>>1928376>>1928632On a serious note however, I'll lend you some advice. Nature is absolutely full of food. Think about a forest full of oak trees, that's acres and acres of edible acorns. Maple trees producing sugar. Swamps full of cattail. Fields and roadsides full of bramble berries and more. I've seen sides of highways that in July are a yellow jungle made up of the flowering stalks of wild parsnips. There's a whole lot of food out there that most people know absolutely nothing about. The key to actually surviving off these isn't exactly in the identification and gathering if these, but in the processing. Acorns need to be dried, shelled, ground into chunks or flour and leached using several different methods. Then you can cook them and eat them. Maples need to be tapped and sap boiled into syrup. Cattails need to be dug up, cored out, and have the starch extracted through several different methods. Through thousands of years of eating these foods, people developed methods of efficient processing, so I highly encourage you to find what your areas native people did, if that information is still available. For example, instead of individually shelling each hickory nut, you can pound them all up in a large mortar and boil the shell and meat, the meats will dissolve and you can separate the shells. Then you get a nutrient rich broth called pawcohiccora. On top of this, you also need to know how to preserve these foods, another skill that most people don't know. There's also some modern tools that would be useful. If your shtf situation is something like a grid down rather then getting lost innawoods, you would have these tools on hand. Things like metal pots, a grain grinder, and jars and canning lids for preserving.
So yes, you can survive off of wild edibles (and I didn't even get to animals yet) you just have to know how to use them.
Pic related, will parsnip patch. Providing unthinkable quantities of food - if you know how to get it.
