Also known as “Are Books Edible?” A somewhat reliable guide to surviving a catastrophe under a specific set of circumstances.

Imagine that while waiting in line at the Bubble Tea and Sushi Spot, a disaster strikes. You take shelter in the stacks, hidden among the books. After what feels like hours you emerge and no one else is around. The exit is blocked by the debris. Can you survive?

Ok, mediocre sci-plot over. Seriously though, how long could you survive being stuck in Milstein? How much sushi can someone eat? Can you eat books?

All these important questions will be answered in due time.

First, I am assuming that you are stuck in Milstein in the middle of the sushi lunch rush; therefore, you will have all the sushi and tea supplies at your disposal. Considering that each roll uses 2 ounces of sushi, and the Sushi Spot makes an estimated 400 rolls/bowls per day, you would have 800 ounces or 50 pounds of fish at your disposal. I hope you are not allergic.

Sushi obviously also has rice, so using the same number of rolls/bowls and an average amount of rice per roll of 0.625 cups, you get 250 cups of rice. Since poke bowls use more rice than sushi rolls, I am going to increase this number to 300 to account for that discrepancy.

All right, congratulations. You have an insane amount of fish and rice. However, I hate to break it to you, but fish and cooked rice expire, and they expire rather quickly. Without electricity, you would have a maximum of two days to eat the fish unless you can find a lot of salt to cure it, so pray to the sushi gods that you have salt. For this, I will let you have the salt. Never say I am not nice. However, this salt will decrease the weight of your fish stores by roughly 30%, meaning you now only have 35 pounds to work with. Sorry.

Now to split up the portions. The average portion of fish and rice per meal is 4 ounces of fish and 0.5 cups of rice. Assuming you do not want to die of malnutrition first, we are going to use that info. With your wonderful stores, you have 140 servings of fish and 600 servings of rice. That means you have roughly 47 days’ worth of fish and 167 days’ worth of rice.

Wait, did I forget to mention that there is no way to save the rice after four days unless you want food poisoning? Silly me. You only have four days’ worth of rice, but I will let you eat only rice for those days, giving you a grand total of 51 days of survival. That is less than two months. Congratulations!

What? You want to survive more than 51 days? All right.

The only way to do that is to eat books, and technically, paper is edible, however, it is not nutritious. Seriously. You would do better by licking a tree trunk. Maybe then you would get a worm or bug for protein.

So, what is the answer? You could probably live for two months by stretching your food if you were stuck in Milstein and you had a lot of salt. At least you would have enough books to keep yourself entertained.

Sushi via Pixabay