Stage Foraging:

How to Save Yourself from Starving

            There is a Gaelic proverb, Tha an t-acras air, which is usually translated as He is hungry. The literal translation, Hunger is on him, refers to the dance with starvation that was well-known to the Celts of old. In this day many of us have never experienced hunger more extreme than being late for a meal.  

Why People Starve

            Imagine you’re out in the wilderness, far from civilization. Your food provisions are gone, you’ve been hiking for days, and you’re getting nowhere. Every step burns, and you have gone beyond hungry: your cheeks are sunken, you've lost every ounce of body fat, and your body is starting to consume itself. You are literally starving. There is no one to help, no one to rely on but yourself. You suddenly realize that you could die.

            What would you do: start trapping easy-to-get rodents? Maybe you could catch some frogs with little effort, or you might gather some wild greens you are familiar with. These things seem to make sense, yet there is still a good chance you will die.

            Why? Because you would be starving yourself to death. I have rescued people who were finding plenty of food, yet they were wasting away. They had full bellies and still they felt like they were starving. They looked like concentration camp inmates: skin and bones, lethargic, despairing.

What was missing?

            Three things: 

Initial health

            Few of us have the metabolic strength or intestinal fortitude to survive entirely on wild foods. Most of us are hypoglycemic, which means our blood sugar peaks and crashes, giving us energy surges followed by slumps. Most of us are not aware that we are hypoglycemic because we mask it either by snacking to keep our energy level up, or by stimulating ourselves with caffeine. (Hypoglycemia is usually caused by over-consumption of sugar and starch. We are designed to get most of our energy from fat).

            Because most of us live mainly on soft, starchy, sterile foods, we do not have the intestinal fortitude to digest wild foods or assimilate their concentrated nutrients. They typically have five times the fiber of our normal fare and half again as much nourishment.

Nutritional knowledge

            Just by living outside, we can’t help but ingest microorganisms our systems are not accustomed to. It takes time for our intestinal flora to adjust to these new foods and buggers, and in the meantime we can suffer extreme weight loss and dehydration from intestinal irritation and nutrient malabsorption.

            Because of metabolic differences, men and women respond differently to food shortage and starvation. Men are generally first to experience fatigue from reduced caloric intake; and women, with lower energy needs and higher fat-body mass ratios, might better withstand the effects of prolonged food shortage. With groups, this knowledge could be critical to determining who is most at risk, how to allocate limited calories, and who is most capable of performing necessary tasks.

Experience

            Compounding all of the above is our lack of experience-based knowledge of the hunter-gatherer lifeway. Even though we might be quite expert in a specific area, such as snaring or edible plants, we cannot live long on rodents or vegetable matter, much less relying on it to regain strength. The saying, Too much knowledge is dangerous, certainly applies here, as specialization can encourage overconfidence, which interferes with our ability to be adaptable and listen to our body’s needs.

            Foraging field guides often contribute to the problem, by:

·   presenting a lot of information, which creates a false sense of security.

·   offering this information without the guidance needed to apply it in a survival situation.

            To help prevent the tragedies that foraging field guides often unintentionally contribute to, I suggest that they have prominently featured warnings similar to the following:

            So why is this needed knowledge not included in foraging books, or taught in edible plants or wilderness survival classes? Two reasons:

·   In this culture, we specialize to succeed, so we assume specialization will save us in the wilderness. We become expert at one or more skills, never realizing we need much broader and deeper knowledge in order to survive.

·   Wilderness survival skills are usually taught outside the wilderness, by people who have never stared Tha an t-acras air in the face. This is like sitting in a bathtub and expecting to be taught how to swim by a desert camel herder.

How to Save Yourself

            Now let’s get back to my original starvation scenario and the question I posed: “What would you do?” I would suggest doing what any self-respecting Celt (or Aborigine, or Indian) would have done – Stage Foraging. It is the time-proven way to restore energy and rebuild strength that I learned from my Native elders. They said they learned it from watching famished Bears, so I did the same. Here is how it works:

Stage 1--Fruit

            When you are out of energy--not just tired or fatigued, but completely spent and wasting away--your ready energy, which is stored as glycogen in the liver, is long gone. Fat reserves are depleted, and your muscle mass is being digested to keep you going. You need quick fuel from easy-to-get, easy-to-digest food, and at the top of the list is fruit.

