Urban ranching

You'll never have to do it but just in case

At the start of the last pandemic I happened to have a huge bag of flour and a single packet of yeast and wound up living off homemade bread with a yeast culture I kept alive for a while. This is a pretty good plan for having a stockpile of food around for such an emergency, with dried rice, beans, and pasta being other good options, along with all manner of canned goods.

The good news from the experiences of the last pandemic is that although supply chains may be disrupted there will always be plenty of food. It may be necessary to drive around in tanks to crush the zombies on the road, but we’ll still have Door Dash via tank, because we aren’t savages.

Still, it’s fun to consider what one would do to survive if all one had was an apartment or possibly a suburban lawn to get food off of. For basic calories there’s a clear winner: potatoes. Potatoes are the uber crop, able to be grown trivially and producing mass amounts of calories. They aren’t terribly nutritious, but they’ll keep you alive for a long time.

If things go long enough you’ll need a source of protein. We humans can eat practically any animal, but most of them have issues which make their domestication problematic. There are some animals which can be raised trivially under just the right conditions, for example sometimes you can build an artificial berm in the ocean and simply pick up oysters from it as they grow naturally, but for the most part the standard animals raised for meat are well the best in terms of ease of raising and yield of meat. Chickens are a ridiculous outlier in terms of yield but aren’t terribly conducive to keeping indoors. Crickets are another huge outlier in productivity and in principle can be ranched indoors but the equipment for that isn’t terribly common.

For ease of raising them indoors with occasionally letting them outside to graze there’s a clear winner: guinea pigs. The biggest problem would be people being able to bring themselves to slaughter them. Rabbits are close behind with similar slaughtering issues. Other reasonably easy animals which are bigger include goats and pigs. You’d be basically raising a petting zoo for food, which is good for having cute animals around but bad for getting attached to them.