Woodland Free Food

[Scythe13]

[g79]

So your food for 24hrs consisted of Grass,dandelions and nettles.How long do you think you can live on just that?

Did you not find any plantain,blackberries, beech leaves and nuts or acorns?

The food you think was O.K. for 24 hrs would only last you a couple of hours at best,you need a more varied and bigger quantity than you found,you probably used more calories finding and preparing it than you actually got out of it.

Considering I'd managed to find food, and LOADS of it, I'd completed the challenge I set out to do!
No you didn't ,you found some food that you didn't like and not enough of it to live on.

I think you have just shown how badly prepared you actually were along with the fact that a bit of wind and rain had you bugging out back home.Is your BOB still not up to scratch?

Not an entirely wasted night out though ,you have shown how difficult it is to find food(you didn't find enough for 1 man for 1 day) even though you think you did.
You have also proven once again that you still think can do these things while actually you cant.

[Scythe13]

Hi g79,

Thanks for the feedback. In response to what you've noted

So your food for 24hrs consisted of Grass,dandelions and nettles.How long do you think you can live on just that?

Did you not find any plantain,blackberries, beech leaves and nuts or acorns?

As a simple trial into the woods, to find food, I found loads of those things. Nettles have lots of protein, and are thus a pretty good staple of a diet. Also, I was only going by what was covered in my book, so maybe the book was crap and covered very little?

I didn't check out the acorns, beech leaves, or plantains. Was looking for the different things in the book, but because of the weather, I didn't want to get my book wet and ruined. Blackberries are not in season are they? I did look, but couldn't find any.

The food you think was O.K. for 24 hrs would only last you a couple of hours at best,you need a more varied and bigger quantity than you found,you probably used more calories finding and preparing it than you actually got out of it.

Considering I'd managed to find food, and LOADS of it, I'd completed the challenge I set out to do!
No you didn't ,you found some food that you didn't like and not enough of it to live on.

Please check the pictures to see how much of those plants I found. More than enough to feed at least 10 people for over a week! Also, considering I wasn't looking for meat, I managed to find deer, and cows on the same area as me and get close enough that anyone with a bow and arrow could make a fatal shot and get meat. Anyway it's not hard to find worms so if you're that desperate for protein, there's an easy option.

Granted I didn't like the taste of the food, which is why I didn't bother eating all of it. The thing is, when in a survival situation flavour isn't the highest concern.

I think you have just shown how badly prepared you actually were along with the fact that a bit of wind and rain had you bugging out back home.Is your BOB still not up to scratch?

Spot on, a bit storm is going to send me home. Yes I stopped. I'm not going to be risking my life when I don't need to. An idiot would have stayed out and 'braved the storm'. And you're right, the BOB is still not up to scratch. I never said it was and I always comment saying it's an ongoing process of refinement.

Not an entirely wasted night out though ,you have shown how difficult it is to find food(you didn't find enough for 1 man for 1 day) even though you think you did.

Please refer back to the photos to see how much I actually found before saying that. You'll see that such a comment is totally unfounded and far from true. Of the plants I found, they were bountiful!!!

You have also proven once again that you still think can do these things while actually you cant.

I set out to prove I could find enough food, and I did. If you check the photos, that I keep referring to, then you'd see that I did find enough food to live off. The fact that I didn't sit around and gorge myself on stuff when I firstly didn't need to (it wasn't a real survival situation) and secondly didn't want to (the idea was to find the food. I found it, ate it, it was palateable, and thus am able to find food and prepare it).

Granted there is a great amount I can improve on! I'm not an expert and I'm going off a couple of hours of book reading as well as some prior understanding of some herbs. At what point did I ever say I was an expert? I believe I said it was going to be a hard challenge? Regarding experts, even Ray Mears says he's always learning new stuff!!! If he's still learning, then thats an encouragement for me to keep trying and progressing.

If you note, I said it would be a difficult challenge, and it wasn't that difficult at all. Finding food is easy, finding lots of food is easy. There's fields and fields of rapeseed plants, which have loads of protein in their pollen. If you just went to one of those you could eat like a king for ages!!!

If it was a survival situation, I would have picked more of what I found, I would have set traps, I would have dug up worms, I would have broken open rotting wood to eat grubs and maggots. My mission was to find food for 24 hours. There was lots of it. I tried it, it wasn't delicious, but I could cope and would get used to it.

[Terry]

I've camped a number of times where you went, I know exactly what you mean by those silly "paths" going from the river to the top as well. Most of them are actually animal runs, there are some paths which have been "paved" with bits of brick and stone right in the middle of nowhere also. Someone took the time to do it but the throughways are strange there. A poacher i've seen on a number of early mornings manages to go places i've never been able to follow.
My ruck has always been on the heavier side and am not as fit as you by any means but I still cant see how he manages it

There are a few people living there semi-permanently, they try to stay off the beaten track but its too small an area to do it succesfully. There are also lots of ticks in the quarry area's (ask me how I know this!).

There are cows seasonally, a few farms nearby. The deer are "wild escapees" from the next door estate. There are mushrooms, apple tree's and hazel and walnuts (in season) in certain parts, strangely lacking in blackberrys, elderberrys and sloes like most of the surrounding area's. Not so many rabbits either. There are a few fish in the stream/pond at the far end. This is where you will see the lean to type shelters built by the "wood school" types and estate kids from not so far away.