(Text Box Insert) Caution: the fruit must be ripe. The hard-to-digest starch of unripe fruit can cause digestive upset. And stay on fruit no longer than you have to, as a diet of fruit can cause either severe diarrhea or constipation, which could leave you in worse shape than you began. (End Insert)

            Ripe fruit is very easy to digest; in fact, it practically digests itself. Its major drawback is that its energy, derived from sugar, is short-lived. People in survival situations who try to sustain themselves on fruit, quickly run out of energy and have to keep going back for more fruit. I’ve rescued starving people who acted as though they were addicted to fruit--they were spending their entire days in the berry patch. They had re-created the hypoglycemic condition that likely got them in trouble in the first place.

Stage 2--Fat

            As soon as possible, Stage 1 energy needs to be used to procure fat-rich foods to build up a Stage 2 energy reserve. Besides having almost three times the calories of sugar, fat digests slowly and gradually releases sustaining energy. Ask any hibernating animal, or any Native on a long journey in extreme conditions, and they will tell you that the key to survival is fat. It is so essential that if I were to pack any food into the wilderness, it would be fat.

(Text Box Insert) Mushrooms Are Not Survival Food.

Because they take more energy to gather and prepare than they give, they become just another nail in a starving person’s coffin. And a novice--especially with judgment clouded by extreme hunger--runs a good risk of poisoning himself. (End Insert)

Stage 3--Flesh

            With long-lasting fat energy, you can now safely focus on getting protein to rebuild your muscles, which you parasitized to keep yourself alive. The easiest way to rebuild flesh is with flesh.

            However, procuring flesh can be more time and energy demanding than getting fruit or fat. In a survival situation, efficiency is top priority, so all effort must be taken to get protein as easily as possible, with the least amount of effort.

(Text Box Insert) Flesh Kills.

Most people think a starving person needs meat. Besides being one of the hardest foods to digest, and thus very draining to a depleted body, meat is a much poorer energy source than fruit or fat. Lean meat can quickly kill a debilitated person who is not getting adequate calories. For these reasons, flesh needs to be the last stage of starvation recovery. (End Insert)

            But what if... 

            ...it is not fruit season? In the winter I’ve found juniper berries and prickly pear fruit in the high desert, and highbush cranberries and hawthorne fruit in the northern states. Fruit ripens earlier than normal in sheltered, sunny locations and later--sometimes much later--than normal in the cool shade. High-acid fruits can persist into the next growing season (I’ve gathered quantities of succulent cranberries that were 14 months old!), and some fruits preserve themselves by naturally dehydrating.

(Text Box Insert) Food alone won’t save you

So as not to oversimplify, I want to stress that food is only one of the many important considerations when facing starvation. Stage Foraging must be implemented in conjunction with those considerations. (End Insert)

            “Fat wouldn't be easy to get--especially if I were half-starved,” is another concern I hear. Animals like Bear, Raccoon, and Deer most often come to mind when we think of fat sources, and nabbing one of them could be a challenge when one barely has the energy to sit up. Fortunately, there is one easy-to-get and bountiful source of fat--insects. Ants, one of the most abundant Insects, can be found nearly anywhere and contain 20% or more fat. Their larvae are particularly rich, as are those of most Insects. Another rich--and usually overlooked--source of fat is lean animals. Throw away the flesh and go for the brain, spinal column, and marrow, which are nice n' greasy. You’ll find fat cushioning around the inner organs, the skin of Birds and Fish is oily, and Fish heads can be boiled and the oil skimmed off. Also let’s not forget about nuts, which are 50-70% fat.

            Others say, “How could I get flesh when I don’t know how to hunt?” If you can grab a Frog or roll over a stone to expose Earthworms, you are hunting. Again Insects come to the rescue: they are extremely rich in protein--more than virtually all meats. Dried Grasshoppers, for example, check in at 70%.

(Text Box Insert) Stage Foraging is not always the answer.

Debilitation resulting from conditions such as Giardia must be treated differently than this three-stage approach (Fruit, for example, can exacerbate the condition). Such treatment goes beyond the scope of this article. (End Insert)

Where to Learn

            In this day it is the rare and remarkable person who has undergone the wilderness rite of passage the Celts call Tha an t-acras air. She will have gone from a soft dependent to an interdependent Native who can now not only survive, but thrive, as a true child of Mother Earth. Through long and hard wilderness experience she has regained the deep perspective and knowledge that have kept our ancestors alive for millions of years.

            And yet there are many fine instructors who, even though they may not have experienced Tha an t-acras air, can get you started with skills such as gathering, snaring, and fishing. There are quite a number of good books available on these topics. Even though these resources may not cover Stage Foraging and integrated skills needed to implement it, the knowledge you gain can be invaluable. Properly applied, it could some day help save your life or the lives of others. Remember too that the same knowledge, improperly used, could just as well kill you.