Oatcake Apocalypse

L.G.C. Smith

I'm taking Rachael's turn today, and she'll take mine next Monday. She's off traveling and having fun. :)

There’s a gritty romance in anticipating apocalypse that pretty much escapes me. Earthquakes. Fire. Floods. Toxic sludge. Supervolcanoes. Asteroid strikes. Ill-intentioned alien invasion. Killer viruses and bacteria. I don’t look forward to any of these, and I really don’t like thinking about them.

But I know one thing: If I survive, I’m going to need snacks.

For the long haul, I have plenty of fat to burn, and I make muscle fast on relatively few calories—although usually I just store fat seeing as I can’t seem to organize myself into exercise on any kind of a regular basis. Anyway, with all that post-apocalyptic trekking to safety and whatnot, I’ll inevitably slim down and get stronger. Just give me a handful of almonds a day and plenty of water, and I should be fine.

But I’ll want snacks, and I don’t mean crickets or invertebrates of any kind. And seeing as I’m allergic to shrimp, asparagus, and pineapple, intolerant of soy and oranges, and sensitive to both gluten and too much glutamate, I can’t rely on poaching whatever snacks anyone else might have. I suspect that after the apocalypse, there will still be wheat and soy in frickin’ everything. Even hard tack won’t cut it.

An oatcake

Luckily, I have discovered oatcakes. These are a sort of Scottish hard tack, er, cracker, made from--you guessed it--oats. They are most frequently compared to plywood, which is not really fair. They can be almost as dry, but they are, in the end, chewable. Plywood is not. Now I know you’re thinking that cardboard is also strictly chewable, but again, that’s not quite fair. Oatcakes are considerably more durable than cardboard, plus, they are a better class of fiber.

Two oatcakes

I am going to make a bold claim that many will dispute: Oatcakes are delicious. Wonderful. Crunchy. Nutty. (Some of them). One can last an hour if you don’t have a nice beverage to dislodge it from your teeth and send it down the hatch. Once rumbling in the old tum, they have a pretty good glycemic value for a carby snack, and lots of soluble fiber. The latter is important because in a post-Apocalyptic world heart by-pass surgery will be much harder to come by.

In terms of an apocalypse snack, oatcakes are lightweight, sturdy and no one will ask to share them more than once. Even after the apocalypse.

A stack of oatcakes.

In a pinch, I could live on oatcakes supplemented with edible weeds and the odd nut or berry. I should probably consider stockpiling them in a waterproof locker stashed where downed power lines won’t make it inaccessible, and away from anything that can burn. One never knows when an apocalypse will happen along.

I wonder if a steady diet of oatcakes would make my flesh unpalatable to zombies?

A whole box of oatcakes!