Survival Nutrition

peripatew

peripatew

Joined
Jul 31, 2007
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After reading: http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html

I got to thinking about long term survival nutritional needs. Do any of the "what you can eat by foraging" books cover this topic? IE, what you need to eat to have a balanced diet so as not to get sick.

I don't know much about nutrition in general, so I'm interesting in reading something, that has a survivally outlook? I don't need something terrible complex, but more so than meat and veggies.

L
 
I don't know if this adds to your perspective, but, in a survival situation, you cannot survive for a long term on veggies alone, but you can on meat.

Doc
 
Over a long period, a good multi vitamin would help keep you heathy and help with any difficencies in your diet.
 
plants are a semi-important part in most survival situation like DOC said you cant survive on veggies alone but they are good for you. from only meat you can get scurvy and other sicknesses so it is good to get into foraging and knowing the edible plants of where you are. pine needles smashed and put in boiled water is like tea and can be a morale booster in some situations.
 
I started looking at edible wild plants and realized that you need to prepare most of them before they are consumable. I think the best way to proceed is (after learning what plants are edible in your neck of the woods) to be sure to:

-bring a knife to help prepare the food (:D)

-bring tools to prepare a fire

-bring water or have a way to purify water

-bring a item that you can use a as a pot to heat up the food or the water.

Since I do mostly day hikes, I just cary enough food with me that can help me get through a few hours (or a few days of near starvation if it is a longer hike) in case I get injured and cannot make it off of the trail before help comes along. I like the new PowerBar "Harvest" whole grain line of bars to carry.

I figure it is easier to carry a small amount of food than it is trying to remember which plants are edible and how to prepare each one. I also figure that if I am injured, searching for plants is not going to be all that practical. I am going to be focusing on water, shelter, signal, and fire.

If I get stuck in a situation where I run out of the food before the rescue arrives, my plan would be to set snares and go fishing. Both of these food sources need preparation too, but I don't need to bring an encyclopedia with me to figure out how to prepare small game or fish, unlike the wild plants where each plant has its own preparation requirements as well as identification issues. Yeah, if I am injured both small game a fish food sources are going to be difficult to acquire, but I already know how to fish and how to look for small game sign. That isn't the case with wild edible plants.

One day when I get enough time, I will try to learn more about the identification and preparation of my local wild plants. I think it will be fun.

:cool:

Scout
 
Check out book reviews at Amazon, going from memory but there was a couple of o.k. books on foraging and identifying plants, I did come to the conclusion that the books that had an exhaustive amount of info, were practically useless to me, because it is hard to i.d. a plant by a drawing, there were some books that covered maybe 25 plants with good color pictures, that I thought would have been a better start.
 
If you get a BrigadeQM catalogue there are card decks that have wild edibles, I am going to order them, eventually.
I do know that rose hips (the red berry lookin' things) are really high in vitamin C and in the winter I swallow them whole, but don't take a lot b/c birds and animals depend on them.
Wild rose, and that pest floral rose grows most anywhere it gets good sunlight, fields, powerlines, etc.
 
led4them said:
I do know that rose hips (the red berry lookin' things) are really high in vitamin C and in the winter I swallow them whole, but don't take a lot b/c birds and animals depend on them.
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Why would you eat them whole? Remove the 'crown', split them open, and remove the seeds. Then eat what's left.

Doc
 
I berry with a good outside shell is probably not going to be digested well enough to get much out of it. Unless you eat handfuls of them... However, your method does assure, with some wilderness pooping, that this particular species of plant will not perish from the planet. :D
 
As for a few good reference's do a search for Christopher Nyerges and his books on wild edible foods...he's top notch! Also the Peterson guides are not bad. I think Chris N. also has allot to do with Wilderness Way magazine.

"Wild Man Steve Brill(sp) leads groups of folks on wild foods hikes and has some ideas on living off the land.

I Think it would also be wise to look at how the Indians(native Americans) East and along the Mississippi River from IL, WI and Minn. survived...They all Farmed!

They used the "Three Sisters" Corn, beans and Squashes as a main stay and learned how to process them in different ways for a feel of some variety. The simple flat mounds used for planting they built where for planting 5 or 6 corn plants in the center of the mound then when they reached about Knee high only two or three of the best looking corn plants were kept and the dead or weaklings were pulled then the fast and easy growing bean plants were planted around the remaining corn plants and as they grew provided the needed Nitrogen to the corn plants for complete growth. The the third sister " The Squash family" was then planted on the outside slope of the mound at the same time the beans were planted, Pumpkins were very popular. This food let the Indians survive the winters with food stores while the hunted animals and caught fishes and other foraged foods completed the balanced or close to balanced diet.

