I'm with you Raellus. In most of the T2K pbems I played in, my characters were concerned with clean water and where their next meal was coming from. I tend to think there would be very few horses available outside of military forces that could enforce the survival of horses. It would take very disciplined civilians to resist the urge to eat livestock and the fodder necessary to keep livestock alive. Assuming livestock survived hungry armies and nuclear war.

In my campaign world, in and around Orlando most food is grown (FL is a very arable place) and meat comes mostly from chickens and wild pigs. You've got to have some connections to get a good piece of beef.

In the city proper, a few "fast food" places are still operated in their original locations, this at the behest of MilGov: projecting a sense of normalcy is helping to maintain calm among the 50000 or so civilians living in the greater Orlando area. Now...you may have to trade work to get a "burger" at "McDonalds" and the menu will vary according to what's available day-to-day, but the fact that you can get a modicum of food, in one of those ubiquitous white, red and yellow bags (drinks are tea, OJ or water - Cokes exist but not for the common man), or a "sub" from Subway, goes a long way to helping MilGov maintain control.

Again, it's expensive, the menus are limited, the portions small, but the psychological impact is huge.

If you're worried about BSE...
At the height of the BSE scare in the UK, a dairy farmer named Mark Purdey raised an alternative theory about the cause of its transmission- he initially blamed the organophosphates used to treat cattle for warble fly. He then set about learning the science to research this theory.
After extensive work, he discovered that cattle treated with Phosmet (the generally used cattle insecticide) did not automatically have BSE-type prions in their bloodstream- they did, however, have raised levels of normally-occurring prions.
Purdey then set about researching spongiform encephalitis in general. He discovered it occurs in all continents, in a variety of mammals- but that it occurs in clusters. He visited many of the areas, to try and discover their common factor.
The common factor in ALL worldwide clusters of spongiform encephalitis is this: the soil has a high level of Manganese, and a very low level of Copper. Manganese in the diet is essential- but only in small quantities. High levels are not a problem- as long as you are getting enough copper.
Incidentally, remember that pine-needle tea mentioned earlier in the thread? Pine needles concentrate manganese...

I'm inclined to agree as well but in some ways it depends on what the PCs are interested in. I'm always happy to digress and look for food etc but many seem to just want to move from fire fight to fire fight.

i could honestly see combat rations go back to hardtack, pemmican, and coffee(or tea for the squaddies).

I have just started an exciting book I received for Christmas. The book, Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants, is a daunting tome filled with photographs and tables. However, the author's first chapter introduction to the book reads, well, deliciously. I'm greatly encouraged that this otherwise intimidating work will be digestible. I put this book on my wish list so I would have another resource for the distinct approach the Black Watch takes to (relatively) large scale survivalism in southern Vermont. The author goes so far as to address the issue of sustainability of edible wild plants, which has been one of my concerns with the Watch. I'll come back with notes as I wade through.

I think that character backgrounds may also influence the ability of characters to gather food or find food even when its all around them. Not sure how many people watch Survivorman, a TV show about one man survival. It always amazes me how he manages to find something to eat that I would have never thought was edible. A party of characters who grew up in city probably could walk right past edible plants and never know what they were. Or not realize just how much food can be had from an animal (still shake my head ever time in the Survivor TV show that they catch fish or get chickens and throw away the bones - hasn't anyone ever heard of making broth?) and not properly be able to butcher it.

I think that cuisine in the T2K world is going to have a lot of things on the menu that people normally wouldn't eat - for that matter look at the Walking Dead episode that just aired tonight - who is up for a nice meal of fire roasted dog?

Or reading any of the other books about wild edibles be it the Military Survival Manual or any of the other books out there.

Mustard plants are almost entirely edible, the same goes for cat tails and dandelions.

Or just going off of one of the lines from the survival manual, "If it walks, flies, swims or crawls it can be eaten!"

A lot of it comes from mindset and cultural morays.

When do we discuss survival cannibalism?

A couple things from skimming through this

1. Once upon a time, I devised a New England campaign setting, before Howling Wilderness came out. My New England was much more settled and centralized; it included (forcibly) recultivating the potato country of northern Maine. (As well as some large chunks of New York, CT, and Massachusetts.
   
2. The fishing industry will take a couple years to figure out how to re-rig for sail. (say 1998-2000) OTOH, the lack of fishery for a couple of years and the reduction of international fishermen will greatly allow the fish stocks to come back.
   
3. I'm picturing a scene in a post-apocalypic bar...
   Barkeep: "Pepsi! We ain't had none since..."
   Tough guy: "Listen, you! The Cola Wars is over..."

Uncle Ted

JKD, can't spell the "K" part, is when prions create holes in the brain.

T2013's E-teams reminded me of the Civil War's foragers.

