12-15-2018, 12:06 AM
Many of my favorite pieces of media revolve around the idea of a post-apocalyptic world, a decaying Earth that has suffered a major catastrophe and it is on the wires, with very few inhabitants left and largely destroyed environments as its only remaining landscapes... the kind you couldn't farm on, or wouldn't want to anyway. Those are great stories to read and I find them to be very engaging, as they just let my imagination run wild with every turn of the page; however... they all share a glaring plothole that is incredibly amusing to acknowledge the existence of: food.
Seriously, most of the zombie-attack, massive outbreak of sorts comics, books, magazines and TV series tend to set themselves on a world that can no longer sustain its people, with factories no longer producing any kind of supplies --much less edibles-- and farmlands being irradiated, taken over or contaminated, yet our brave heroes are always hanging around decades after everything went south, and it just leaves me scratching my head.
Like, you could make the argument that they could be living off small farming and or canned foods, but the issue is that the former would require them to stay put whenever they are, which is clearly never an option on those sorts of stories (due to getting assaulted, overrun...) and the latter is not a solution. Sure, you can live off eating from tins for a while, but those would go off in due time, and it's been made clear that the world is no longer producing new ones, so you have a year worth of edible supplies at best there. They kind of wrote themselves into a corner here.
Some comics try to play it a little smarter and have characters resorting to military rations, the affable MREs.
I would say that that's enough, but I have a friend who is always eating these rations and he says that, under no circumstances, you should be eating them for more than twenty one days straight, so that's kind of a problem, isn't it?
I know I'm seriously overthinking stuff here, but I can't help but noticing these issues the more I get into the genre of "ooops, no more civilization".
I'll give credit to games like The Last of Us, though, whose writers sorta thought of this and had military-controlled areas and self-sufficient communities across the US, providing for all the members of their communities. It's a smart way of dealing with that without downplaying the apocalyptic setting the games takes place in.
So... what do you think?
Seriously, most of the zombie-attack, massive outbreak of sorts comics, books, magazines and TV series tend to set themselves on a world that can no longer sustain its people, with factories no longer producing any kind of supplies --much less edibles-- and farmlands being irradiated, taken over or contaminated, yet our brave heroes are always hanging around decades after everything went south, and it just leaves me scratching my head.
Like, you could make the argument that they could be living off small farming and or canned foods, but the issue is that the former would require them to stay put whenever they are, which is clearly never an option on those sorts of stories (due to getting assaulted, overrun...) and the latter is not a solution. Sure, you can live off eating from tins for a while, but those would go off in due time, and it's been made clear that the world is no longer producing new ones, so you have a year worth of edible supplies at best there. They kind of wrote themselves into a corner here.
Some comics try to play it a little smarter and have characters resorting to military rations, the affable MREs.
I would say that that's enough, but I have a friend who is always eating these rations and he says that, under no circumstances, you should be eating them for more than twenty one days straight, so that's kind of a problem, isn't it?
I know I'm seriously overthinking stuff here, but I can't help but noticing these issues the more I get into the genre of "ooops, no more civilization".
I'll give credit to games like The Last of Us, though, whose writers sorta thought of this and had military-controlled areas and self-sufficient communities across the US, providing for all the members of their communities. It's a smart way of dealing with that without downplaying the apocalyptic setting the games takes place in.
So... what do you think?
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