Winter is coming...

[TheokinsJ]

Winter today seems like just a change of season, with nothing that spectacular coming with it, however back in medieval times if you weren't prepared for winter, you died. As simple as that. In the world of my current WIP it is a harsh, cold land where it snows about six months of the year, and where food is easy to come by in the summer months, but hard to find in the winter. Basically my Main character and another thousand people are stuck in a city without food stores and winter has only just begun. I need to find a way for her to feed these people so that they can last the winter. Any ideas? I've thought about there being cattle in the city that they could eat when the time comes, but even a hundred or so cattle wouldn't feed a thousand people through winter. Would it have been possible to graze large herds of animals during winter, even in the ground was covered in snow?
I guess most people don't realise how many provisions a large number of people would need, huge armies of twenty thousand men were impractical if you didn't have food to feed them, finding food for let alone a thousand people is a mammoth task, especially if you have no way of trading for it. So any suggestions on how I could feed a thousand people so that they could last another, say, three months of winter?

 

[Asura Levi]

Look for the Inuit people. You can get food from frozen lakes (by breaking the ice) and winter animals, like seal, bears, elk.
To have proper cattle would be difficult if the winter is that harsh but the elk and some breeds of sheep (like Old Norwegian Short Tail Landrace) can help you out.

Take a look in common livestock and animals in northern countries such as Norway, Sweden and Russia as well as Canada.

And yes, feed a thousand people is a mammoth task. Some will die for sure.

 

[CupofJoe]

There would be cattle in or at least near a city but not for meat but for milk. Up until the railways in the 19C there were herds of cows just outside and sometime within London [and I would guess other cities] to supply fresh milk.
As for meat I would guess that Pork was more likely as it could be cured to Bacon and Ham and stored.
The same would go for Fish, salted and dried as well as pickled. I guess you can pickle any meat...
Meat wasn't as common as it is today and you can find recipes for just about any part of any animal.
Honey and cheese was used for protein and sugars. As were fruits and veg.
[I've only just found out that plums rot and spoil easily but if you baked them for half an hour or so until the become prunes they can last for years...]
And on a slightly different tack - they would need an awful lot of wood, coal or peat to cook and keep warm. The animals could help with the keeping warm if housed under the living quarters...

 

[AnnaBlixt]

You need some kind of supplies, or your guys are going to die. The city can't be totally empty...

If you have food for chickens, you'll have eggs. If you have hay for goats, you'll have milk and cheese. Pigs will eat just about anything. If you have some kind of wilderness surrounding the city, you can have poachers and gatherers doing some work outside the city. You'll want to ration the supplies and make sure to keep the cats fed, so that the rats don't get to your few supplies. Never eat your kittys!

Some fruits will keep rather well, such as winter apples. The city could have a protected orchard. We have a winter-apple-tree in our garden. We harvest it from september to november (before the snow comes in december), and it keeps me and my husband in apples until about march. We store them cold and use them for pies and stuff. A good number of apple trees will make a nice addition to your city's supplies - apples will grow in cold climates.

Do some research about cold countries. Scandinavia, Russia, Greenland etc. You'll find a lot of fishing going on, even when the lakes freeze. We drill holes in the ice and fish through the holes. The fishies are hungry in winter, so the fishing is pretty good and it's very easy, you just need a pole, string and some bait.

You can't graze herds in the winter, unless you invent some kind of animal that grazes from evergreens or something. Deer turns into pests during the winters here in Sweden. The can't find stuff to eat in the forests, because the snow is too deep, so they wander down into the villa gardens to snatch grazing from cultivated bushes and from whatever borders the shoveled streets. They are very very cute, but they eat all my flowers in the spring. *growl*. I send my cats out to chase the deer away.

Anyway, you'll want to have some fruit trees in the city and gardens with late crops. You can't grow much during the winter, so you'll be left with eating whatever you can hunt & gather, and whatever you can get out of the livestock in the city /eggs, milk etc) before you eat the animals too.

If you want this scenario to work, I think that you should have a forest and a big lake nearby. Lakes offer good fishing in the winter and the snow makes big animals easy to track - you could have your people hunt deer, elk, fox, rabbits or even bear...

If game and fishing is plentyful and you have some livestock and late-yielding plants in the city, you should be OK.

 

[Butterfly]

On the other hand it's cold so they could freeze perishable food such as meat, and vegetables to make it last.

And...

Before refrigeration there were ice houses. Ice house (building) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Addison]

You could also possibly have your character sort of study other animals. What do they store? How and where do they find it? Several animals, if they really need food, will dig in the earth and eat bugs and roots. Maybe she switches the rules in the food chain, instead of running from the wolves or bears she runs at them with a butcher knife.

 

[ecdavis]

What if there were large flocks of migrating birds that just happened to fly over the city, within bowshot of some of your thousand people. Perhaps the sudden cold caught them off-guard and they had to land as a flock on a body of water nearby, only to find it frozen, so many of them died, smacking into the ice, but giving your people at least a few days worth of food.