Cannibalism thread got me thinking…lots of refugees and prisoners in WW2 ate some weird stuff without resorting to cannibalism, what else could you eat to survive but wouldn’t normally consider food?
Examples from WW2:
Tree bark
Shoe leather
Dirt
Some basic assumptions:
Let’s say that any animal or insect would already be eaten and no longer available.
Things that are obviously bad for you or poisonous would not be eaten, unless there was a way to prepare it for safe consumption (e.g. fugu, snakes, etc.)
Basic kitchen tools, fire, etc. are available
Moving is not an option because of distance, weather, or other obstacles
The area is urban yet abandoned. You can go into any place and take anything.
My thoughts: If leather can keep you alive, then I would hit luxury cars for the seats, dash, etc. A school would have extra sports equipment around, like baseballs, gloves, etc.
I would look for laboratories where bacterial cultures had been grown. There could be jars of growth medium powders of various kinds. Preparing them as broth or gel would make them easier to consume and digest.
Idea: would an average sewer system have a developed ecosystem? I’m thinking moss would be a possibility, insects, rats, possibly fish, etc. Also there’s the whole deal about tomato seeds from poop growing into viable plants.
Also, would a latrine or cesspool be able to support life?
It shouldn’t be surprising that leather is potentially edible. It’s just preserved animal skin. I think I’d avoid getting my leather from cars, though. The less dye and processing, the safer and more nutritious I’d assume it was.
Is the library paste already eaten? I might look at other starch-based adhesives too. Wallpaper paste is supposed to be edible.
I know that wild animals usually get the most nutrition from new shoots and young leaves, so I’d look for those on any plant I knew to be nonpoisonous.
While sawdust, paper and the like aren’t directly edible, if desperate enough, I just might try peeing on it and growing mushrooms in the dark, especially if I could find spores from a mushroom species that is normally edible. (Commercial mushrooms are often grown using a compost that includes straw from horse stables).
If I could find ethanol-based rubbing alcohol, it would be worth trying to do a distillation to purify the ethanol. Alcohol is good for calories. Even if I couldn’t figure out the distillation process, I might just try drinking tiny amounts (like a teaspoon a day) to see if I could get a few calories without dying. Since I’m in an urban area, I should be able to find the necessary research to do this without killing myself.
Oh, and inpsired by another thread: Bud Light Lime.
I could see how a sewer could be a viable mushroom farm this way, but I wonder if mushrooms could keep you alive. I know that your body chemistry allows one to survive on only say potatoes by chemically altering it into whatever you need. I don’t know if mushrooms would have that same quality. My other concern would be how could you get mushrooms to grow fairly large overnight, like those that appear after rainstorms? If there was a way to commercialize that, that would be awesome.
There was a horrific case of foster parents starving their children in New Jersey (google it if you must). The children were eating raw oatmeal and wallpaper paste to survive.
Solzhenitsyn said in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that the Soviets fed their prisoners boiled grass when food supplies got low (In the film adapted from the book, it didn’t look so bad – it became a yellowish puttylike mass. Like yellow-green Play-Doh).
Of course, it was nutritionally useless – people can’t digest cellulose. Unlike cows and gorillas and termites, we lack the gut bacteria that can break it down. So we get no nutritional value from it. But it does fill you up.
I posted a thread here about eating acorns. I had always heard that acorns were extremely bitter and needed to be ground and soaked in several changes of water to be made edible.
Being the intrepid adventurer that I am (read as “lacking in common sense”) I nibbled at a couple of acorns from a large white oak in my front yard and found them to be delicious!
Turns out acorns are highly variable in flavor, even from tree to tree.
