>>536385612
>The DC wasteland shouldn't have any large permanent settlements at all, just a bunch of nomadic scavengers.

They just value the fantasy of theme more than any real world aspects. They look at pic related and go "cool, we gonna have to scale it down, but it looks cool" without even considering the real world implementation of a place like that. As stupid as the question "what do they eat?" may be, they don't even try to answer it because they don't care. Any detailed answer would introduce too many complexities. Let's keep it simple, they eat whatever they scavenge or pull out of the river. Next topic please. That's just Bethesda.