And then there was the Big Grab.
But we'll get back to that.
Okay, last bit on "organic" farming.
It's bad for the environment. It's sucky efficiency. Trying to go to it as the only way that farming was done caused the famines of 2019 and 2020. And then there's the whole pest thing.
Sure, there are more worms but, hell, it's healthier for you! Right? Well, there's the part about hormones and their effect on H5N1 but that's sort of specious. Let's talk about real health and safety issues.
What do they use for fertilizer? Shit. Okay, dress it up in any pretty language you want, "manure," "fully natural plant food," whatever. It's shit. It's what came out of your anus and you flushed down the toilet. It might come from cows or horses or whatever. It's all shit.
Don't get me wrong. It's a pretty good fertilizer. Especially horse shit. Very balanced. Also less smelly than the cow shit. (Which means, by the way, less nitrogen.)
But it's shit. It's made up of e coli bacteria. And the good organic farmers not only use it to prep their fields, they spray it (using a tractor and a manure sprayer) at times during the growing season. Because while it's pretty good fertilizer, it's not as good as the industrial type.
Yes, that's right folks. That organically grown food you just ate at some point was sprayed with shit. In many cases, it's "debiologicaled" shit. That is, it's been heated to the point that the germs should be dead. Doesn't always work out that way. And that kind is more expensive. Anything that's not cooked—lettuce, celery, green onions—generally got "debiologicaled." And sometimes it wasn't quite debioed as people would prefer.
Look, bottomline: Of the ten major e coli outbreaks of base food materials in the five years before the Plague, one was associated with industrial farming. One. The other nine were products that were "all natural."
Way more people died of "all natural" food that was contaminated with some "all natural" toxin than people who stuck to that icky "evil" food.
Back to trying to avoid famine.
Chapter Eight
Let Them Eat Cake
Food distribution centers had been set up in some areas. But they, by and large, had not gotten to small towns like Morrisville, VT, or Blackjack, GA. Never really did. Those areas were supposed to be producing the food, not drawing on it.
Initial movement during the Plague had been out of the cities. As the summer (what there was of it) kicked in, the movement was back. There wasn't any food in the countryside. Oh, there was, just not what most people recognized as such (yet). And the locusts wanted the government to feed them. Which it did. I wasn't on that detail but I've heard the stories.
Food distribution was very much on the classic methods used in Africa during famines. People got in long lines and were given some basic food materials. Semolina (cream of wheat for those of you who don't know the name, couscous for the hoity toity) was a base distribution as was cornmeal and beans. Why those? You could put it in a pot and boil it up and eat it. That simple.
"How can I boil it? I don't have a pot!" "I've got a pot, where's a stove?"
The answer is "find a pot, cut down a tree, boil the fucking water."
Believe it or not, there were still "environmental activists" being interviewed on the news who were complaining about the ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE that was being done from this sort of distribution. Trees were being cut down. (There used to be these things called "greenbelts" around subdivisions. I kid you not.) Fires were adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There were even lawsuits seeking injunctions against fires used for cooking food.
Due to the way that the population had ebbed and flowed, most of the food distribution centers that were getting heavy traffic tended to be in the outer edges of cities. Central areas had some commerce as well, but people were clustering out of cities and, well, there were "issues" in the cities. Which wasn't good for the economy. Cities were and are the mitochondria of the economic animal.
But that's where most of the people who were coming to the food distribution centers were. And they included the "random associations" from suburbs. Side note again.
According to orders, the only people who got food were those that came to distribution centers. The Bitch again. I'll get into her hate affair with her crisis management specialists, including the head of FEMA, later. But that was the Rule.
Very few local officers paid attention to it. The majority of the distribution was going through the Army and what remained of the National Guard and reserves. The NG had had widespread desertions when they were called up. Go take care of others or stay with your family? About 20% chose the latter. There were also screw-ups with their vaccination program. They ended up at about half strength.
Oh, why weren't there more widespread desertions in the Army? There is no better place to be in an emergency (generally, we still haven't gotten to me, right?) than the Army. The Army always gets fed. Rations may be short, but it gets fed. And it generally takes care of dependents.
Dependents near bases went to the units when things got bad. They got some medical care, unit family support groups gathered in "less than random" associations and, well, supported each other. The troops were away. Rear area detachment personnel weren't going to turn away their wives when said wives turned up with kids in tow, hacking and coughing. (And in some conditions girlfriends or even "close personal friends" of the same sex. You can turn a blind eye to all sorts of shit in an emergency.) But even the dependents, those that lived on or near base, mostly got innoculated. And while power might be out in the local town, it stayed up on bases. There was food, water, shelter, medical care and clothing. As things started to get humming again there were even jobs.
There's a reason for this. See the difference between the National Guard and the Regulars. The Regulars stayed on the job in droves, less than five percent desertions, no matter how nasty those jobs were. (Body clearance in Miami was high on the list according to a buddy in the 82nd. He's challenged by a couple of officers in my unit who were involved in breaking up the food riots in DC. Clearing already dead people in hundred degree heat or killing American citizens? Tough call. I didn't get to find out, fortunately. Sort of. But, truth to tell, I actually enjoyed Detroit. Sometimes you can do good works in very bad ways.)
The point being that most of the work at the grunt level was not being done by FEMA, which never had many bodies, or even by the National Guard, which should have had many more bodies, but by Regular Army units. They'd been flown back starting in April when it was clear things were going to hell in a handbasket. At first the generals stuck with the pre-disaster plan until they got ordered to follow the Bitch Plan under Emergency Powers.
Okay, okay, damn. Sooo much to cover.
There was a Plan. Like all emergency plans the Post Catastrophic Disaster Emergency Rebuilding Plan left out, well, the Emergency. But it was a plan. It was a plan nobody wanted to implement but it was a Plan. It amounted to nationwide triage.
Triage is a word that comes from the old French word "trier" meaning "to pick or sort." Triage on a battlefield (where the word originated in the Napoleonic Wars) came down to three choices: Those that don't need help right now, those that can survive if they get help right now and those that are probably going to die whether they get help or not. Three choices. You send the bulk of your resources, doctors in this case, to the cases who had to have help right now, but that were probably going to live if they got that help. The lightly wounded could wait until later. And for those for whom there was no help, you sent no help. You put them together hopefully somewhere far enough away from the rest that their groans and screams wouldn't bother anyone and you Let Them Die.