was consumed by man and animal alike that the 8,000,000 acres of kudzu in the United States were reduced to less than 3,000,000 by 2059. Unlike many famine foods that were quietly retired at the end of the Starving Time, kudzu has now permanently earned its place as an American staple crop. Kudzu salad, roasted kudzu roots, and kudzu blossom wine are all commonplace across the southeastern United States. Although the vine still grows unwanted, its spread is now checked by grazing livestock, mostly goats and swine. In a rare reversal of fortunes, the Great War transformed this ecological disaster vine into the hero of the American South.
Water Hyacinth
Water hyacinth can be likened to the less successful cousin of kudzu. Like kudzu, it was introduced by the Japanese in the 19th Century as an ornamental plant and grew wildly out of control. It congested the waterways of the southern United States, choking other plants, depleting the oxygen in the water, and creating environments where mosquitos could breed. Malaria reemerged as a health concern in the southern United States, although it never reached the prevalence it had in Africa (thanks to international trade, the reintroduction of quinine to the United States means malaria is on its way out). Also like kudzu, its preference for warm climates means that it could largely only be found in California and the southeastern U.S, yet was hardy enough to survive the nuclear winter.
Water hyacinth was already eaten in some East Asian countries and fed millions of Americans during the Starving Time. The leaves and stems can be eaten raw, though its tendency to cause allergic reactions means that it was seldom eaten this way. Water hyacinth was instead usually boiled or fried. Its ability to absorb toxins from the water made it a real health risk, however, and water hyacinth could only be reliably eaten in sufficiently remote regions far away from destroyed industrial areas. This made it a popular choice in Florida, a state that has many unique dietary options not found in the rest of the country.
Like kudzu, water hyacinth is still consumed by Americans today, twenty years after the end of the Starving Time, making it more successful than the likes of bark biscuits or still more unwholesome famine foods. It cannot compare with kudzu’s popularity and versatility, but there are some people who swear by it. It remains widely cultivated in Florida and central California; the People’s Revolutionary Council in Merced has even triumphed it as a “victory plant” and encourages its cultivation.
Mussels
Further continuing the trend of invasive species being utilized for Starving Time diets, we have zebra mussels and quagga mussels. These creatures are some of the most hated, destructive organisms in the United States. They spread everywhere, destroying infrastructure, killing off local life, and eating all the good algae so that the waters are polluted by poisonous cyanobacteria. Truly, these loathsome pests were good for nothing. Even in the Starving Time, that remained mostly true. Although there was mass zebra mussel death due to the frigid temperatures of the nuclear winter, they remained a commonplace and irksome species throughout the period.
Zebra mussels are so small and difficult to pry open that they offer very little meat in exchange for the great amount of work required to prepare them. A common recipe is beer mussel soup, in which steamed mussels are doused with alcohol; after laboriously opening every single mussel, one would have to remove the tiny stomachs with tweezers. Those with enough time and energy could also remove the tough, unpleasant to eat adductor and byssal muscles, but most people desperate enough to eat zebra mussels kept them in.
Quagga mussels are larger and less tedious to prepare, but both kinds present a very perilous health risk. As filter feeders, these mussels absorb all of the toxic chemicals of the polluted waterways in which they can be found. This is especially dangerous near NEZs and abandoned industrial centers, where runoff pollution, chemical spills, and radioactive fallout have the potential to seep into the mussels. The hard work and high risk all for a measly, unpleasant meal made zebra mussels an unpopular choice for one’s preferred famine food. But if there was no game to be shot and no fish to catch, then said mussels might be the only thing available. Many Midwesterners living near the Great Lakes or along the rivers that fed into the Mississippi survived off of such sorry fare.
If time were not such a critical issue, they could have waited for certain species of birds, fish, and decapods to eat the mussels unmolested and grow in population, as has been the case thirty years later. Indeed, for the man who once lived off of beer mussel stew, the smallmouth bass that are now waxing plentiful in the Great Lakes are a welcome relief. Likewise, Southerners have come to appreciate the rebound in the crawfish population.
Lionfish
Lionfish are yet another invasive species that found its way on the menu after the Great War. These poisonous fish from the Indian Ocean outcompeted species native to the Caribbean, and their invasion was made worse by overfishing their few predators, such as grouper. There were already efforts to promote catching and eating lionfish in Caribbean-adjacent countries before the war; during the Starving Time, Americans overcame their natural aversions to the fish and started eating them too.
