Science & Technology

How long could you live off a supermarket ?

By T.K. Randall
February 22, 2016

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Surviving in a post-apocalyptic world is a scenario that has been explored in movies, books and television shows for years, but if you really were fighting to stay alive in a world where everything had gone to the dogs, how would you find enough food and water to survive ?

In a recent study, British scientist Dr Lewis Dartnell looked in to what would happen in the rather unlikely scenario that you, and you alone, ended up living inside a fully stocked supermarket.

With mountains of produce to choose from it might seem as though there would be no chance of ever running out of supplies, but with so many perishable foods being sold it is likely that a large percentage would end up going bad long before you could ever get around to eating them.Nonetheless, according to Dr Dartnell's work, the average supermarket would contain enough non-perishable food and water to keep one adult alive for around 55 years.

The research was conducted as part of a larger study designed to see how people would cope with an apocalypse and how long the UK as a whole might take to recover.

"Clearly we shouldn't be worrying 24/7 about a potential apocalypse but it's interesting to take a snapshot of where we are now and how we'd fare - individually and as a society," he wrote.

Source: ITV.com

Tags: Supermarket, Apocalypse