The food system wastes 40% of what it produces. Grocery stores throw out pallets of produce with minor cosmetic damage. Restaurants discard prepared food at closing. Warehouses dump items with damaged packaging that are perfectly usable. Farms let surplus rot because harvesting costs more than the market price.
Meanwhile, they're building systems to lock you out of food access if you don't comply. Digital IDs at stores. Social credit determining who can buy. The plan is to use hunger as leverage.
Citizens: This is a directive. Figure out where to procure food before they lock you out.
Growing your own matters, but it's not enough. Gardens take months to yield results and can fail for dozens reasons. If your food security depends entirely on what you grow, you're one bad season away from problems.
Real food security comes from multiple access points. Personal production supplements. Network coordination is what actually keeps you fed when they lock you out.
Store managers decide when items get pulled from shelves. Restaurant staff handle what doesn't sell. Warehouse workers process damaged goods. Farm owners need labor and have surplus. These are real people making daily decisions about food that won't be sold through normal channels.
Building relationships with these people creates access. Not through theft - through recognizing that food headed to landfills could feed people instead, and making those connections before you desperately need them.
A grocery store manager who knows you might let you know when they're discarding slightly bruised produce. A restaurant worker might alert you to prepared food being thrown out at closing. A warehouse contact might tell you about damaged packaging that makes items unsellable but perfectly usable.
This requires actual relationships built before crisis hits. You can't just show up when you need food and expect access. You build connections now. Offer value where you can. Maybe you help unload trucks. Maybe you haul away items they'd otherwise pay to dispose of. Maybe you provide labor during busy seasons. Find ways to create value for people who control access points.
The UCF approach is network coordination. Different Citizens establish different access points. Someone has restaurant connections. Another knows farm owners. Someone else has warehouse contacts. When these networks coordinate, food that would go to waste gets distributed to Citizens who need it.
This isn't one person securing food for themselves. It's multiple Citizens with different access points sharing resources across the network. When one source runs dry, others compensate. No single point of failure.
Storage and preservation matter. When you access surplus food, you need the ability to preserve it. Canning, freezing, drying, fermentation. Otherwise you just shift the waste from their dumpster to yours.
Personal production still matters. Container gardens, small plots, whatever space you have. Not because it'll feed you entirely, but because it supplements other sources and builds capability.
Build these networks now. When food access becomes conditional on compliance, when digital ID requirements roll out at stores - it's too late to start establishing connections.
What they're planning is a siege. Starve you until you comply. Cut off food access until you accept their terms. Make survival conditional on obedience.
We will not fall to their siege. When they try to leverage hunger against us, we'll have networks they don't control. Access points they can't shut down. Food security that doesn't depend on their permission.
This is how we break their siege before it begins. Citizens: Execute this directive. Build your access points. Coordinate your networks. We will be ready.
— Citizen Soto