When the spines are removed and the meat properly filleted, lionfish become safe to eat, and are similar in taste and texture to grouper. The fish were so widely caught and eaten that their populations were just as badly devastated as all the other fish species in America. Their population has since rebounded, but is kept in check by the continued harvest of lionfish for American platters. They remain a popular post-Starving Time food, especially for Roman Catholics during Lent. In fact, the Catholic Church officially embarked on a campaign to encourage Caribbean parishioners to catch and eat lionfish on Fridays, Lent, and Easter.
Yaupon Tea
Also known as Indian Tea, Carolina Tea, Appalachian Tea, South Seas Tea, or the Black Drink.
Americans love their coffee. One of the most caffeinated countries in the world was in for a severe crash when the Great War disrupted international trade and the nuclear winter hindered coffee growth for several years. In recent years, coffee is slowly being reintroduced to the former United States as foreign trade returns to American waterways, but the beverage still remains expensive and reserved primarily for the upper middle class.
In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, survivors simply had to rely on ersatz dandelion coffee once the antebellum stockpiles ran dry. The taste may compare with coffee, but what most Americans wanted was the caffeine. To fill the gaping hole in American stomachs left by the absence of coffee, yaupon holly re-emerged. Ilex vomitoria is the only caffeinated plant native to the United States. It was widely used by the Native Americans for ceremonial purposes and by the European colonists as a normal caffeinated beverage. Starved for coffee under the Union blockade, the Confederacy drank large quantities of yaupon tea to get their caffeine fix. After the end of the Starving Time, yaupon holly became one of the most widely-cultivated crops in the American South.
Yaupon tea-drinkers must drink in moderation, however. As its botanical name implies, yaupon tea can lead to vomiting when ingested excessively or after periods of fasting. While yaupon leaves and branches, the components of the beverage, are not poisonous, yaupon berries are. When consumed safely, however, the beverage has no emetic properties. Yaupon tea is also used for medicinal purposes and, for certain Native tribes, ceremonial purposes. Some Southern factions give especially strong brews for their soldiers to drink before battle.
Gelatin
Gelatin was once a common meal for pioneers on the Oregon Trail and in other austere settler environments. The colorless gel is made of collagen, which is found in animal parts such as bones, skin, hair, and teeth. Gelatin is most often eaten in its sweet dessert form, but this was not the gelatin of the Starving Time. The gelatin of the 2030s was made from animal parts that were otherwise inedible—the aforementioned scraps and leftover materials. Jellied pigs’ feet was common throughout the country, and gelatin was often eaten on its own as a source of protein and energy—gelatin is 99% protein, after all. More often, however, it was used as a thickening agent for soups and stews. Animal bones and skins were the most commonly-used ingredients, but some desperate people even made it from their own hair and fingernails.
Blood Sausage
Creative and resourceful usage of animal parts was vital to survival during the Starving Time. Like in days of yore, none of the animal could be left to waste. Blood sausage—made from the blood of animals mixed with a filling agent—was elevated from “acquired taste” to a necessity. Some people do quite enjoy blood sausage, though they might not have such a taste for the blood sausages of the Starving Time. With limited grain and meat to go around, alternative fillers had to be used. The ersatz boudin rogue of the Acadian People’s Republic differed from the traditional Cajun recipe, and instead called for a mixture of blood, water, animal scraps, and plant fibers—usually sliced sugar beets, but sometimes any marginally edible plant material. The “People’s Sausage” of the Acadian Revolution was despised by those who survived Chairman Blanchard’s genocidal rule and likened to “a mouthful of sawdust.” Actual sawdust was used as a filler on occasion, as was tree bark, a la pine bark biscuits. There are, of course, the ongoing rumors and black myths from out of the Starving Time that human blood and even human organs were used in blood sausages.
Ketchup Soup
Another Great Depression-era food that made a brief return during the Starving Time, this light soup consists of ketchup and hot water. Some recipes include a handful of other ingredients, such as creamer, salt and pepper, or mustard, but plain ketchup is the principle ingredient. Euphemistically referred to as “tomato bisque,” it has little to no nutritional value, but is hot, filling, and keeps hunger pains away. Its taste can range from barely edible to genuinely enjoyable, and was one of the easier-to-stomach famine foods. Its main use was to turn excess ketchup—a sorry meal as a condiment on its own—into a more palatable meal.
Cats and Dogs
Nobody in America wanted to eat their pets. Other cultures—stereotypically East Asians—may eat cats and dogs, but the practice was highly taboo in North America. Even in the Starving Time, most people did not resort to eating their own pets, just as they didn’t resort to eating other people—yet both taboos were nonetheless broken by many.
