My nephew, who is a grown man with a family, lived with my wife and I at our house about 7 or 8 years ago, and we used to watch a lot of apocalyptic shows, like The Walking Dead. One day we were talking about it, and he said something about how he figured he and I, his dad, and brother-in-law could probably make a pretty good show of it in such a scenario and provide for us and our families.
He asked me what I thought, and I said flat out, “No!” He was kind of deflated by that.
He thought since we all had experience camping, and we all knew how to shoot a gun, we’d be able to survive. Ha! First, the kind of camping most of us did together was car camping with big coolers of food from the supermarket. The shooting was at targets or plinking. None of us ever went hunting, and the weapons owned by the group are not hunting weapons. No one was a particularly good fisherman. Most of us could grow a garden, but we are not farmers. The idea that any of us would last longer than our food in the pantry and the generous amount of belly fat we all have been packing away over the years was a total joke to me.
Look at the amount of food in a shopping cart when you do a weekly shopping trip. There’s no way most people are going to be able to hunt, grow, or forage that much in a week. At this point, there isn’t even enough game, fish, or forage left in nature to support even a fraction of the population. Even the people who know how to survive off the land won’t be able to last long when EVERYONE switches to trying to live that way.
Our only hope is to keep this society functioning so we can keep the agriculture that feeds us running, along with all the logistical infrastructure that makes agriculture, food processing, and distribution possible. If there’s an “event” that knocks it all down, most people will starve within months or a year. Maybe with a billionaire bunker, you could hold out for significantly longer, but unless civilization gets back on its feet, long-term prospects are not great.
