If the Grid Goes Down, the Menu Starts With Animal Feed
An essay in The Conversation Canada sketches what a cyberattack that shuts down the electricity grid would mean for eating: we would need to eat animal feed and biofuel crops, ban alcohol production, cut food waste, and fish from sail boats. The reason is that modern agriculture runs on electricity. Without power there are no fuel pumps, no livestock ventilation, no food refrigeration, no irrigation systems or grain drying and no fertilizer production — and the authors argue the food system would rapidly collapse, with even small-scale farmers struggling.
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Banning alcohol production to keep grain for food, and fishing from sail boats, is triage that makes a grid outage sound less like an inconvenience and more like a siege.
The speculative framing does a lot of rhetorical work. The load-bearing part is the dependency list: fuel pumps, ventilation, refrigeration, fertilizer. That is true of any long outage, whatever causes it.