People who ate cats and dogs were usually not eating their pets. They were eating the captured pets of neighbors, domesticated pets that were abandoned by their owners, cats and dogs left abandoned in shelters and pet stores, or feral animals. The ferals presented the greatest risk; they had a natural fear of man that newly-abandoned dogs lacked, and could pass on terrible diseases when eaten. Rabies, ground itch, cat scratch disease, giardia, and salmonella were all potential ailments from improperly-prepared cats and dogs. Still, even feral dog was a much safer bet than rats, racoons, or other vermin.
A select few parts of America—certain warlords in central California—still eat cats, and in fact breed them in captivity for just such a purpose. Dogs are not kept for eating anywhere in the country, however. Certain food-insecure regions (the infamous Badlands rears its head once again, as do parts of the Mid-Atlantic) fall back on culling feral cats and dogs in the event of crop failures or other unforeseen food shortages.
Not all feral dogs and abandoned pets were killed. There remains a large feral population comparable to its antebellum size, descended both from the original feral population and from stray pets who escaped the hunter’s shot, bow, and trap.
Rats
For those who are unwilling or unable to eat dogs or cats, rats were the last resort when it comes to meat (save for DPO, that is). Vermin rats thrived by feasting off of the millions of unburied corpses that littered America’s streets and fields. When other game ran dry, or in urban centers far removed from deer and rabbits, the starving turned to rats for sustenance.
Eating rats, of course, carries the risk of disease, even more so than feral cats. That risk was amplified by the fact that most rats were now feeding on human dead. Victims of leptospira and hantavirus have improperly-prepared rats to thank for the widespread outbreaks. Even for the most cautious rat chef, little could be done to protect against the fleas that they carried. The bubonic plague returned to the southern United States as a health risk, with major outbreaks from California to Texas. Such outbreaks did not reach the scope of the Black Death, at least; even in a state of starvation and anarchy, modern Americans are more sanitary than 1300s Europe. Yet they did reach the ferocity of some of the bubonic “aftershock” pandemics from the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Leather
As told in old sailor’s stories, leather is, in fact, edible. It’s made of animal skin, composed of roughly 60-70% water and 30-35% protein. It is not, however, pleasant to eat and is usually toxic. The processes employed to tan the skins into leather make them hard to eat and lacking in nutrition, at the very best—and downright lethal at the worst. Most people who ate leather immediately fell sick, and those who ate leather treated with chrome or formaldehyde died. Vegetable-tanned leather, typically used for saddles, holsters, belts, and wallets, tends to be safe. Chemically-treated leather, such as is commonly in shoes and luggage, is not edible.
Leather is up there with zebra mussels as a famine food that takes a lot of work to prepare, offers little to no nutritional value, and presents a high risk of chemical poisoning. Most who took the trouble to ate their leather were truly at the end of their rope, and typically did so by boiling it until it was soft enough to eat. A few went to such lengths as to cut their leather into small bites and fry it, though this was a very rare occurrence.
Mud Cookies
Here we reach one of the lowest forms of famine food—a meal which offers effectively no nutritional value, and is simply eaten to fill an aching stomach. Mud cookies, also called mud cakes, clay cookies, or galettes, are a Haitian invention in which clumps of clay or dirt are filtered through a strainer and mixed with water, butter, and salt. They are then either baked in an oven and left to cool, or simply laid out in the open air to be sun-dried.
Haitians mostly ate them as dietary supplements for pregnant women, believing them to possibly contain calcium and other minerals. In the advent of starvation, these cookies were eaten as a famine food. They were principally eaten by Haitian-Americans and by certain desperate bands of people fleeing the wider Chicago area.
At best, these cookies taste salty and buttery, and at worst they just taste like dirt. They have no caloric value, a negligible mineral value, lead to tooth decay and constipation, and present the risk of ingesting toxins and parasites. They have one utility beyond the placebo effect, which is filling the stomach so that hunger pains can be delayed long enough for the eater to find real food elsewhere.
Conclusions
These are only a handful of the desperate measures people resorted to in such a dark time. There are plenty of other examples of famine foods: moss, dandelions, drippings sandwiches, ground tulip bulbs, sego lilies, and more. It would take a long time to discuss all of these foods, but the ones showcased in this article help demonstrate key facets of life in the American wasteland.
Index
Click here to read the master post of the series, with links at the bottom of the page to all other Fallen Continent entries.
Dont forget, Rubaboo has a little bit of roux mixed in--butter and flour-- it adds thickness, making for good consistency (tastes good too) though you need to cook it by itself a minute, unless you like the taste of raw flour (and the risk of stomach upset that accompanies it).
Hominy is still a fairly popular dish in the South today. I never liked it, but my little brother did and ate it pretty much every time my grandma made it. You can even get it in a can at most supermarkets.