What is the basic food humans need to survive?

When it comes to survival,you people would be doomed.
You might survive off what you brought from home for a little while but when it runs out you will be dead within months.
You will not find potatoes or most of the items that people mentioned out in the wilderness.
I am not answering from the point of view of having items to CHOOSE from...I am answering as a survivalist who has studied and studied the reality of it.
Even the cavemen would see fat as the hardest thing to get in the wild.
Long term survival is about what you know...not what you have or can take off a storeshelf.
So...I will say it again.
FAT IS THE HARDEST TO GET AND THE MOST ESSENTIAL.

Also.......THE MORE YOU KNOW,THE LESS YOU NEED!!!

Ok rant over...carry on.

Wait a minute...wasn't this in the survival forum???

I'm a vegetarian who eats fish (a pescatarian).
I was told my panic attacks would go with essential fatty acids.
I had a choice between flax/hemp oil or sardines.
Choosing the cheaper option was quite beneficial.

Could I kill a sardine? You bet.
Two cans of sardines per week was the answer.

reply to post by DrumsRfun

That's one thing I asked my mum.
Where did they find all the potatoes?
She says they were not just cultivated, but they grew wild like weeds.
They were a dominating, invasive species at the time.
However, not everybody knew how to use them yet, and sometimes people ate the poisonous leaves.

reply to post by DrumsRfun


I just google wild potatoes, and wild peanuts. The Native American's
ate wild potatoes and peanuts. Interesting to find out the facts we don't
think normally think about.

reply to post by halfoldman


Your Mum sounds like a smart lady.
Sorry about my post above....I thought this was in the survival forum.

reply to post by 19rn50


Wether it be The Natives or The Cavemen or The Inuit...alot of that knowledge hasn't trickled down on our society.
Its lost knowledge and techniques.

reply to post by DrumsRfun

No worries, I guess it is a survivalist forum.
It's only different in the sense that we have different ideas and plants/foods these days.
For example - growing up the first time I heard of manioc was with Amazonian tribes.
But my granny knew manioc.
It was used widely during post-WW II rationing.

if noone said it, I will
Soylent Green

reply to post by halfoldman

In fact, my granny used to complain that there was no more manioc and real sugar-beets all of a sudden.
She used to go to East Germany (my grandfather always had to wait - he never set foot there) for certain gherkins and foods.

Originally posted by Bendii
My grandson ,who is 12 has survived on potatoes. We all were very worried that he would not be healthy when he gets older. We have tried everything to change his diet. The school even tried to train him to eat something else. Even tried not giving him potatoes and have him eat something else. Didnot work. He would start throwing up. When he is here with me, he will start gagging when I cook cabbage, have kraut on the table, boiled eggs and the list goes on and on. He will drink milk..doesn't like chocolate milk. And he will eat bread and ketchup.. The only fruit he will eat is a banana. he will not eat any meat at all. Does like peanut butter and soda crackers. Does not like any candy but a Hersey bar..without the almonds. Likes roasted peanuts. He does take vitamins.
He is healthy and his blood work shows his iron level is normal. So That is One for the potato.

As I said in the other thread, you cannot attribute that solely to the potato. Potatoes are mostly carbohydrates, with minimal proteins and other vitamins. If your grandson ate only potatoes, he would be dead. The fact that he also drinks milk and eats bread and bananas, etc. is why he's okay. Heck, you could do away with the potato altogether and keep the bread; he'd still survive.

Your body needs a few basic things to stay in check. Fats, sugars, proteins, vitamins and minerals. I could explain why each is necessary, but I should really go and help out my neighbours whose houses are under water (I live in Brisbane, QLD). Go check out the other thread about Gelatin.

reply to post by hypervalentiodine

Hey my friend, hope everything turns out OK for you and your neighbor!
Holding thumbs, and my prayer is with you.
Thanks for your fantastic input.

Originally posted by halfoldman
- does survival testimony always support "modern nutritional science"?
Often the survivors' narratives are very different from what what we are told humans need to survive.

Different people will have different tolerances to vitamin deficiencies, and fat soluble vitamins will have different depletion rates than water soluble vitamins. But it's known that sailors sometimes had vitamin C deficiencies for example, so some aspects of nutrition science have been proven.

If you take a one a day vitamin, you can live on just about anything, like this professor who lived on twinkies (along with a vitamin pill):

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food...

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

"That's where the head scratching comes," Haub said. "What does that mean? Does that mean I'm healthier?

I think the vitamin is key when the diet is limited in variety:

Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks. Families who live in food deserts have limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, so they often rely on the kind of food Haub was eating.

I also read about a guy who lived on nothing but eggs. Eggs must be nutritious because the developing chicks have nothing else to live on.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

Interesting.
I do think both people and varieties of a food differ greatly. Whatever milk and scraps people had in Europe for long periods would ultimately not have saved them without the potato.
What worries me about the twinkie, egg or meat diets is the lack of fiber.
I'm not sure how long people can do this without putrefying their gut.
Apparently a high meat diet is associated with colon cancer.

A friend of mine was on the Atkins diet last year, and she said they had now adapted it to include a cup portion of salad a day to stop them from becoming constipated, and the meat rotting inside them for days.

I would say there are differences between simple survival foods, and optimal survival foods.
Optimal survival would probably include a lot of essential fatty acids.