All there for the taking. To think that people would be trading for ten pairs of wellington boots only a couple of years after the plague is preposterous. About the only thing that's certain is that people would have plenty of everything. Maybe not too many doctors or medics left to actually administer medicine or drugs, but there would be plenty of it for generations.
shareYep, join the club, this is the 3rd thread that I am aware of saying this, I started one too.
This is definately one of the series weak points.
stuff goes off!
The date on tinned food is a year or so, even if they might last for 5.
even petrol goes off.
plus the series's excuse was all resources were in cities that were human compost heaps
tins last a very very very long time.
Bottled alcohol lasts a very very very very long time
Wellingtons and other clothes last very very very long time when sitting in a wardrobe unused.
There are 100's of 1000's of houses in the countryside/villages which as we saw the survivors were happy to use. There were only 10,000 survivors for England/Wales.
This is not a defensible storyline not by any means.
yeah i suupose your right. Can you think of a bit of back story we could add that would explain it?
like, um, "the country had been famine struck for years before the plague so all the tins were eaten"
"the plague brought on ravenous hunger so all the victims ate all their food and clothes before dying. of fat." :)
Has anyone thought of fires? I think I remember one character (might have been Greg) saying a city was burning in one of the early episodes. If cities or towns catch fire and there's no one around to put them out, a lot of unused food, medicine, clothing and alchohol would go up in flames. There was a famous heatwave in 1976.
England has had some pretty devastating weather over the years. Floods, storms and hurricanes would bring buildings down and wash them away. With no one to repair the damage, a lot of goods would be spoilt. Tins would go rusty if they're exposed to the elements. Rats, mice and moths would do a lot of damage to packaged food and clothing, especially when there's no pest control. Would three years be enough time then?
Many of you have brough up the subject as to how long tinned food would last. Tinned food has a shelf life of at least two years from the date of processing. Tinned food retains its safety and nutritional value well beyond two years, but it may have some variation in quality, such as a change of colour and texture. Canning is a high-heat process that renders the food commercially sterile. Food safety is not an issue in products kept on the shelf or in the pantry for long periods of time. In fact, tinned food has an almost indefinite shelf life at moderate temperatures (24°C and below). Tinned food as old as 100 years has been found in sunken ships and it is still microbiologically safe! I would not recommend keeping tinned food for 100 years, but if the tin is intact, not dented or bulging, it is edible.
share[deleted]
You'd have to get in quick though. any surviviors would be quickly pillaging and hoarding whatever food they could. Petrol, however, goes off very quickly, within a matter of months it seperates into a kind of mix of parrafin and creosote and a vehicle won't run on it. diesel lasts a long time however if its not allowed to freeze.
share"In fact, tinned food has an almost indefinite shelf life at moderate temperatures (24°C and below)."
A lot less, I suspect, when it's exposed to the elements in a collapsing shop; rain, debris, fire, summer heat, winter cold are all going to take their toll on the tins and their contents. In addition, while the food may be edible, I believe one of the biggest problems is loss of nutritional value with vitamins and the like. I could see easy access to viable tinned food for a decade or two, but certainly not for generations.
And none of that will help if another group of people have systematically looted the shops in the area where you're living to build up a stockpile of their own; as people have mentioned, petrol will only last a year or so unless you store it properly, and after that you're not going to be driving tens or hundreds of miles to find other sources of supplies.
I do agree, however, with other posters who said that 'Day of the Triffids' handled this more realistically.
I agree, Day of the Triffids was much more realistic in this. And in the new version of Survivors they are still going out and salvaging a lot of stuff too. I think that the writers of the original series were interested in looking at what would happen if you had to virtually start again from scratch so wanted to explore that.
If you want an explanation though, here's one:
Where the survivors were staying once they settled in season 1 was quite remote, they were staying away from cities because of the dangers there. Yes there would have been a few farm houses scattered around but other people intent on stock piling goods had already been through (they mention their neighbours had a lot of stuff, much more than them and bargained hard when they traded) and cleaned a lot of it out. They mention a few times - particularly in the episode where the trader comes by looking to trade goods for gold - that the area has been picked clean.
