Via the beautiful Browser, I came across “What to Eat After the Apocalypse,” Yvonne Bang’s Nautilus interview with Adam Pearce, co-author of Feeding Everyone No Matter What, which plans the menu for Armageddon. One exchange:

“Question:

So what would we eat after the sky goes dark?

Adam Pearce:

There are many things that you can eat that we don’t normally consider food, particularly in the west. Leaves are one of them. You can eat leaves. You just have to be careful about how you do it. Leaves are high in fiber and we can’t digest any more than half of it, but if you chew the leaves and spit out the fiber you can draw out nutrients from it. Or you can make teas.

Tea in particular is a relatively easy one to do. Pine needle tea has more than 100 percent of the vitamin C of orange juice. One could actually make pine needle tea from the pine tree in your backyard and get your vitamin C for the day. It’s actually a really good superfood. And in some cultures, like [South] Korea, they even have pop that is flavored with pine. That’s their drink.

The other obvious one is insects. The conversion ratios between biomass and food in insects is much better than say, in cows. Beef production is unbelievably inefficient the way that we do it. In the west, we definitely turn our noses up at eating insects. But there are actually quite a few people throughout the world that eat insects today and, for feeding everyone, it is a very obvious solution. It’s not like you have to eat insects raw. You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. It’s all the same! It’s just the spices. Let the food scientists go crazy on it.”