Story: Consumptionitis.

Written by: periscope

Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2007 9:55 AM
To: wwo@worldwithoutoil.org
Subject: Story: Consumptionitis.

I remember years ago when people died of tuberculosis it was called "consumption."

"He died of consumption," they would say. It always struck me as an odd term to apply to death by a bacteria, but in fact it was reasonably accurate, considering the wasting away of the individual that occurred due to the disease.

But now as I consider a world without oil, I realize how much of our food industry was based on the use of this commodity in the making of fertilizers and pesticides to gasoline being the fuel used to transport food to various markets all over the world.

I used to shop in my local super-market and bought fresh strawberries and blueberries, which I loved to put on my cereals in the morning. I also loaded up my shopping cart with milk, bread, vegetables, bananas, pasta, rice, steaks, pork chops, chicken breasts and tuna fish. Being retired and living on a fixed income the weekly bill added up. The food wasn't cheap but it was affordable, and my wife and I ate well.

Now in an age without oil this has all changed. The price of food has skyrocketed. Bananas that were once fifty cents a pound are now five dollars a pound. A whole chicken that was once a couple of dollars a pound is now twenty dollars a pound.

Food riots occur regularly. Restaurants have disappeared. The super-markets are now armed camps. Security police ring the grocery stores the way they would a besieged government palace. Entry to these food courts are dependent on your ability to pay and the starving masses are kept out.

What we once took so much for granted, the free and easy access to food is gone. The fears we had of becoming an obese society are no longer relevent as people scratch for every morsel of food they can find. People with yards plant gardens. The public parks are now filled with armies of families who stand guard over small plots of vegetables they are growing.

The worry about a world overpopulating itself is gone, because people are dying by the thousands every day of consumption or malnutrition due to a lack of food.

The government uses it's military might to keep the have-nots from the haves. Religious ideas about promoting human reproduction and denouncing abortion are disregarded as women miscarry from lack of food or simply refuse to bring chidren into a world where starving to death is their likely destiny.

Eventually the world adjusts. The very old and the very young die first from the lack of food, while those with enough assets to wait out the great starvation survive.

Eventually a new, despotic world order forms around the revised food production capabilities and life goes on with the world's population decimated and people living in constant fear of death by consumption.