Food Production

Food Production is a critical occupation in the world of Twilight:2000.

Distilling ethanol for consumption

Making moonshine or homemade sprits requires grain, fruit, or vegatables, and at times all of those will be in extremely short supply after the collapse. However, communities that can spare the foodstuffs, or use smaller portions of cut up food, would inevitably build a dedicated still for making alcohol for getting drunk as opposed to using it as a fuel. These stills will be an invaluable source for trade good, for personal use, or community morale.

In any case, stills will become more and more important as communities begin to cooperate again, and the spread of knowledge on how to distill spreads.

Spirits made to a higher quality, like whiskey, vodka, or gin, will became an even more valuable trade good as some people and communities will specialize in luxury goods. The people who run these stills would be an in demand, and protected, asset, and could probably form their own trade ties with neighbors.

However, communities experiencing famine conditions will outlaw the practice altogether until conditions improve, and in cases where the community or group is filled with extremists of any stripe, distillation or consumption may be a capital crime. An example of the latter is the Church, run by Rasputin in Twilight 4th Edition.

Brewing Beer

Beer, unlike spirits or Ethol-Methol Alchohols, is more of a food item than the trade and luxury goods of spirits. Beer has a long history throughout the world, with workers in ancient Egypt being paid in a daily ration of beer. Even communities suffering famine will produce beer to pad out their supplies and supplement caloric intake.

For Europe in particular, beer has been a cultural staple, especially outside the wine producing countries of France and Italy, to the point beer in Soviet Russia is considered a soft drink, much to the confusion of American sensibilities. In the post apocalypse, it would be strange indeed to find a dry village or town without a bar or inn for the community to congregate and socialize. It may even be one of the only places outsiders and foreign soldiers are allowed to loiter when within village limits

Beer can be made with most cereal grains common in agricultural communities, wheat, barley, oats, maize (Corn for Americans), and rice are all possible ingredients. During brewing, hops are commonly added when brewing for flavor and bitterness, but it also serves the invaluable addition as a stabilizing agent, and most crucially as a natural preservative.

Unlike spirit distillation, which can be a specialist skill in the immediate aftermath of the year 2000, beer brewing is a relatively available skill in most communities, even if their brews do not match the quality and quantity of pre-war corporations and state industries.

As a trade good, beer would be a relatively available staple, with only a weak 2-4% alcohol content. Stored in barrels or bottles, it can be transported over relatively long distances and remain good through the seasons. While not as valuable as spirits and alcohols, even extremist communities would accept it in trade, and beer in all qualities would be in constant demand from slave mines to Krakow itself.

Growing crops for trade and food

(Cotton, Tabbaco, Wheat, Corn, etc...)

With the collapse of the transportation network after the nuclear strikes in the twilight of 2000, starting with the November Massacre of 1997 and continuing through late 1998, it became a very serious problem to get foodstuffs to major population centers. Relocation, which was a program to move population closer to food sources was a major failure, and simply contributed to the breakdown of civil authority. By 1999, a major die-off of the population had occured, and food production entered a major shift.

Military and Civilian groups began to farm where ever they were, and this included urban farming (use of city parks and upper floors of buildings). Composting of organic material was a major part of these efforts and it was common to see community rules in place for the disposal of all organics, including human and animal waste. Crops that were grown were typically the easiest and most productive that could work for the area; in the Northern Hemisphere with temperate climates these included maize (corn for Americans), potatoes, wheat, and lettuce. Farm plots were much smaller, as production was limited to what smaller groups of people could cultivate by hand, and the importance of being able to defend the crop against attack from opposing forces and animals.

Small single family farms would use fodder and crop waste to help support small animals such as goats, sheep, and rabbits, with goats being a source of milk as well as meat, and Sheep being a source of wool for clothing. Most of the animal stock that small farms would keep would be housed inside their own homes or in well protected areas for defense against natural predators and raiders. Poultry is, and remains, another favorite of farmers world wide after the twilight. Swine can eat nearly anything, including feces, making them popular as a natural and efficient way for communities to handle the ever present danger of sewage. Poultry and swine were usually supported on larger farms that would be maintained by villages and towns and were a communally maintained resource. Medium to large farms and ranches in more secure areas could support cattle for grazing exhausted farm fields and pastures as part of crop rotations, typically requiring the support of national governments or military groups. Cattle rustling was a executable offense, and the famed "Polish cowboys" became mythologized much like their American ancestors.

As it would take years for transportation networks to recover globally, most of the food produced had to be either consumed close to the area where it was raised, or preserved for more transport via rail or horse and cart. Methods of moving food supplies started out with the old standby of horse, mule, and for most small farms, human transport. Where rail lines were placed, communities could make transport easier by building improvised rail carts and pulling them by animal power or by hand. The most fortunate of communities are those near rivers, who could use handmade rafts to transport enormous quantities of food quickly and easily.

