How did people survive famines?

by eating food

>>2598770
how did they eat when there's no food?

>>2598765
famines do not mean there is no food they mean there is not enough food.

>>2598773
the ones that didnt have food died. the ones that did have food lived

It's never zero food.

Typically a famine is a situation where an armed class is exporting food grown by an unarmed class. If this doesn't happen, everyone goes hungry and some people die. If this happens, most people go hungry and a lot of people die.

In Argentina 2001, the police protected Monsanto exporting food, while supermarket shelves were bare.

>>2598765
in usual cases, food had to be imported from other regions if it was possible.

When the Dust Bowl was going on in the midwest during the Great Depression, crops from the Southeast and was used to try and relieve the famine as much as possible. Of course this doesn't fully relieve famine, but offers enough food to avoid mass starvation.

The mass starvation accounts you hear about were cases where there was either no surpluses food available to be imported from elsewhere (present day North Korea, for example), or importing of food was restricted with the goal to starve out the peoples afflicted by famine (1840's Ireland)

>>2598818
*Southeast were diverted

>>2598780
This.

>In Naples, in 1585, large-scale exports of grain to Spain had caused domestic famine. The people had to eat bread di castagne e legumi - made with chestnuts and pulses. The grain-hoarding merchant Giovanni Vicenzo Storaci faced with a crowd who were shouting that they would not eat that bread, insolently replied: "Mangiate pietre" (Eat stones). The Neapolitans hurled themselves at him and murdered him, dragged him mutliated body around the city and finally chopped the corpse into pieces.

- Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism

often there will be a mass exodus of refugees from the worst hit areas

one of the reasons the famine in China from 1959-1962 was so bad was because the government forbade people from leaving their villages to go beg elsewhere so they had to just stay and die. That had never happened in Chinese history before, which obviously has a very long history of bad famines and natural disasters.

>>2598780
Irish potato famine as well, the English got corned beef from Ireland while the paddies starved. Capitalism is a disease

>>2598901

Bengal.

>>2598780
Nailed it

All famines are man-made disasters, the result of market manipulation

>>2598870
That merchant sounded like a Jew tbqh

My great uncle used to eat cats during the great depression.

>>2598780
Was there a famine in Argentina in 2001?

>>2598901
Colonialism is a disease, be it British colonialism in Ireland and Bengal, or Soviet colonialism in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

>>2598951
>>>/leftypol/

>>2598914
While this is frequently true, The Great Famine of 1315-1317 is probably the best known example of a famine caused by other forces.

>>2598770
fpbp

>>2598765
Cannibalism! The strong preying on the weak!

>>2598765
in Ireland people literally ate nettles to survive the famine. contrary to /pol/ they also ate whatever fish they could get their hands on but the british authorities never made this easy.

>>2598914
the year without a summer 1815 was caused by a eruption

>>2598905
>>2598951
I'm Irish and I've been to (west) Bengal. I was surprised at how people there had a mostly positive attitude towards Britain. most assumed I was British and were very pleased to meet me; even taking photos with me etc. however I should mention one of my (Irish) friends was told to "go back to Britain", although I wasn't there when this allegedly happened

>>2598765
>How did people survive famines?

thrifty gene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrifty_gene_hypothesis

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>>2598773
Ask Russia.

>>2598989
Nettle is good in soup, it's not like if it was weird to eat it.

>>2599007

it's an honest mistake to make

>>2598780
And if the police didn't protect large scale agriculture all of their capital would like leave and Argentina would go hungry for years.

>>2598914

Because the natural state of the world is without property rights. A dog doesn't defend his dinner and a tiger cohabitates in harmony with other large carnivores. So it is true that men, by nature, sacrifice their hard work and wealth for the well being of others. I know this is true of you, anon, as you donate the majority of your earnings to feed the starving children in Africa whom you have no personal connection.

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From Jung Chang's memoir "Wild Swans" a description of the famine in Sichuan province China in 1959

>In Chengdu, the monthly food ration was reduced to 19 pounds of rice, a third of an ounce of cooking oil, and 3.5 ounces of meat when there was any. Scarcely anything else was available, not even cabbage. Many people were afflicted by edema, a condition in which fluid accumulates under the skin because of malnutrition. The patient turns yellow and sells up. The most popular remedy was eating chlorella, which was supposed to be rich in protein. Chlorella fed on human urine, so many people stopped going to the toilet and peed into spittoons instead, then dropped the chlorella seed in. They grew into something looking like green fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out of the urine, washed, and cooked with rice. They were truly disgusting to eat, but did reduce the swelling.

>>2598773
If there can be food shortage, a social group exposed to it will start by dividing food into long term storage foods, preserved food, and perishable food.

Once the signs set in, you start by becoming desperate and start eating all edible roots, and everything thats actual food.
The same is true of hunting.

Before you run out of food, you start adding filler.
I.E Bark, minced wood, plants that isn't really edible.
Bark bread is common, where it starts out as 30-40% filler to worst case of mostly bark.

Once you do run out, shit gets weird.
But it rarely gets to that. What happens instead is that you go from last storage, to extreme rations to avoid running out.

>>2598765
they didn't

rich people had food in abundance
others probably survived to the next harvest by the skin of their teeth

>>2600244
I have to wonder if socialism makes famines worse simply because they try to ration out food to everyone making it so lots of food is wasted on letting lots of people have long slow deaths.

In capitalism, the poor starve quickly. The rich have enough to not suffer malnutrition

>>2601068
look no further than
>>2598870 to see what happens to the rich during a famine

The reason why the great famine of China was so bad was because Mao believed his own bullshit and nobody was willing to speak up and force him to listen to reason. In late 1959 the general who had led China's forces in Korea, Peng Dehuai, who was also a personal friend of Mao told him that the great leap forward had clearly gone off the rails and needed to be stopped. For that he was arrested as a reactionary and the famine continued for another 2 years. I wonder if things had been different and Mao listened how many millions of lives could have been saved.

Its just unbelievable to read about the famine since its the worst famine in human history yet it was mostly man made. Different government officials were competing with eachother to set higher and higher agricultural production quotas, which led to them becoming extremely unrealistic. So the officials didn't look foolish they simply lied in their reports about how much grain they had, which led to government taking so much that there was none left for the people to eat.

Some of that grain was used to feed people living in cities, some was sent to the soviet union to repay debts, but a lot of it just rotted in store houses while millions died of starvation. Fucking unbelievable.

>>2600016
The couple standing barely look human anymore. They look like somekind of savage beasts.

>>2598765
get some knee pads and start sucking

>>2600200
>people can't farm their own land

rly makes u think

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>tfw millions will die in Africa in a few months
It fucking sucks. I gotta get out some money and contribute something. Is there a good charity to donate too?

>>2602312
dude
in some murica'n states
it's illegal to collect rain water
while somehow it's perfectly legal for the government to prevent rain
how about that