Survival can be summed up in three words - never give up. That's the heart of it really. Just keep trying.
- Bear Grylls -
I'm an outdoorsy man with many skills suited to survival in remote places far away from assistance or other humans and that leaves me feeling confident when I'm there; it's taken many years to learn and develop the right knowledge and skills and yet there's always more to know so I never rest on my laurels and continually seek a better understanding.
Food (and water), shelter and warmth are the three basic necessities of survival however there's many other elements such as first aid skills, navigation, escape and evasion (in some cases), making fire, and the ability to cope mentally with isolation, fear and hopelessness that often comes through wilderness survival situations, wild animals (or humans), thirst or hunger; there's others too, it's a long list really.
Despite feeling extremely comfortable in remote places there's a few gaps in my skills, one never knows everything, and with a continual improvement ethos in mind I decided to fill one in respect of foraging skills some time ago; I wanted to learn more.
Foraging and edible insects
I know how to trap animals, fish, track, stalk and hunt, and also what to do with the animal to prepare it for consumption but it's not always possible to find animals and so I decided to learn more about foraging.
It's a simple thing really; know what's edible (and its benefits), what is inedible and why, and know where to get it, what to look for and what to do with it when it's found.
Ok, so maybe it's not all that simple. Also, one must remember that foraging burns energy and won't always provide enough calories to sustain the energy burned to perform the foraging so it could be a false economy and one needs to be able to evaluate the reward (or lack of) for the effort expended; but eating something is better than nothing so I wanted to build better skills around foraging specifically.
Further to that, I decided I wanted to know more about edible insects and decided to track down a person I knew to be an expert in that particular aspect of foraging for survival purposes, a friend of a friend.
The person was a wealth of knowledge and right away got me over the, no way I'm eating any fucken insects thing, by telling me that we all eat them already. Flour beetles and weevils are always present in granaries and end up being milled in with the grain for instance...yep, those tiny black specks in your bread. Fruit and vegetables also often contain tiny insects which we eat when we eat the fruit of vegetables and processed (and canned) foods and drinks are often full of insects too; bug infested apples are usually separated from the good ones and used in the production of apple cider just to name a few examples. Ok, I get it, I eat bugs; I'm not dead though, so it's all good...and neither are you. Once over that little hurdle we got into the nuts and bolts of it.
It was many hours of training which I'll not write about in this single post but it opened my eyes to the opportunities of edible insects as a means of staying alive in a wilderness survival situation.
As it turns out, there's many insects that are edible and some are especially tasty and nutritious (apparently) - but he must have kept the good ones for himself as the ones I ate all tasted fucken disgusting. Many have high protein content though and they can be milled into flour to add a protein boost to 'normal' food or eaten natural like one would do in a survival situation. They are easy to raise (in a domestic scenario) and there's minimal butchering required compared with animals for consumption.
These are some of the things he told me...I was unconvinced at that stage as I just don't want to eat insects...but in a survival situation I need to do what is required to survive, so I kept going back for more information and knowledge and we got into some practical methods of finding them, identifying and gathering them and then...eating them. I even ate a witchetty grub...google it.
There's (apparently), almost 1,500 recorded species of insects that are edible and probably far more waiting to be discovered and here's the thing, they're nutritious. If you were to eat 100 grams of crickets for instance you'd be consuming about 120 calories, around 13g of protein, 5g of fat and the same of carbohydrates, 75mg of calcium, 185mg of phosphorous, almost 10g of iron as well as various amounts of thiamine, riboflavin and niacin. (Crickets don't taste good but in a survival situation I'd rather eat crickets than die.)
There's a whole movement around insect eating being the way of the future for humans, thank fuck I'll be dead by the time that happens as the insects I ate tasted horrendously bad. But I learned enough to most probably sustain my life, if barely, in a survival situation and that was my aim.
As I said, I'm not going to go into great detail here and am certainly not trying to suggest we all go around eating insects...especially when pizzas and burgers, tacos, donuts, Indian food and fucken anything else at all is available to eat, but what I learned will possibly help keep me alive in a difficult wilderness survival situation and me being alive means I'll be able to apply my skills to keep others that way too, should others be with me. Just like I have skills in hunting and shooting, first aid, finding and gathering water, building shelter and fire, navigation and other such things it's a responsibility to have skills in this area too, foraging, in my opinion. I'll admit to not wanting to eat insects, but if it's that or die it seems an easy choice.
Just a note, foraging is not something the uninitiated should be doing and must be approached with caution.
Example:
Just recently in Australia a woman had a live Ophidascaris robertsi (roundworm) removed from her brain after suffering many terrible symptoms for a long time. The Ophidascaris robertsi is a parasite found in pythons and the woman often foraged for edible grasses in her area where carpet pythons are also found - it's suspected one took a shit on the grasses the woman collected and she ingested the parasite due to not washing the grasses properly prior to eating them. Here's a link to a YouTube video and you can do your own googling if you care to as well.
What the fuck right? So yeah, picking up stuff off the ground and eating it doesn't always go well so educate yourself before doing it. If done right, if the skills are present and the right form is followed, it can save lives in difficult situations.
Have you had any experiences with alternative foods? They say a global food shortage is imminent so it's something we're all going to need to deal with I guess, those that live long enough and beyond world war three that is. Have you eaten any weird things, insects for example, or have you foraged for food and hunted to gather your own meat for consumption? If you want to comment please go ahead below.
Design and create your ideal life, tomorrow isn't promised - galenkp
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Image(s) in this post are my own