The smell of beef stew made my mouth water and drew my attention to the small buffet line. Made with wild greens, berries, and some other local plants that I hadn’t yet figured out, it was my favorite meal. As soon as Tyler got a bowl, Nate set a generously sized bowl of stew on my tray. Nate, like everyone else here, performed multiple duties. Like Kurt, he was also a Guardsman and a scout under Tyler, but he was also a damn good cook. Between Vicki and him, they planned all our meals.
It was easy to see that Nate thoroughly sampled each meal. He was one of the few scouts whose clothes fit tighter since the outbreak. After giving Nate a grin, I moved on and grabbed a handful of nuts and two crumbly chunks of cornbread, our daily staple. One thing the Midwest had plenty of was corn, but there was one big problem. Farmers planted seed corn, with only small pockets of sweet corn scattered across the area. Seed corn was made for cattle feed or corn syrup. Hard and bland, it generally wasn’t exactly consumable without being ground down into cornmeal. We’d grown accustomed to the simple taste. Hell, I even looked forward to Nate’s corn hash every third morning.
That was the way things were around here. Everything had become a routine. Hard-boiled eggs or hash for breakfast, meat as dinner’s main course every other day, and only vegetables and grains on the alternate days. Sugar and salt were restricted for medical use only. After a while, a person’s palate became accustomed to a blander fare, finding new flavors in things like dandelion tea and root soup. But that wasn’t always the case. Some things were just simply flavorless, or worse, tasted like weeds.
Tyler led us back outside to a picnic table. Manny and Bill followed us rather than sitting with their own people.
“Real beef?” Manny asked, swirling a spoon in his stew, while Bill slurped directly from his bowl, completely oblivious to us.
“It’s nothing fancy,” Tyler replied after taking a bite. “But it fills the stomach.”
Manny chuckled. “No, you don’t understand. I can’t remember the last time I had meat that didn’t come out of a can.” He took another bite and frowned. “I can’t make out the seasoning.”
“It’s marjoram,” I said. “Deb found a whole bunch of it growing wild around the park. We ran out of spices a month ago and have been trying out what grows naturally. We’re still getting used to the new flavors ourselves.”
“We’ve also been collecting all the remaining livestock in the area,” Tyler said. “Mostly hogs, but a few cattle and some chickens. There aren’t many left, but enough to repopulate into something that can support us.”
“Impressive,” Manny said. “We’ve brought some livestock into Marshall, but nowhere near enough to support the numbers we need to support. You’ve got everything you need right here.”
“Not yet, but being smaller helps,” I said. “Right now, we’re working on harvesting and canning fruit. There are quite a few apple trees, but other than berries, we don’t have much variety. Not having enough vitamin C to last the winter is one of our greatest nutritional worries right now. Scurvy is a very real risk we will face unless we can get into town for food or vitamins.”
Manny tilted his head. “Well, you’re a step ahead of us. For winter, we planted some crops in the greenhouse, but we’d planned on living off anything we could find in houses. The pickings have grown pretty slim the past few weeks. We’ve gotten desperate enough to start picking around the edges of the Twin Cities. We’ve been saving seeds. Come spring, we’re planting crops anywhere there’s grass at the university. That is, if the herds haven’t busted things up too bad.”