That’s why I’ve always thought it was a reasonable survival food. Yeah, it’s boring but I expect that the zombie apocalypse will provide some margin of entertainment.
Having said that, I was always impressed with Ötzi’s (The Iceman) varied diet judging from the contents of his digestive system when he died five thousand years ago:
Analysis of Ötzi’s intestinal contents showed two meals (the last one consumed about eight hours before his death), one of chamois meat, the other of reddeer and herbbread. Both were eaten with grain as well as roots and fruits. The grain from both meals was a highly processed einkornwheatbran, quite possibly eaten in the form of bread. In the proximity of the body, and thus possibly originating from the Iceman’s provisions, chaff and grains of einkorn and barley, and seeds of flax and poppy were discovered, as well as kernels of sloes (small plumlike fruits of the blackthorn tree) and various seeds of berries growing in the wild.
Of course, it’s possible that he may have been atypical. Probably one of those insufferable health nuts always going on about BMI and the food pyramid.
The problem with peanut butter is that, although it has a significant amount of protein, it’s an incomplete protein, deficient in histidine and especially tryptophan. Cite. How important this would be if subsisting on it alone for a month is more than I know, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be adequate as a lifestyle diet.
In the novel Make Room, Make Room [the base for Soylent Green movie] there is a scene where some chavesque woman and her child are getting a prescription for peanut butter because the child has qwashikor, but she actually intends to sell the peanut butter, been a while since I read the book but I think she was going to buy booze with the money.
In the Minnesota starvation experiment, for example, volunteers were fed a semi-starvation diet while walking 22 miles a day. Since the whole purpose was to figure out how to bring people back from starvation, the volunteer diet imitated the European refugee diet of potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, dark bread, and macaroni. In other words the volunteers were not getting a balanced diet, and not enough of it, while exerting themselves more than the average bear.
After 6 months they were very hungry, very weak, and somewhat mentally disturbed, but they were all alive.
I’m not aware of any nutritional deficit – including eating nothing – that can kill you in a month unless you were already very sick. Lack of water will kill you in around five days, though.
I remember my grandfather telling me that when he was stationed in the Amazon during WW2 his unit was told that, if lost or stranded without food, a good rule of thumb would be to observe primates and eat whatever they were eating. The one time that they were forced to follow this advice all of the monkeys they could find were eating ants.
A long time can be long indeed, like the case of the chicken nugget girl, who ate almost nothing but chicken nuggets for 15 years before finally getting sick; with a vitamin/mineral supplement, you can probably go on even longer.
Going by that article, she didn’t eat “almost nothing but chicken nuggets”-- She also ate fries. Which, admittedly, also aren’t a very healthy food, but it does mean that she was getting twice as much variety as the headline states.
I don’t know about her but I met the real Chicken Teriyaki Kid once. I went into Whole Foods Alewife in Cambridge, MA for lunch with a female coworker. If you aren’t familiar with the area, it is ground-zero for flakes in general. A woman walked up to us and said that she needed to do some shopping and would we mind watching her three kids while she did it as if that was the most normal thing in the world to ask of strangers. We were eating lunch at one of the front tables and the request was so bizarre that we said sure. The kids ranged between 5 and 10 years old. Cute kids. The mother soon brought over food for the kids before she did the rest of her shopping. The 5 year old had a big plate of chicken teriyaki and nothing else. I commented that he must really like that.
His older sister quickly revealed that chicken teriyaki is all he ate - ever and had since he was two. Not only that, it had to be chicken teriyaki from that specific store and no where else so the parents made trips to the store at least once a day to get it for him. He looked healthy enough and seemed happy. His older brother and sister ate more normally. As a bonus fact, we also learned that their father was a doctor and they had recently gone on a trip overseas and the biggest logistical problem was having enough chicken teriyaki shipped from that store to keep the youngest fed the whole time. That was a few years ago so I don’t know if he ever started eating anything else but apparently you can live on nothing but chicken teriyaki for at least three years.
Not sure, but based on other stories that he told me about his tour of duty in the Amazon I’m guessing that the servicemen weren’t sober enough to climb up trees and catch them.
