After water, food is the next most important necessity that every living thing must have to remain living. I do not believe I need to have much explanation of this, but I do feel it is important to frame food and ongoing sufficiency goals against preparedness and survivalist techniques.
In our modern world, the current generation(s) look at food very differently than all previous generations. I believe it is because until the last half of the 20th century, at least in the United States and most of the other “1st World” countries, the pursuit of food as a daily sustainer is no longer our primary concern. These days it isn’t IF you have any food to eat, it is WHAT food do you want to eat! This is stark and changes everything in how this section needs to be addressed. Most survival guides focus on how to get food to eat and how to peck out the most meager of sustenance just to exist. The doom and hopelessness of such an existence abhors my senses to think about.
I do not have the statistical proof of this next statement, however I believe it to be true. More people have died of starvation than of any other thing. I stay this because as I stated before, prior to the past few decades the primary occupation for the mass of humanity has been to find food in sufficient amounts to sustain life.
We know that we are tough, mankind has experienced and lived through the most horrific conditions possible in wars, pestilence, plagues and all other types of crises. Reverting back to a state of merely existing is not what most would call survival, I certainly do not. Therefore, preparing for as many potentialities as possible
Food is one of those things that will require the biggest paradigm shift for most people to get used to in a survival situation. Managing your food and supplies will be as critical as anything you have to deal with. If the world reverts back to the stone age then being able to grow, raise and otherwise procure food stuffs will reemerge as the primary occupation of most. So the goal of this section is to minimize the impact of such a transition and sustain healthy food that will still taste good.
There is a place for the basest survival practices of scavenging, foraging and other low to the ground minimalistic survival techniques. But they are NOT the focus here. The focus is getting to the situation of sustainable food supplies and then grow from there.