Preppers’ PING!!
Assuming the stench of rotting garbage and human excrement have not saturated the air.
Lots of apocalyptic movies (”The Road Warrior”, “A Boy and his dog”, etc.) involve a canine companion. There is a reason — human hunters have teamed up dogs for thousands of years. Dogs can smell, you know.
Oh I get it. I’m the one starving? I go after my liberal neighbors whom I know have no guns. Hell, I may feed the liberals to my dogs, but I care for my dogs to much.
The “city” is the last place I would be.
If you are in a house you could fire up your rocket stove in your fireplace and cook over that. I think going up the chimney would alleviate some of the food odor. The rocket stove gives off little smoke.
/johnny
I’ve been in an “unpleasant” area (long story, professional decision that I would not make again), and I don’t think I would have smelled a five star restaurant. Sewage, decay, garbage, and the other smells of SHTF would almost certainly overwhelm the smell of good food. By the time those smells are gone, I suspect most troublemakers would be gone also.
What would I do for food if I had nothing left? Certainly not try to take it from someone who had food days, weeks, or months into a disaster. That sounds like an extremely bad idea. More likely, I would offer to work, patrol, assist, build, repair, etc. in return for food.
Had someone rifling through my trash can two weeks ago.
Woke me up.
4:00AM.
Caught him red handed.
Well, red pawed...
400 - 600 pound bear.
If I needed the food, he would have been acceptable.
We were less than three feet apart (and a door, of course).
Easy shot at that range...
Boil socks?
But, you can always add the smell of burning zombies to counter the good food smell.
Remember, the good food smell can also be used as a bobby trap diversion.
What do you do? You go fish. Coast. Streams. Lakes. There’s urban fishing, too. Nutrias. Rats. Crawdads.
Snakes are easy to kill. Slow creatures. City pets, pet stores, and zoos are easy pickings, too.
What you avoid are humans, especially groups of them or someone dug in with supplies. Anyone with a fire and food is a high risk to have tools and weapons, and avoiding being wounded or expending energy fighting is like stocking up with 5 course meals for a couple of months in energy equivalence.
The flip question is how do you behave when you have food that others do not have. Killing “everyone” is a high risk plan, for example...as is “trusting everyone.”
Do you sleep out on a boat on a lake, under an overpass, on top of a skyscraper, out in a field, in a forest, in a bunker, in a house with more windows than you can monitor?
Do you shelter in place or bug out?
Do you yell to a passerby that you will trade a can of food if he chops up firewood for you?
Pure survival is the easy part. With a knife, shoes, a pot, and a fire starter...maybe even less (just a knife for the hard core), boiling water to be safe, catching rainwater, carving spears, and you’ve got the basics.
The hard part is the step above pure survival. Interacting with anyone else, such as trading. Entertainment. New social structures.
Take a small barrel. Put in wood. motor oil and urine. Ignite with gas. A putrid odor that will mask any food aroma.
Well, my first thought was that they will only smell the rotting bodies of those that came looking my food.
Where have the city dwellers gone? Out to the country? Ha haha ha!
No could be the smell of bar-B-qued long pig
Much of my stores are dehydrated. Boiling water makes no smell.