Never before in the history of mankind has a generation of people been so distant from their food sources, both in geography and in knowledge of how they are created. Those who are intent on doing evil have used withholding food as a weapon of war for thousands of years. Unlike modern weapons of war that leave great environmental damage, starvation is a silent albeit slow killer. This leaves a populace malnourished and the people are hence easily led, unable to resist the commands of leaders. Depopulation follows, leaving all wealth and infrastructure in place. It truly is the perfect weapon.
Hunger: Some Illustrations
In my younger years, I was an avid backpacker. I would stay in the backwoods sometimes weeks at a time. The only thing that drove me from the deep woods was lack of food. As a guide to large groups of people on Monday through Saturday hikes through wilderness areas in the early 1980s I would ask to inspect each person’s backpack. My mantra then was: “If you can’t eat it or wear it, then leave it.” When going through the backpacks of Newbies, I would constantly find items that had no use in the backcountry: From fold-up lawn chairs to cast iron skillets, to #10 cans of stewed tomatoes, to three pairs of boots.
I had to explain to them over and over: “The lack of food will drive you out of these woods very fast.” I tried to explain to them that deep hunger will drive you to distraction to where you can think of nothing else. With these large groups sitting around the campfire the topic of food would painfully come up over and over again. I have seen the bidding on a lowly candy bar top $50 in the deep woods, because people were hungry and there, currency had no value. There is a reason why many trails, streams, and mountains are named after food because you can think of nothing else. The old myth that food is plentiful in the woods is simply not true. I have never seen a fat coyote. Most animals in the wild all look malnourished most times of the year.
I had one group of 24 people that were especially quarrelsome mainly because it had rained two days and the group was cold, wet, and hungry. So I radioed my boss to have some food dropped off at the last campsite where we would be staying. When we got there we found a 50-pound pound sack of potatoes and nothing else. So I handed out about 2 pounds of potatoes each and proceeded to build a large campfire so they could roast their potatoes. I then showed them how to roast the potatoes in the coals provided. To my surprise, few came forward. The group looked sheepishly at me until I realized most of them had eaten their potatoes raw.
The Search for a Crashed Airplane
Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that there is little food in the woods. I the late 1970s a widow posted an advertisement that she would pay $15,000 for anyone who found a crashed airplane with her dead husband in it. Her husband was a doctor who had been flying from Spokane to Seattle and his plane was lost deep in the Cascade mountains. A young buddy of mine was fresh out of the military and was extremely fit and he too thought the $15,000 reward was well worth trying for it. We did have a credible tip from a Forest Service Ranger that he had heard a plane late at night on the night in question and then the sudden thud, then nothing. He gave us the general direction on which to head.
It was late summer so we filled our backpacks to overflowing and headed off into the deep woods. Our backpacks must have topped 80 pounds of mostly food and we were out for a two-week search. We made a high camp near a 7,000-foot mountain. We spent the first week bushwhacking up and down ravines looking for the crash site to no avail. We noticed our food supplies were dwindling faster than we thought. So we decided on the second week to offset our reserves with Brook trout and Cutthroat trout with the hooks and line we had brought. The fish were plentiful and delicious, but each night we felt like we were going to bed hungry.
