There are Many Kinds of Freeze Dried Foods

The growing demand for freeze dried foods reminds of a novel I recently re-read after about twenty-five years -- Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon.

This book came out in 1987, a product of an era when nuclear war was again prominent in the public consciousness, after several decades of being quietly ignored.

McCammon obviously began with the scientific thinking about what would happen in the event of a serious nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union -- a "nuclear winter." This notion was popularized by Carl Sagan and others.

Large scale explosions throw a lot of dust and dirt for up into the atmosphere, where they tend to hang and drift. In enough volume, they block sunlight to the Earth, producing global cooling. Eventually of course they fall back to the surface or burn up as they do go down, but in the meantime the world is cooler. This does tend to happen after major volcanic explosions throw enormous volumes of particulate matter into the stratosphere, such as Mt Pinatubo.

You'll Need Freeze Dried Foods to Survive a Nuclear Winter

McCammon sketches a scenario where, along with other evidence of rising international tensions and unrest, the U.S.S.R. is massing submarines together in the Atlantic. The only rational reason is to begin a first strike on the United States. Consequently, to defend itself, the U.S. strikes first. Then the Soviet Union counterattacks.

food supply

The novel is very long - about 900 pages. It tells the story of two groups of survivors. One group is the good people, including the little girl Swan who doesn't realize she has the power to save the world. The other group consists of the bad guys who are taking advantage of the disappearance of the government to found their own, complete with armies and torture.

It lasts seven years. During that period, the sun does not shine. It's blocked by the enormous amounts of dirt thrown into the air by the atomic blasts. The only difference between July and January is that official winter is even worse than the cold and snow of official summer.

No plants grow. All the trees are dead and brown. There's no grass, no bushes, no flowers -- nothing green is growing at all.

With All Plants Killed, You Better Have Stored Frozen Dried Foods

This is what McCammon gives way to poetic license. Animal life, including humans, cannot continue without plant life, because plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and give off oxygen. We tend to think of the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere as a static 20%. It's not static at all. Oxygen is a highly reactive substance (which is why it combines with iron to make rust and turns apple cores brown).

Left on its own, oxygen will react with something to become a more stable substance. Without plants around the planet continuously giving off oxygen, the atmosphere would soon have none.

So if the United States had no plant life for seven years, it's difficult to see how the war survivors could have continued. However, perhaps the algae in the oceans were not killed off. Those one-celled plants give off more oxygen than all the trees and other plants on land.

But the people also had to eat (as well as breathe) in the meantime. How did they do that? Looting the houses, stores and warehouses not destroyed in the initial blasts.

How did wild animals survive seven years with no plants, considering their inability to open up cans? We're not really told. Early on there are a lot of wolves we're told came from the deep woods driven by hunger, and a lack of normal prey who'd left in search of plants. I doubt any place in the Eastern United States has so many wolves remaning, but hey, it's a novel. We're not told how the rabbits and squirrels that need plants, and the foxes and owls that need small prey, survived in that period.

We see the characters in the book eat a lot of canned food. However, it would have been good if the author had shown them sometimes eating some freeze dried foods they discovered.