Near to the cliff area there is also an old "dump" (trash area) which I guess is from the Estate, found some old glass bottles and a WW1 canteen (half rusted) there. Never dug into it to see if I could find more interesting stuff. The river washes up interesting things also but I'd be wary of using any of it due to pollution. It's too close to the city for me to consider it as a medium or long term BO location.

I dont believe it's possible to survive for extended periods of time on wild foods alone, this is why the human race became agrarians and herders. Am more than happy for people to prove that I am wrong, I dont expect to be able to apply it to myself though.

All the best

Ter

[Nemesis]

[Scythe13]

Nice one Terry.

It's a cool place up there. Anyway mate, what are you saying? You're probably much healthier than me. No doubt your lungs suffer less polution than mine, and you're more used to carrying your kit up those hills than I am! I went up the steep slope and damn was that hard, even with my UL BOB!!!

I think it is doable to live off wild food, but I believe we became agrarian because it's less effort. Now that we are that way, it is easier to regulate our diets for optimum health. Does that make sense? I reckon (on no scientific foundation) that we were first foragers, become farmers, which then gave us more food that allowed us to better develop our diets to achieve better health. But that kind of makes sense, if you think about it. We could survive, but it wouldn't be the healthiest way to live.




Also, thanks WnC.

As you know, the kit is an ongoing thing, cutting down weight, improving quality, testing items, keeping what works and changing what doesn't.

Bivi is on my shopping list, but I'm going to check out the emergency bivis that you showed me the other day. For the price, it's worth a trial. Most of the other stuff though is also pretty good. For the waterproofs though, I'll just get my snowboarding stuff. I've got a brilliant jacket that has become part of my BOB, and it's really light. The gloves was just something I should have had and didn't. I'll get a pair from my boarding stuff, same as leggings. The rest of the kit will just be a slow adding, testing, and refining process, I think.

For the pillow though...when I put some soft items, like clothes, into the stuff sack for my camping mat, that was perfect. Which was a nice surprise. I know it's a small bit of kit, a pillow, but a good nights sleep isn't really doable without somewhere to rest the head! You can get them at PoundLand. But a padded stuff sack works too.

---

Thanks guys, really appreciate the feedback!

[Terry]

[Timelord]

For the point raised about expecting not to be able to survive in the wild for extended periods of time & just so these type of thoughts do not dishearten you >>>>>>

Humankind has survived as "Hunter Gatherers" for 99% of the time we have walked on this planet. There are still tribes not yet murdered, living out there that exist this way. It is a perfectly natural, doable way of surviving. In living memory during war years, some of the population resorted to supplementing their diet by "gathering" from the wild. The only problem with trying to live the Hunter Gatherer lifestyle today from our cultural perspective, is that a lot of the knowledge is lost - we think, compared to surviving hunter gatherer cultures in other parts of the globe. That knowledge which does survive is dispersed and transposed through hundreds or thousands of years. So it is a lot more effort to relearn just a fraction of this surviving & retro engineered knowledge nowadays and with us not being subjected to it from birth.
Farming started in the Neolithic period, so in this country that was approx between 4000 and 2500 BC. It was a gradual expansion & development of the domestication of wild animals by hunter gatherers and soon after of edible vegetation at pre determined locations of migrations/seasonal sites. Eventually this led to settling at one of the most favourable locations. Possibly originally by a skeleton "caretaker" crew and later by the whole group/tribe. farming was successful because it enabled a SURPLUS of goods to be produced and so traded on with other groups. This leads to a raised standard of living through the aquisition of greater communal wealth - wether this be in farm land, cattle, horses, tools, resources or other goods. Communities that were settled & practised farming were also more suitable for a power elite to grow on the back of - as a mutually supportive pact (sound familiar??). this led to greater stability - that is until competition for resources & farmland arose. (The American west settlement ended up with a similar result, but on speed and with guns. Yeehar!!)

Today in this modern world of the last few hundred years and especially in recent times with the media and internet revolution, for the first time we have had the ability to compile this knowledge & cross reference it against sources and surviving hunter gatherer communities. This has led to our general popular reawakening of these ancient skills & knowledge. Whilst it will likely never be complete or 100% accurate, it is an ongoing successful historical study that we can put into practical use. Appreciation goes to those few guardians that passed on the knowledge down the generations that has been a key part in our understanding.

Happy studies, TL

[Scythe13]

Nice write-up TL. Very informative and much more accurate than my theory, which surprisingly wasn't that far off.

I've got an interesting thing for any preppers living near a train line. The most common edible plants by a train track are apple trees! The reason being that people throw their apples out of the window of the train, and as a result, the seeds start growing and hey presto, an apple tree! Pretty cool hu?

[bigpaul]

if you look at some of the native cultures still left, you will find they only spend part of their time hunting/gathering....with quite small hunting parties too....the rest of the time is spent in their village, they make weapons, they prepare and dry food, they have art........they also have lots of kids so they must have lots of time for sex as well dont sound too bad does it??