But What Will We Eat at the Apocalypse Now?

There are, of course, a lot of critical issues going on right now, and you can count on your blogiste to keep you up on them.  Besides the fallout from Sandy, crisis of arctic sea ice and all the agricultural issues that need to be brought to the  light, it can be hard to keep up.  But I think we all can agree what really is critical at this moment is this:  What are we all going to eat when the zombies come?   How will we go on now that that perfect survival food, the Twinkie, is no longer available?  Particularly since Israel and Gaza seem bent on bringing the zombies in extra-soon, before we have time to properly grieve our loss.

Of course, you could stock up on survival Twinkies, buying the last thousand cases so that you and your family will have a food that can be passed on to your descendants with no reduction (or increase) in quality.  Or you could smuggle them over the border - I'm told that Hostess brands have been licensed to a Canadian company for some time.  This, along with the useful foresight of being a net-energy exporter,  is the main reason that Canadians are much better prepared to survive the end of the world than we are.

For the millions of Americans, newly aware of the possibility of climate related disaster, or store shelves emptied by gas shortages, but far from the Canadian border,  however, the question becomes - what survival foods can take the place of Twinkies?  The answer is bleak, I'm afraid.

While any number of nutritious, delicious storage foods are available, many of which, properly packed and stored, will not degrade for many years, the category of food that will outlast the human race without noticeable change is now gone.  The species that rise to fill the ecological niche of human beings after our destruction will simply have to evolve without the help of Twinkies, Ho-Hos or even Sno balls (the pink Sno balls, which of course, are  known to actually cause DNA mutations will be particularly missed.)

What does the zombie-ready reader do now?  How do we counteract the growing sense of despair as we are cast back on the traditional resource of whole grains, legumes, nuts, dried fruits and the fruits of our preserving labor?  After all,  none of those foods could ever equal either the sugar-high or radiation absorption capacity of the Twinkie.

For the millions of us who had planned to subsist entirely on dry-as-pasteboard "cake" with benzene-flavored "cream" filling, this is a stunning setback.  What WILL we eat as the mutant cockroaches approach?  How can a meal of lentil- kale soup, fresh cornbread and marinated lemon carrots with a dessert of pumpkin-chocolate chip bars ever seem anything but deeply disheartening in the face of our Twinkie-less future?  Twinkies were the best survival food ever created by nature (well, nature was involved in there somehow, at least in the creation of a few of the original molecules of the filling that the synthetics were then mostly modelled on).  Nothing we can ever do now will be the same.

All I can say is that if you have already come to terms with the knowledge that a stable climate and endless cheap oil are not part of your future, you can work through the unbearable suffering accompanying the knowledge that Twinkies won't be there for you.  We will soldier on through disaster after disaster, knowing that what is lost can never be reclaimed, enduring the suffering of a diet based on real food.  The pain may never end, and the fear of the future, but humans endure, as the last few, precious, golden Twinkies do, no matter what you do to them.

Sharon