If you eat raw pork, you’ll have more problems than scurvy. 
If there are pigs and mushrooms, there have to be other edible plants too.
correct me if i’m wrong: you can get along without any natural source or supplementary pill of vitamins but lack of either protein, carbohydrates or minerals will kill you.
Huh? Lack of vitamins will most certainly kill you in a variety of original ways, depending on the vitamin you’re lacking.
The trick is surviving without vitamins long enough to have viable offspring, thus ensuring the future of the non-veg species. The OP didn’t ask about quality of life, just survival.
But there’s also commercial mushroom production, so it’s certainly possible to profitably harvest mushrooms.
What if the pigs are just eating the mushrooms. Could they live on those only and metabolize whatever stuff is in them we need but can’t get from the mushrooms directly?
they’re also why we’re so damn fat. you don’t need to eat carbs.
My first thought, having breifly worked on a pig ranch, was. “what are they feeding the pigs?”
I’m wondering if mushrooms have a lot of fiber. I know that instead of cellulose they have chitin, which is equally indigestible to humans. That could act as ruffage to push all that meat down the tubes.
Also, fungi–I believe–are a good source of vitamin D.
Mushrooms would grow in more inhospitable places than plants would, so they’d do better in a post-apoctolyptic scenario… They don’t need light, the kinds of substrates they need are more varied, and they can grow fast. They just need moisture. Heh, why even bother with mushrooms and just eat lichen, like reindeer? You can scrape them off of trees, dry them, and eat them like potato chips. That sounds like good eating!
Here’s the wiki on mushrooms:
Note, no Vit D .
However, there are some experiments that show that if mushrooms are grown under UV lite, they will produce Vit D. Not in the wild, however.
Wiki doesn’t mention fiber, but raw mushrooms contain about 2 grams per serving of 5 smallish mushrooms.
I believe it was mushrooms and possibly yeast.
Regarding vitamin D, I read that you’d only have to expose mushrooms to UV for five minutes or so to get enough vitamin D that one serving would exceed the RDA. I’m not sure if there were UV lights in the book but I somewhat doubt it.
In fact, fresh mushrooms are loaded with protein. The protein is cooked out of the canned stuff.
2-3 grams per 100 grams. Not much at all.
And it’s vitamins, not proteins that are cooked out.
I don’t see why one could not, though it would be a risk of getting sick, besides mushrooms only sprout at certain times of the year. I think it would lead to a shorter life span.
That’s clearly not true of all mushrooms. You can buy fresh farmed mushrooms in the grocery store year-round, and they certainly don’t keep very long, so they must be harvested regularly.
Sorry, I should have clarified. The amount varies depending on species but, per world-of-mushrooms.org the amount is “typically 20-30% crude protein as a percentage of dry matter” though true variation is much greater.
Is the UV that comes down to Earth sufficient? We produce vitamin D through exposure to sunlight, so I’m wondering if it’s the same for mushrooms.
But that then makes mushrooms unnecessary. If we have UV lights to make the mushrooms produce vitamin D, then we could just stand in the light for a few minutes and cut out the middle man.
I’m guessing mushrooms could simply fill you up when you don’t have meat around. It’s better than eating nothing, although the risk of eating the wrong mushroom seems too high to make it a safe bet over the long run. I’m sticking to the lichens when the end times come, thankyouverymuch.
Once you are talking % of dried, you aren’t talking the same. Mushrooms are mostly water. Thus sure, dried mushrooms have more protein as a %. In any case, 2-3 grams per serving is very low protein.
Apparently not.
In this vein, you can get a lot of minerals from livers, both beneficial and less so. Arctic explorers tried eating polar bear back in the day, and found that the liver was too toxic to eat. I imagine this is true of some other top carnivores as well.