Great idea for an adventure there - your team gets hired by an "entrepeneur" who wants to have you retrieve the formula for Coke from the vault where it was stored in order to restart syrup production and thus giving him the only operational soft drink facility in the Western Hemisphere

Many a chicken wound up in a GI camp over the years. A fond tale from the Congo was an ex-legionaire saw the French misdrop supplies and ran to hide a crate. After lying to the troops looking for this crate, the unit enjoyed a French General's field food. Whole can chickens, truffle sauce, decent wine, etc.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Very similar to mad cow disease. It's sometimes still found in the highlands of New Guinea, where the locals call it Kuru.

That's it! Boy I mangled the name on that.:o I'd stick with stretching livestock meat and veggies out by soups and stews. A drum, pork and poultry for "hobo stew".

I'm lucky. I live in the North East near the Allegheny National Forest. I have access to:
Elk
Bear
Bobcat
Deer
Feral Hogs
Fish
Groundhogs
Muskrat (known as Marsh Rabbit in the south)
Opossum
Rabbit
Raccoon
Squirrels
Wild Turkey
Water Fowl
and any other number of wild animals or remaining domestic livestock to hunt. We also have access to several vegetable sources that have already been listed by the rest of you.

In my part of the UK, the most common thing to find would be a squirrel.

Independence,MO still has it's "Victory Garden" laws allowing poultry in all neighborhoods, not just those designated "Rural-Agricultural" hence there are those who keep chickens, ducks in their yard. Rabbits are a quieter option, but depending on one's timeline, meat and garden fertilizer sources might be closer than one thinks in urban areas.

Glad I live in a semi rural area....with a former duck hunting club long closed but we still have the ponds and flights plus local fauna....as for here, its plenty of horse people and cattle and even the odd llama and camel...even a two humper down the road.

When I was in the Boy Scouts we did one camping trip where the goal was to see how much food we could gather ourselves from the woods - always amazes me how much you can find if you know what you are looking for - in the space of a few hours we found cattails, edible mushrooms, wild berries and other edibles - we didnt eat like kings but we ate - and on the second day using our campers 20 gauge single shot shotgun we added a rabbit to the pot as well

One of my favorite guilty pleasures from the 1980s is a movie called Band of the Hand - basically a police social worker takes a bunch of fuck-ups and runs them through his own Outward Bound combined with Muscogee Indian training with a dash of SFOR training mixed in. He drags them out into the Everglades and teaches them Indian survival skills. The first meal he serves them is a soup of snails, wild greens and herbs, mushrooms and so on. A couple of the kids enjoy it, one throws up, and another (a cocaine dealer) wryly observes that "A bowl of soup like this would cost you $200 a plate at Coconut Grove in Miami."

Then later they (armed only with knives and spears) are walking in heavy woods and have an encounter with a wild boar; their "benefactor" says "We'll go around. Only wild men and Indians eat wild boar."

They all share a knowing look, then we jump cut to them feasting on wild boar around the campfire later that night.

Similarly, Bear Grylls (yeah, I know, his stuff is mostly set up) spent a couple of nights in the 'glades and had a pretty fine meal out there of tortoise and grapefruit (citrus is essentially a weed here in FL anymore).

I live on the outskirts of Orlando near a green belt and have seen bear (fatty, but good eating I'm told), innumerable gators (gamey but tasty!), deer (mmm venison) and too many members of phyla rodentia to mention, like rabbits, squirrels, and so forth...

There are a couple problems with foraging and the rules cover it pretty well.

After a while they get harder and harder to find. Add the fact that more and more people are foraging for wild edibles and game that an area would be picked clean, and in some cases to the point it would have a hard time recovering.

Another factor, foraging is seasonal. This strikes home often in that show with Les Stroud, Dual Survival and Dude You're Screwed.

Then, there is the knowledge of edible items in an area. Some things in one area (or season for that matter) can go from edible to poison. Or just look alike items. A prime example is mushrooms.

I forgot but is there anything in any of the various editions about combinining foraging with medical knowledge to specifically forage for medicinal herbs and the like? its one thing to know how to find food but another to find medical herbs and to know how to use them

Food Purification Kits
 

During our foraging, let us not forget the official US Army food purification kit; Black Pepper and Frank's Red Hot Sauce. Because everyone knows that you can make virtually anything edible if you put enough black Pepper and Frank's Red Hot Sauce on it....

I put that sh-- on everything!

They were called bummers.

My dogs eat before I do.

If you train them right, your dogs can help you eat better than you ever would without them. Ask any Racoone, bobcat, or deer (which is why it's now illegal to hunt deer in PA with dogs).

Just came across this bit of info and thought it was appropriate for T2k.
Forget wasting your grenades to catch some fish, try fishing with car batteries!

You take the battery, hook up some jumper leads/cables and then throw the ends of the cables into the water. Make sure to remove the cables from the water before retrieving fish :p
Allegedly it will stun or electrocute the fish.
Who knows, maybe it really does work? But even if it doesn't work too well in the real world, it might make survival for the PCs a little easier in the game world.

That's how the fish and game get fish to test for illness and contaminants.