Surviving diesel and gasoline stocks were either quickly used up, or expired in their forgotten storage tanks, new petrochemical production was reserved exclusively for government and military use. This left alcohol production, either through wood gasification, or spirit distillation, to provide day to day fuel, and even that was most often requisitioned by the militaries or militias for combat use. Whatever was left was rationed for civilian use running available mechanized farm equipment, the few functioning locomotives for trade, and emergencies.

Trade is a major source of motivation for growing additional crops, as small single family farms could trade surplus food for nearly anything. Medicine, technology, spare parts, additional labor (help grow the crop and you get a share), but above all, security. Farms need some kind of defense to keep raiders and marauders from stealing or destroying their harvest. Farms attracted all sorts of martially inclined people, the most valued are former and active duty military or paramilitary, who come with their own gear and sophisticated training. Survivalist groups were the next best, those who were skilled in foraging, tracking, and ranging, and typically armed with civilian firearms. And if all else fails, local militia from a nearby village could stand watch at night and work as farmhands during the day.

Many military units set up cantonments near fertile farmland, or even incorporated them into their own cantonments in order to guarantee a source of food. In some places, food became the primary currency for trade akin to the Feudal Japanese Koku, since conventional paper money had little value by that time, and machinery, ammunition, or precious metals was too valuable for even essential bartering.

Ration books became and remain a popular mechanism for large communities and national governments to control and distribute food, particularly as a reformation of paper currency to pay soldiers, workers, traders, and mercenaries. Americans and the British were the first to do so through the importation of company town script to replace worthless national currencies, backing these new paper notes with food. These promissory notes were often referred to as "Snap books" from the American food dole program pre twilight, Russian food cards and books were in turn called "Blat (Favor) books". The idea proliferated throughout Europe through the 2000's, to the point that ration book theft and counterfeiting was punished with execution in most communities.

After sufficient space and manpower was dedicated for subsistence farming, cash crops became the next step for most people. Textiles, tobacco, cacao, coffee, sugar, and their regional substitutes remained in extremely high demand post twilight. Europe, particularly a Europe suffering from a nuclear winter, cannot natively grow cotton, cacao, or coffee. Crossing the Mediterranean would be the swiftest way of accessing these three luxuries grown in Africa. While greenhouses were an option, most villages could not justify the huge expense in resources and it remained the purview of specially maintained greenhouses in surviving major cities, utilizing scavenged or imported seed stock. In the post apocalypse, age old substitutes for clothing remained. Wool, linen, and hemp were all viable and had many dual uses. Chicory and sugar beets are both native to Europe, and have a long and storied history, the former as a coffee substitute, and the latter for sugar production, often the second thing farmers would plant would be sugar beets, to fuel the ever hungry alcohol stills and their own bellies.

In general, cash crops were often literally worth their weight in gold during the years after 2000, and were some of the first things widely available in 2001 as commodities. The famed Free City of Krakow made its riches off tobacco and hemp, which it was able to natively grow in massive quantities in the Silesian Lowlands, and exported across Europe. To this day, "Royal Krakow" cigarettes remains a brand known throughout the world for quality.

Meat salting/smoking

Salting and smoking are a pair of ways to preserve meat that became critical skills once widespread refrigeration became impossible with the collapse of the power grid. While both methods were used widely, salting was the first choice for most, as fuel for smoking took away from other productive activities.

Salting meat is done by washing, drying, then covering the meat portions with a curing salt, table salt, or crushed salt from a local source, the last option being the most common in the first months of post-collapse recovery. Injecting a brine solution into the thicker parts of the meat was also done to assist in the curing process. the meat is then set aside to cure for around three weeks. During that time the meat needs to be checked periodically for evidence of parts going rancid, which are then cut off and recycled. Cured meat was then stored dry in whatever containers were available that would not contaminate the food.

Smoking was more popular in areas where there was a shortage of salt. As an essential mineral for human survival, areas that lacked easy access to salt heavily rationed it. Smoking meat preserves it by dehydration and the antibacterial properties of the smoke absorbed into the meat. Smoking was typically done by building or improvising a smoking box which enclosed the meat and the fuel for smoking. A small fire is lit in the bottom of the box with the meat hanging over the top, and in between is placed a pan or plate of water soaked wood chips which put off smoke as they heat up. The wood chips themselves worked best when soaked for 24 hours, and lasted about a half hour. In Europe, and in particular Poland, smoking houses were a common fixture of rural households pre war.

Smoke curing meat took some time to preserve meat, it depends on what kind of meat was being smoked, the temperature that the smoker could reach, how much and how thick the meat was being smoked. Illness and death can result by making mistakes in the process, and eventually the knowledge was passed on as widely as possible as communities began to re-contact each other.

Cheese making

(ideal for long term storage/reserve)