Foraging #5 Is it worth it ?

Imagine you somehow got dropped in a random location, somewhere on our planet.
What would be the most important thing out of the following three to look for first ?

• water
• food
• shelter

While I want you to think about this for a second, scroll over my awesome handmade MS Paint graphics ...

... made a decision ?

The right answer is: Shelter !

• It takes up to three weeks to die from starvation.
• It takes up to three days to die from dehydration.
• It only takes three minutes to die under the wrong climatic conditions.

While some may say this was a trick question; it's true !

You could freeze to death within minutes.

---

Now that this is established, you may think, that food isn't really important in a life-or-death outdoor-survival scenario; I want to make the case for food-foraging and how important it could be.

I'm too lazy to look up studies to prove my next point, but food should be an immediate concern just as much as water.

Not only will your physical strength rapidly decline, when you don't eat, hunger will influence your decision making massively. Hungry people can't think as effectively, will generally take more risks and altogether make poor decisions.

With this in mind, looking for food immediately from the beginning of a survival-type scenario, could improve your chances of escaping death substantially. Many plants contain a lot of liquid and while they might not be the best source of calories, they can hydrate you and raise your psychological and physiological state.

I sincerely hope, you never end up in a life-threatening situation like this ( like randomly falling out of a helicopter in a remote desert ), but with some basic knowledge of foraging, you could still influence the outcome of this 'adventure'.

If you can top it up with some trapping skills, your chances of surviving a scenario like above, might increase drastically. ( I might cover this in a later post )

You might escape the forest/desert/bush, survive just long enough to be evacuated, write a book about it, become the main character of a movie and become famous and rich - But if you ran off looking for water instead of shelter, you quite possibly might have died already at the very beginning of this post.

---

If anything, being able to find and produce food on a hiking- or canoe-trip can make you look really cool and knowledgeable.

As usual, it's best to train and practice, before you actually need a skill.

While many plants are edible, most of them don't taste very well and I recommend you also practice some methods of preparation.

I will post some more on this topic soon,
I hope I could raise your interest.

Happy foraging !