Humans are animals that take care of each other. We build communities that manage risk – protecting the vulnerable and using good years to prepare for bad ones. The hard times always return one day, but we prepare for them and learn how to live lifestyles that can handle when the odds aren’t in our favor.

Cultural traditions from around the world are passed between the generations, teaching how to get through bad times. Festival foods prepared every year that remind us how to cook the greens from the field if the food runs out. Comfort dishes using lots of grease to keep you warm when there’s no more heating oil. Aunties and uncles handing down their sewing machines and soup pots and other tools for making do.

Not everyone has access to these traditions. Some folks don’t have a family (either born or found) to teach them. Others have had it easy long enough that they don’t remember the old ways of doing things. 

At times when cultures have had to change fast without traditions to guide them, they intentionally built up the skills of the community to meet the days ahead:

• In 1406 the Chinese Ming dynasty prince Zhu Su wrote Jiuhuang Bencao (救荒本草) / ‘Famine Relief Herbal’, a book of illustrations and descriptions of wild plants that could be eaten during starvation events. 
• As the world blockaded Cuba during the cold war, the government released a manual called El Libro de familia’/ ‘A Book for the Family’ – which had DIY guides for skills ranging from foraging, construction, mechanics, and medical care. 
• World war II era Europe published numerous magazines, pamphlets, media programs, and social events, which taught regular people how to make things work with less and less. 

This book is intended for those people who have lost the traditions of hard times, and don’t know how to face them when they finally return. We’ve sourced the material from personal interviews, scientific papers, and historical accounts of people making it through scarcity.