The point of the above Three Sister paragraph is that good long term survival nutrition by only using nomadic foraging methods is very difficult even for seasoned experienced people with a large exclamation on the difficult.

From my 2 cents worth of experience it takes what I call a "Double Bakers Dozen" of edible plant/tuber/Legume/tree's/flowers knowledge to survive longer term when only foraging for food and not farming(notice that survive is the key word and not balanced nutrition).

The simple explanation for a Double Bakers Dozen is that you must know at least 26 different types of edible plants for each growing season. At first this may sound like you must know 100's of plants but this is not true because in many cases depending on where your nomadic wanderings take you these 26 edible plants may overlap in growing seasons from early spring to late fall so the knowledge base may not have to be vast to survive.

Then you have to consider what does long term survival mean to you. For me it means that if I am feeling hungry for two to five days at a time repeatedly things are not going so well and something must be done to correct this repeated scenario.
 
As much as you need vitamins in a survival situation the thing you need most is fat. Fat provides the most amount of energy to your body for the amount eaten and when surviving that is what is going to keep your body in the best shape. Thus eating fat and meat that contains fat is probably the best thing. Also, if you happen to catch an animal, cooking and eating the liver will provide you with almost all of the vitamins that you would need to survive.

I guess you are looking more for foraging methods, but I would say to that that digging up insects and larvae is probably the best "foraging" method there is. Eating plants in the wild can be extremely dangerous as many contain toxins that are not good for your body. If you are going to eat a plant you need to be 100% sure of what it is.
 
raythebigfoot said:
As much as you need vitamins in a survival situation the thing you need most is fat. Fat provides the most amount of energy to your body for the amount eaten and when surviving that is what is going to keep your body in the best shape. Thus eating fat and meat that contains fat is probably the best thing. Also, if you happen to catch an animal, cooking and eating the liver will provide you with almost all of the vitamins that you would need to survive.

I guess you are looking more for foraging methods, but I would say to that that digging up insects and larvae is probably the best "foraging" method there is. Eating plants in the wild can be extremely dangerous as many contain toxins that are not good for your body. If you are going to eat a plant you need to be 100% sure of what it is.
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All great information! Thanks for adding/beating me to punchline in a second post.

MTMM
 
I know enough about Chris McCandless to commend him for his bravery and condemn him for his thorough lack of respect for the wild places.

As for survival nutrition, water, bugs and little critters (lizards, snakes, rabbits, birds, eggs) can all keep you going till humanity gets back to you.

-For EOTW type situations, ladies and gents, I give you RAMEN! ; )
 
A few have mentioned eating bugs, is this generally a safe practice? Are there bug eating identification books? Seems like mushrooms are hit or miss, are bugs this way too? Or not so much an issue of eating poisonous bugs?
 
Bugs are much easier to harvest and are much more plentiful than small game with lots of protein. IMHO no different than plant ID and prep, you have to know what your doing.

With regards to Mushrooms, they are better left alone even if you know what your doing. There are over 3000 kinds of the fungus that grow in the USA and I know what I am doing yet only harvest 4 types for eating because they are easy to ID but still have look a likes which are dangerous.

It's best to go out with experienced folks to learn what's safe to eat then build on it.

MTMM
 
The Chef said:
I know enough about Chris McCandless to commend him for his bravery and condemn him for his thorough lack of respect for the wild places.

As for survival nutrition, water, bugs and little critters (lizards, snakes, rabbits, birds, eggs) can all keep you going till humanity gets back to you.

-For EOTW type situations, ladies and gents, I give you RAMEN! ; )
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I think Chris M. suffered from some form of long term mental disease. I also believe he learned how to partially cover up the symptoms of this disease like many with mental disease do.

I also believe if Chris M. would have walked out of Alaska alive he would have continued his life until some other form of destruction took his life or an other's unless some medical treatment successfully worked for him.

MMTM
 
In my opinion bugs are still a lot safer than plants. Obviously if the bug has a stinger on it than you should probably leave it alone, but other than that bugs in general should be pretty safe to eat. (look at how many medicines are extracted from bugs vs. plants, almost none) If you are worried cook it for a second over open flame as most poisons would be neutralized by this.
 
As for survival nutrition, water, bugs and little critters (lizards, snakes, rabbits, birds, eggs) can all keep you going till humanity gets back to you.
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Stick with grubs initially. In military survival training they were called "nature's fast food." Ants are good too especially if you can roast them and put them in water for a kind of tea. Grasshoppers, but pull off the legs. They're best roasted too cause they can sometimes have a dangerous parasite. Worms work.

Since you won't be likely in an escape and evasion scenario, roasting should be easy.
 
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