Yet the Democrats survived?
They would have been eating everything they could.
Not surprising.
They would eat whatever they could find to survive.
The ability to eat gross foods is a huge advantage for survival, not everyone can do it.
People who are starving and living hand to mouth will eat almost anything. Maggots, while disgusting to us, are probably a good source of fat and protein. I saw a documentary on PBS once about cultural food practices; the only part I remember is that people in Mexico hunt and eat mice, and eat black flies steamed in banana leaves. The New Testament teaches us that we no longer have to follow the dietary laws, so people can eat what they want. Westerners are spoiled, but if a famine occurred, we’d probably also eat whatever we could get our hands on. I read a book about Stalin’s abuses, (can’t remember the name of it; it was written by a famous guy who defected to the US, and was eventually found and killed by the KGB) in which a housewife was so embarrassed when the author visited, because she was cooking manure for her family to eat. Pitiful.
In the Pacific Northwest (US & Canada) native Americans who lived on a diet containing a lot of fish and local game, did take small fish (smelt, herring etc.) and let them rot in a cedar box full of water. They would then scoop the fish oil that floated to the surface and use that in cooking and to augment their diet.
So not all rotted food needs to be eaten for maggots and fly larva.
There are places in the current world where people are forced to eat bugs, worms and all manner of weird foods.
As recently as the late 60s, Germans hung beef carcasses until they turned green and where maggot infested. They scraped off the maggoty green and the now tenderized meat was served in resultants and butcher shops along side tenderized horse meat.
Since Adam & Eve were the first humans on earth and had the intellect & common sense to eat fruit (apples, etc) and not maggots, it appears Neanderthals were an early version of Big Foot.
One time in the desert southwest a college did a study. They microscopically studied ancient Metates (Grinding Stones) to see what type of seeds and such the archaic natives were eating. They found very little vegetable matter, it was mostly rats, mice, and lizards being ground into a paste.
why we don’t patronize the big chain fast food dispensary
If you don’t have refrigeration, you can stretch that mammoth haunch by eating the maggots.
Or, bears do it, why can’t we?
Hard times, hard choices.
The Preface of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It re- ported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream-and in it were found frozen speci- mens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish. or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and de- voured them with relish on the spot.
The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.
As for us, however-we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.
We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.
And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the
pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psycho- logical sense, fused into a continent-an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.
But, as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago, they kept their silence.
By an unexpected tum of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: “No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.”
But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”
Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some im- probable salamander.
I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents. And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them? Those who do not wish to recall have already had enough time- and will have more-to destroy all the documents, down to the
. very last one.
I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as
something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy tum of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander-which, incidentally, is still alive.
Slimy, yet satisfying.
they would do really well on fear factor
Gosh, I did not know that there were politicians in those days.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Speaking of survival, Srednik highly recommends the book FOLLOW THE RIVER by Thoms, the escape from Shawnee captivity by Mary Ingals during the French and Indian War.