Survival bars?

I'm a big fan of Clif bars & the new Clif Builders (protien) bar.
Tastes good IMO wide assortment of flavors, and no "brick-out" effect for me atleast.
 
I've not tried the Datrex bars, but I like the Mainstay bars. I've been keeping a pack in my truck for a couple years and decided it was time to rotate. So, I opened the old pack and the bars were not only in good condition but tasty. They taste like a lemon flavored cookie.
 
PowerBar came out with a new line of bars called "Harvest Whole Grain". They are not survival bars, but they taste better than many other nutrition bars out there. One bar is about 2 ounces (65 grams) with 240 calories. They are actually not only edible, but tasty too. I use them one day hikes.
 
Good suggestion about the pemmican. I tried making some a while ago with venison, blackberries and eulachon grease. Kind of a west-coast version I guess, it was heavy enough that you don't want to eat it while hiking - it sat like a rock (and it dries ya out pretty good too !) I did it a little differently, mashing everything together first before drying it but it tasted ok. Definitely different than what I'm used to !

I recently finished a book about David Thompson's travels from about 1780-1810 and he described how some of it was great and some of it was so inedible that it encouraged them to spend travel time hunting fresh meat. On the prairies, a common recipe was with chokecherries and bison and apparently there was a particular tribe who always went really heavy on the chokecherries and the fur traders knew not to get provisions from them unless there was no other option !
 
"That wouldn't be enough. 1200 calories is below your basal metabolic rate. Even sitting in a lifeboat, you'll still start to starve, your body digesting its own muscle to keep going. If you are doing strenuous work in the survival sitation, you'll lose weight eating 3600 a day."


A human being can live on a 500 calorie / day diet without any side effects
 
Don't take this the wrong way Thomas, but....try it. BMR does vary from person to person, and at 6'1" and 240#. My body's not happy on a caloric intake that low. I really think everyone who is able to should try fasting, just to see how their body responds. I was really surprised that after day 2, the hunger actually went away. I started making dumb decisions though. Had I been in a survival theatre, it could have caused me to injure myself or to inadvertently wreck the gear I needed to get food.

EDIT: here's a caloric intake calculator from a dieting site. Obviously, one needs to take the results with a grain of salt, but my BMR came out at just over 2000 calories/day
http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm
 
In a survival situation 1200 calories a day is plenty fine. Part of surviving means using your best survival tool, i.e. your brain. That means understanding that part of taking in less calories means rationing your exertion as well.
 
Seeing as you can live just fine for weeks without food 1200 cals a day is luxury.

There are entire countries who subsist on that or less a day. Not ideal but doable, short term at least.

Skam
 
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