By the time they moved in season two, they didn't have a lot of petrol to go very far looking for more stuff. They decided to put all their time and energy into farming instead. Of course it probably would have been smarter to set up somewhere where there were still several sites nearby, maybe small villages, where they could still gather stuff but I guess they wanted to settle in one place, not keep moving all the time.
Indeed the survivors could go on forever , after all they had eaten Abby Grant for food at the end of the 1st season and could continue eating each other for a long time .... the natural population control
givemebackthelast136.789secondsofmylifeolenkagrygier----Ididnotneedthat-Ivotethumbsupthismovie!
I think it was too dangerous to go to cities because of disease, although they should have considered using protective gear like the one improvised in one episode. I don't know about provisions found in towns unless militia already took them, but there should have been enough tools, including needles, in various houses.
The more serious problems, and these appeared in the second and third series, involved population and lack of skills to operate whatever complex machinery was available.
I know I am restarted an old thread but it is an interesting topic. In my mind in the 70's we didn't have as many supermarkets as we do today and many of them weren't the huge monoliths we have now too.
The smaller towns and villages would have smaller supermarkets and most of the food in those would be quickly snagged and bartered by the initial survivors.
Larger urban areas would have the larger supermarkets. I suspect these would be looted early on in the crisis and left open to the elements. Raw foodstuffs would rot quickly, the weakly packed foods would be open to parasites like rats/mice. This leaves us with the tinned foods and glassed goods. Imagining my local sainsbury's there isn't a huge amount of tinned goods. Imagine a group of 10 people with a truck arriving. They'd pretty much wipe out an isle of tins. The booze might last a bit longer but even then I suspect they would be stockpiling that too until every last one was gone. You'd also get the crazies smashing the place up for laughs. The cities would be more densely populated with survivors like in London in this series. They have no other means of creating food on a large enough scale so they'd quickly use up much of the food goods. People in remote areas would fear the cities because of the diseases so even though there will be lots of goods available it wouldn't be much fun.
Distribution plants would be the place to go. They are huge, have vast stocks that feed all of the supermarkets and they are often located out of the Urban sprawl close to the motorways. They'd be an ideal place to go and I suspect the sheer amount of goods available would be more than enough to keep people going for many years.
Tinned goods will last a long time as long as they aren't dented. You can buy dehydrated tinned foods with a ceramic lining that are rated to last 25 years. Even this is overkill as a normal tin would survive quite harsh conditions and still be healthy to eat after decades. Not much fun to eat, but still life sustaining.
I think the huge problem would be the supply of seeds. Most seeds we buy today are hybrid varieties that often don't produce more seeds that can be reharvested for the following year. We actually have seeds banks all over the world to protect the varieties we have just in case something goes wrong. One such place is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The problem is, if we are almost wiped out then these places might be lost and forgotten or too remote to be of use.
well looking at it from my own point of view i would be hoarding far more than i actually needed since i could no longer pop out to the shop and buy things.
i would have caches of food/items hidden to last several life times in fact that would be my main job of each day to go out and horde food/items.
and dont overestimate the amount of food in places like supermarkets
you only have to look at real life situations that we have witnessed in our own life time to know food/petrol vanishes fast in a crises.
EDIT: the real question that should be asked is why did they fail to do that?
Spot on. the whole supply chain is on a "just in time" basis as nobody wants to have to store huge amounts of stock for long periods. without a crisis it would only take a day or two for the shelves to be empty once the deliveries stop. the distribution centres also get restocked on a daily basis for the staples so they are not going to hold much either.
shareThis thread is missing the whole point that "Survivors" is trying to make. Yes you could live on what was left for a very long time but things wear out and rust. Without knowledge would you recognise iron ore, know how to mine it and extract it. Without it life becomes very difficult ie Stone Age. Back to hunter gatherer. In this series new glasses were mentioned but what about dentistry, medicines and surgery, transport (making wheels and harnesses), shoe making, cloth making, scissors, so much that we take for granted. While this would take generations to run out unless these skills are learnt and kept up they would disappear. Someone on the site talked about a book "Earth Abides" which I have read and found really interesting. A very different scenario to "Survivors" and which I don't think could be successfully made into a film. Interestingly in Terry Nations original book "Survivors" the group end up trying to go to the Mediterranean as England's climate means the struggle to survive allows no time nor energy to relearn skills that have been lost. Well worth reading also.
share