In my previous post I mentioned the difficulty of relying on wild foods for survival. I’ve experimented with it in the past with mixed results.
It’s one thing to shoot a grouse or a rabbit and have that as part of your dinner. The sides, cooking fats, and spices are not sourced from the wild. Believe me, those additional ingredients make all the difference. Having a bit of wild game at hunting camp was pretty common, but it wasn’t the only thing on the menu.
One of the more efficient ways of getting a lot of calories is fishing. A friend and I lived off fish, raspberries, and wild greens for a few days. The food was a bit bland but we didn’t go hungry. It didn’t take hours and hours to source our food either. It wasn’t that hard to do: where the fishing was good and the berries were ripe.
Then there’s the three days I tried to live on wild foods in the winter, in the mountains of western Maine. I ate a lot of rock tripe. It kept me full. That’s about the best one can say about rock tripe. It’s a fungus that grows on rocks. You have to boil out the acid dissolving chemicals in a couple changes of water.
There was almost no sign of game up in those mountains. Had it been a true survival situation I might have tried to get one of the beavers hanging around a small mountain pond. Their fat would had been essential nourishment. Of course, it’s illegal to just shoot beavers so it would have had to be a matter of desperation.
In a real survival situation you can’t be afraid of eating things you normally wouldn’t. I would not refuse insects and amphibians for that matter.
All in all, even the worse MRE doesn’t look that bad in comparison.
-Sixbears
I eaten some pretty interesting things, including my own cooking, however your post reminds me of a TV show on the History channel called, "Survivor". Participants try to live in the wild for extended periods of time with only 10 essential items in their packs. All of these competitors loose most of their body weight do to two factors. 1. they can't find enough game, and or edible plants to sustain themselves, or 2. if they've gotten a good source of fish, etc. they starve do to lack of fat's, oils, and the essential nutrients that we take for granted. British Columbia is the main area of competition, however they go anywhere remote and dangerous. Modern man has physically forgotten how to store fat, and survive the way our ancestors did. We have become the special ed crowd of the back country.
ReplyDeleteNot, "Survivor" "Alone" Got the programs mixed up.
DeleteMy body fat could keep me going for a long time. There are tricks. If you are going to eat rabbits make sure you also eat the brains and eyes. Otherwise there's no fat at all.
DeleteOk, yuck. heh heh.
ReplyDelete