This is sort of why civilization is based on agriculture. Not hunting-and-gathering.
There is no reason however, to think that hunting can't supplement a family's food stocks if other sources start to become thin. And there's a lot more to hunt than deer.
There's also more in play than hunting. A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.
One interesting thing about this is that those living close to the coasts may be in better shape in one or two regards. Most notably, seafood is one area where "direct to the consumer" sales is a real thing, and there isn't a lot of processing involved. At least where I grew up on the NC coast. It's common for seafood houses to sell oysters, clams, shrimp, etc. directly to consumers.
Early Americans spent the whole summer struggling/working like slaves to put up enough food for the 3 months of winter.
Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain). That used to be pretty good return. Not sure stocks today could feed a fraction of America for long. Most of us eat seafood a meal a week/month that way even in the best of times.
Again:
A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.
I'm saying that hunting, etc. are individuals components of a broader strategy for providing food - not that any one of those things is sufficient in and of itself. As as of today, it doesn't appear to me that the commercial market for food is going to just disappear overnight. But if things devolve to the point that you can't buy everything you need, then some of these other approaches can come into play.
Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain).
There isn't just one "food supply line." The supply chain for the steak you buy at Food Lion involves a lot of intermediate steps and processing. And those are exactly the steps where we've heard news reports of the processing plants closing down, etc.
My point about seafood is that there are fewer such intermediate steps involved. A boat comes in, docks, and sells their shrimp to the seafood house, and the seafood house sells to the public. The main processing is weighing. And some boat captains even bypass the "sell to the seafood house" part and sell direct.
Fewer steps in the seafood supply chain, doesn't offset the fact that in America anyway, it currently provides a whopping total of 1 meal a week per. That's gotta be dropping too. So still the numbers don't support any idea of supplementing food supplies to any great degree.
The OP was just a puff piece about an uptick in hunting. That was fun and interesting. I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad. No alternatives are reasonable.
You can't really make that claim without quantifying the degree of supplementation in question. And that's an unknown. So really this is all just speculation. But I can say that for myself, I'd rather have the ability/knowledge/skills to acquire food by hunting, trapping, foraging, fishing, etc. than not, all things being equal. If you want to take a defeatist attitude and not pursue those things, well... that just means you'll be one less person I'll be competing with for food eventually.
I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad.
I think we're ultimately talking about two different things here. Of course we have to restart the commercial food supply chain. That, to me, goes without saying. It's also somewhat irrelevant to that I'm talking about (which I think is different from what you're talking about). I'm talking about things to do in the interim for base survival... until the commercial food supply chain is working again. It sounds like you're assuming that we're talking about depending on hunting/foraging/fishing etc. as the default way of life for perpetuity. On that point, I agree with you... it's not reasonable to sustain a population of our current size for an indefinite period of time.
If it comes to it, good luck out there hunting with all the amateurs who are hungry, unskilled and outnumber trained hunters 100:1.
I highly recommend "How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons.
Every year, my garden produces an ever increasing portion of the food for my household and this year it has expanded to provide a significant amount of food for a small flock of chickens. Important things that aid my productivity and reduce the time it takes are a heavy mulch to minimize weeds, improve soil fertility and reduce water consumption as wel as drip irrigation on timers.
There are plenty of people using sustainable techniques to produce more food than they can eat if you look around on the internet.
No one would seriously recommend an all meat diet. It will kill you. Seriously - Go google protein poisoning. Unless you're eating incredibly fatty meat like seal, don't eat just meat.
The Carnivore Diet is a real thing that is gaining popularity, if choosing between two extremes with veganism on the other side, I would much prefer an all meat diet.
The carnivore diet fits pretty well into the "high fat" category.
I just went and checked, and the following seems to be a fairly consistent outline of the diet
---
Red meat (beef, pork, lamb), with an emphasis on fattier cuts of meat to take in enough calories.
Other options include:
Organ meats Eggs Lard Bone marrow Butter Salt and pepper
---
Basically - A mix of protein and fat with fat constituting much of the calorie intake.
So yes, my comment should really read
>No one would seriously recommend an all LEAN meat diet. It will kill you.
but the poster was doing calorie calculations for pure lean venison. That's insanity.
Why is that your assumption?
Depends on the size but you can get 40-60lbs of venison from a whitetail deer.
My state of 3M had 100,000 deer harvested last year. That's deer for 3% of the population. One deer each. Not gonna put a dent in our food supply. That was my only point.
And what about rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, ducks, quail, bison, elk, feral hogs, etc., etc? There's more game out there than just deer.
I don't mean to be a scrooge - go hunting if it pleases you! But its not gonna feed America, not even a percent or two of us. The numbers don't support it.
Nobody is claiming that it will.
The bigger issue is getting one's family on board. A spouse or kids who have grown accustomed to CAFO beef and chicken and not much else will be difficult to transition to gamier meats, to say nothing of offal.
To this day my boys rave about the pepper deer tenderloin, roasted and sliced thin. Best meal of their lives. And they're all about 30 now.