Mad Max never needs the loo

That is, it's generally true of both RPGs and the media they're drawing from that the heroes just ignore minutia like using the toilet, eating, drinking, bathing, etc. But in AW, scarcity of any of those things (even privacy) can be a threat. So how do you handle that in-game? Making the PCs tell you every time they need to pee, or asking them to roleplay lunch, isn't exactly making their lives interesting. But suddenly springing (for example) a water shortage on them, when they've never had to think about water before, seems too heavy-handed.

My first thought is to use NPCs to present the problem: have the PCs walk into the middle of a water riot or something. But what if the problem is closer to home? It's not like they wouldn't have noticed it before it got to the riot stage. Can I just bring it up out of nowhere, like, say "it's been a while since it rained, and this morning when you went to the well the bucket came up dry. What do you do?"

In setting up for the game I've been running, I did a lot of reading to get a feel for what life would be like.  (The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, is an excellent resource http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html).  So when we've played, I often begin the session by asking the players questions about the "minutia" as you call it.  Questions like, "where do you get water from and how do you make it safe to drink?" have gone a long way towards framing the story, creating potential story elements, and putting the players in an apocalyptic state of mind.

Fundamental Scarcity cover this quite well, I think? Or am I missing something?

@CodexofRome: Do you talk about the water situation after that first session? In my current game, we decided that people eat seabirds and scant vegetables from rain-watered rooftop gardens, but since then we've just kinda assumed that the PCs are eating more-or-less regularly. Should I have added more detail, maybe, like giving random farmers names and making them human?

@pooka: Yeah, but I'm wondering how to turn those general scarcities into actual problems for the characters, without making them detail every time they have to drink, eat, bathe, etc.

Can I just bring it up out of nowhere, like, say "it's been a while since it rained, and this morning when you went to the well the bucket came up dry. What do you do?"

Yes! Also things like:
"Dremmer comes up to you, his feet covered in reeking muck, and says "the drain from the shit-pit is full up, boss. We're gonna have to do something and soon." What do you do?"

Should I have added more detail, maybe, like giving random farmers names and making them human?

Yes, as needed. "One of the farmers, a dark-haired woman named Finch, is waiting for you when you get up. She looks worried "Something got into the field last night and tore up things pretty bad. At least half the potatoes are a loss, and most of the cabbage." What do you do?"

One of the things that always seems to come up in our games is how does the holding dispose of it's dead? Because dead bodies is something every hold is going to have to deal with, sooner or later. So far we've seen practical cannibalism ("Waste nothing. Use every part"), a variant of sky-burial in the open desert, and a Don't ask, Don't tell policy about feeding the dead to a giant boar in the woods.

@CodexofRome: Do you talk about the water situation after that first session?

Yes, oh yes.  For two reasons.  First, fresh water is so vital to life, it has to be a constant concern for anyone not blessed with plenty of it.  Second, but equally important, the details we forged originally about water became fundamentals of the story, and vectors for threats.

My players had decided they'd catch rainfall during the rainy season and store it in boilers and vats that had been liberated from nearby breweries and industries.  For the dry season, they had a well that had been drilled down to the aquifer.  It was established that people living in Tabernacle would come in the morning to get their draw of well water, and that's where the next couple of sessions would begin, in the morning, watching over the water distribution.

Two threats involving water got more play than almost anything else.

The first was an environmental threat, a large marsh that even in the dry season never quite dried up.  The marsh is a couple of miles from Tabernacle, situated in between the site of a small nuclear reactor at a research university and the headquarters of what had been the world's most popular soft-drink.  To me, that added up to a big soup of chemicals and mutated bacteria, something that could be a big problem if it got into the aquifer.

[We're playing in our own backyards, in Atlanta, so this is the Coke HQ and the reactor at Georgia Tech.  The real reactor in question, was actually shut down and de-fueled before the 96 Olympics.  And two of the players work at the Coke HQ in RL.]

The second threat was from the primary front, the enemy at Big Rock.  Barnabas sent his reclusive brainer, Zip Gorgeous to infiltrate Tabernacle.  Zip sold himself as a chemist who could help them create explosives, something they ate up like candy.  They sent him out, along with Flint, one of the Chopper's gang, for protection, to get the supplies he needed.  Zip puppet-stringed Flint, who was caught red-handed (having been puppet-stringed) poisoning Junktown's well.  That put an end to alliance talks.

Do you talk about the water situation after that first session? 

We sure do.  I think one of the very first fronts I designed for my game was "the water tank":

0:00 - there's water in the tank; people come every day for their ration
3:00 - the water level dips below the rust line, and thus below the spigot used to portion out the water.  Somebody has to climb into the tank with a bucket to distribute water.  People start to hide small water caches in preparation for thirsty times (a practice the the hardholder has strictly forbidded)
6:00 - the tank is dry; people subsist on their hidden caches for a short time.  Unrest becomes widespread.
9:00 - hidden water caches are exhausted.  Water riots begin as people fight over suspected (and usually nonexistant) remaining stockpiles.  Harbour water sickness begins to be seen among the thirsty and desperate.
10:00 - people start dying as violence, dehydration and harbour water sickness take their toll.  The populace targets the hardholder's crew (who are known to keep their own water supply) and lawlessness reigns.
11:00 - The dead outnumber the living by a wide margin; the violence slows as it becomes clear there is no water left to fight over.  People take what supplies they can scavenge and the exodus begins.
12:00 - The holding is a dry, empty shell; any portable valuables have been taken.  The last of the survivors have moved on to neighbouring holds to find what succor they can.

Currently 6:00 is the highest the clock has ever been, but things could go to 9:00 pretty easily next session.

@NickDoyle: That sounds delightfully ominous... What triggers movement on the clock, in either direction?

Nick, I never really grokked the countdown clocks for Fronts until just now. I don't know why, it's very straight forward. However, your example made everything click into place.

The last game I ran had several threats linked to the water supply. Snow and cold were the central environmental themes of the apocalypse, and eating the snow tended to result in madness. We had a Threat who would go out in snow storms and offer people shelter, only to offer them contaminated water in order to drive them insane (and eventually turn them into 'ghosts', as it turned out.)

At one point one of the PCs manipulated the most powerful local NPC hardholder to attack another 'holder, whose primary source of power was his control over a barely-functional water filtration system that supplied most of the city with water. The result was the defensive sabotage of the water filtration system, which deprived several hundred people of their only supply of fresh water.

The game is about scarcity; questions like 'where do you get water' really don't seem like minutae to me.

@NickDoyle: That sounds delightfully ominous... What triggers movement on the clock, in either direction?

I tend to bump this particular clock whenever I don't have anything handy for "on a miss, the MC can make a move as hard and direct as he likes".  Not too often, but often enough to make the players worry about it.

The hardholder's crew has an old armored schoolbus with all the seats removed that serves as the water-truck.  They fill it with big steel drums and drive it to several neighbouring holds, trading whatever they have for ammo and water.  Of course, local raiders know about this and are often lying in wait, but that just means the water-run is always exciting...  There's nothing casual about refilling the water tank.  Sometimes it's a damn nightmare for the crew.  When they manage to get the bus back to the hold with full tanks, the clock gets reset to 0:00.

And it starts all over again...