Suppose you wind up in the wild, and you desperately need food. What would you do ? Eat berries, grass, mushrooms, tree bark, seeds ? Well, believe it or not, it is not a good time to be a vegetarian right now. You don’t have your vitamins, food supplements and other stuff with you to keep you (really) going, so you need … meat. In the wild, human is an omnivore, and that means you want to eat anything, or better: everything, you encounter. Especially meat, since it gives you lots of energy for a minimal volume. Sounds all well, but how to do it in practice ?

(First of all: the details (which I will largely omit). If you are out and alone for a long, long time, besides being able to survive on food is one thing, but doing it without catching some ugly disease is another one. Famous example: scurvy. Humans need a diet which contains enough vitamin C, since otherwise they end up having scurvy. Now there are many ways to do this, but in the wild this is a particular hard one. Especially if you are, say, in Alaska. An orange a day (or some similar citrus fruit) is enough, but usually you won’t find oranges hanging on the trees in the North. (Probably English people are genetically unable to get scurvy, since they use orange (zest) in about every dish they ever invented.) Some texts (and many stories) claim that pine needles – or pine needle tea – do the trick, but what sort of pines is often not specified. Still, if you are in the situation, this could be a way out. I find it in some sense quite romantic. Another one is horses. And in general, organ meat (such as liver) contains more vitamin C than muscle meat.)

Plants are very tedious: most of the plants in the wild are inedible by humans, or even poisonous. A simple Daffodil or the grape-like fruit of Moonseed can mean your end (since you are weak), so you will need to be extremely careful. And let’s skip the discussion about mushrooms altogether – only eat them when you know you are going to die anyway. Death caps often look very much like champignon mushrooms, but they will lead you to the hearse in a matter of days. First you will get sick – I mean really sick (vomiting, headache, fever) – then you could get a bit better (or so it seems), and in the next stage your vital organs will start to fail, one by one. Even in the civil world a nice Death cap and chicken sandwich is often fatal, so who are you kidding ?

Even if you have your favorite mushroom book with you, a nearly fatal mistake is hard to avoid (eventually). Believe me on this point, dear reader. Been there. Unfortunately.

Grass is kind of a safe bet, but won’t keep you going either. (The soup is ok, the legend goes.)

You might want to look for bird’s nests for several reasons: one, for the bird – it is good food, certainly of you are able to make fire; two, if the season is right (yes, many “ifs” in this story), you might find some eggs. Bad thing about birds is that usually they are small, and usually they can fly. And since you are very hungry by now, your aiming skills – if you have a rifle, that is – aren’t optimal.

Now for the meat that doesn’t fly.

As the story of Chris McCandless shows, big game is hard to preserve unless you are very experienced. McCandless was euphoric when having shot and killed a moose on June 9, 1992, but he wasn’t able to stop the meat from rotting. Mind you, the man had a Remington semi-automatic rifle with 400 rounds of ammunition. He also had a bag of 4.5 kilograms of rice, and a book on local plant life. And at least some experience. He poached porcupines, and birds such as Canada geese, tried to eat plants, but died anyway. As you are even less experienced and certainly do not know how to preserve meat, you’ll probably also try smaller animals as well, and if they are there, one of the main candidates might be rabbits or hare. They are delicious (again, if there is some fire around), and the meat is lean and healthy. Or so it seems.

To quote Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson:

“Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source—beaver, moose, fish—will develop diarrhea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North.“

And indeed, he is right, although the mechanism is still not sufficiently understood. Stuff yourself with very lean meat as much as you want – if you don’t have other resources to fat, it won’t buy you extra time. The principle is called rabbit starvation.

According to Wikipedia, Charles Darwin (in The Voyage of the Beagle) wrote:

“We were here able to buy some biscuit. I had now been several days without tasting any thing besides meat: I did not at all dislike this new regimen; but I felt as if it would only have agreed with me with hard exercise. I have heard that patients in England, when desired to confine themselves exclusively to an animal diet, even with the hope of life before their eyes, have hardly been able to endure it. Yet the Gaucho in the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry meat, such as that of the Agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, “that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea:” this appears to me a curious physiological fact. It is, perhaps, from their meat regimen that the Gauchos, like other carnivorous animals, can abstain long from food.“

We still do not know precisely what killed Chris McCandless (and we might reflect on this matter in future posts). But one thing is for sure.

Think twice when you are alone in the wild with an empty stomach.

(To be continued.)