Picture this: the world, in all of its peculiar glory, decides to end tomorrow. Imagine that this sudden apocalypse came with the token doomsday tragedies—barren, withering farmlands, desiccated fisheries, ration lines sprawling on and on and on. Imagine, somehow, that you survive. Over time, though, a question remains: What food will survive with you? Supply lines to grocery stores and supermarkets might have been severed, and diseases might have ravaged cultivable cropland. Fresh produce will go first, the water-concentrated tomatoes and cucumbers and melons bursting with rot, shriveling with decay. Then the raw meat and fish. According to Michael Sulu, an expert in food chemistry at University College London, “[m]ost foods, not all, spoil for the same reason—because of the growth of microbes.”
So, then, which foods promote rapid bacterial growth and which ones don’t? Are there certain chemical properties that determine this? Which food products can sit untouched for months, years, centuries, even, and still remain edible?
Here is a short list of some of these imperishable foods, for whatever purpose you might use them for (i.e. what to start hoarding when the doomsday sirens go off and the world starts to thaw over):
- Honey
Honey is known for its virtually eternal shelf life—it does not spoil over time. During the excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, archaeologists discovered jars of honey that were up to 3000 years old. When they tasted it (which was certainly a choice), they found it to be perfectly edible and sweet. Honey’s eternality is likely due to its low water content; after bees collect flower nectar (up to 70 percent water), they ‘fan’ the honeycomb with their wings to induce evaporation of the water from the nectar, dropping water content to about 17 percent. Another factor that prevents honey from spoiling is its acidic pH. This is primarily due to gluconic acid, which is produced by the interaction of bee enzymes with honey’s glucose molecules. This combination of low water concentration and high acidity renders the substance dehydrated and unable to promote bacterial growth.
- (Bog) Butter
According to Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London, “[v]ery fat-rich foods can be preserved for a long time. […] Things like butter and cheese, tallow or oils.” This is primarily due to the hydrophobic, water-excluding nature of fat, which makes for a terrible bacteria breeding ground. A historical example of this is ‘bog butter:’ highly fermented butters that were unearthed from the peat bogs of Ireland and Scotland. Nine known butter samples were dated to the Iron Age, and three to the Medieval Period. It is thought that ancient people buried their butter in the peats as a means of preservation or to hide it from thieves. Bog butter is still theoretically edible due to its fat content and the acidic, oxygen-free bog water’s ability to prevent decomposition. In a modern experiment that involved the burying of butter in a bog for three months, those who tried it noted its gamey, salami-esque taste.
- Food with preservatives
Predictably, food products containing preservatives are adept at…well, being preserved. An example that famously demonstrates this is the last McDonald’s Big Mac in Iceland. When McDonald’s closed all of its Icelandic restaurants in 2009, one man decided to purchase his last hamburger and fries. As of 2019, the meal is on display in a glass cabinet at Snotra House, a hostel in Southern Iceland. While the burger’s paper wrapping appears aged, and the Big Mac is wilted and pale, mould has not yet set in. While this is a clear indication of the volume of preservatives used in McDonald’s recipes, it is also a demonstration of the power those preservatives possess. Calcium propionate, for example, is used to prevent bacterial growth on bread, and sodium benzoate to deal with mould on cheese. But, of course, a diet that consists of primarily preservative-laced food is far from a sustainable one.
- Seeds
Hidden in Svalbard’s dark, snow-capped mountains, pulsing with a defiant green glow, is perhaps the symbol of the apocalypse itself: the Global Seed Vault. Or rather, a symbol of the possible salvation within it. The Global Seed Vault (casually dubbed the ‘doomsday vault’) was opened in 2008, and contains millions of seed samples from approximately 930 000 different food crops behind a colossal steel door. The seeds are kept as a safety depository, allowing humanity to restore essential crop varieties in the case of natural disasters, pandemics, war, or operational failures. They are stored in a subzero-temperature environment, inside of vacuum-packed silver boxes that are stacked on towering floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Something far more important than the physical properties of the seeds, though, is what they represent. When you conjure a seed, you conjure life, conjure growth, conjure sprouts of green pushing through the dark. You forge images of fruit gardens, of tree branches leaning towards one another to fend off a storm. An interesting thing about the Global Seed Vault is that it contains seeds from every corner of the world. Any country, territory, or organisation is welcome to send seeds to the vault, and there are no limitations based upon geopolitical tensions or matters of statesmanship. It is as if, for a moment, we can be children again, planting seeds in sandboxes, rebuilding a world together and watching it grow.
