Foraging for food

>>912073
You won't be able to sustain yourself off of foraging during the winter; indigenous peoples would have grain stores and still hunt in order to meet caloric requirements.

But if you started early, learned the area, cached grain seeds and supplemented with animal fats and proteins, it might be possible to survive the winter... if you have enough knowledge of your local edibles.

A good place to start would be: all compound berries, crown berries and anything that looks like a strawberry is edible. All parts of all grasses (rice, wheat, cattail) and cruciferous plants (broccoli, mustard) are edible.

Stay away from mushrooms unless you're willing to risk a slow, painful and incurable death. But if you are, boletes are the least likely to kill you when you fuck up; you'll just wish you were dead for a few days.

If you watch the TV show Alone they do that very thing, they have to find their own food. Every single one of them that makes it past a few weeks starts to look emaciated, they are actually supposed to possess survival skills to get on the show. Best bet is to learn several ways to catch and trap fish/sea creatures.

>>912076
That's not really true. There's several species of ocean fish that are highly toxic.

The contestants on the show are given guidebooks on the toxicity of local flora and fauna, this would be the first step, and also dependent on what "local" is for you and contingent on your location not changing.

Freshwater fish species are all edible, but toxicity may still be present in fish living in contaminated water.

The ultimate goal is managing caloric intake and expenditure; greens have few calories, grains have many, animals are loaded with them. But greens require almost no energy to prepare, grains require processing, and animals may need to be tracked for days depending on what you're hunting. I find squirrel traps to be the best source of calories for the energy required to set them up.

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>>912074
You say that all parts of grasses and cruciferous plants are edible. What are the "other" kinds of plants, which aren't edible?

I noticed that deer just eat the leaves off of bushes. Surely they don't keep an internal encyclopedia of what all plants are good to eat. What if I just start eating everything green in sight?

>>912273
are you a deer?

>>912273
I don't know enough about botany to tell you what the other genuses of plants are, or which ones are edible, but I do know that deer don't eat everything.

Deer learn to eat the same way people do; copying their parents.

>>912590
>genuses
lol

adding on to what someone said about eating grasses:

don't eat any grass seed that has turned purple. It's got a fungal disease that's not good to eat.

>>912837
It's pretty safe to say that it's not a good idea to eat anything that has a peculiar color, odor, or texture.

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>>912083
How many days might it take for a squirrel trap to catch a squirrel? Also, do squirrels hibernate?

>>912297
Actually, yes

>>912830
What's the proper term, then, geni?

>>912837
How to identify a grass seed?

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>>912073
You can pick reeds, assuming it doesn't get so cold you can't get through the ice.

You chop them up into small pieces, boil them for 15 minutes, or you just chew them and spit out the fibers.
You have to eat about 30 of them to get 500 kcal.

>>913046
> squirrels
There's a lot of different types of squirrels and environments, and different traps, but expect to get one off of each of five traps every day, starting with the third day from when you last handled the trap. In the southern sierras one tree squirrel is a decent meal, in flatlands you'll need about three ground squirrels. They're fattier in the fall, pretty lean the rest of the year. Hibernation is dependent on their food sources and how harsh the winter is.

> grasses
Any plant with a single stalk, single seed pod (except maize) and bladed leaves is a grass. Different types of seeds would have different cook times, but you can always combine them into flour. Roots of bigger grasses like cat-tail and bamboo are worth seeking out too, as well as the white inner parts of lower stalks. The best way the chaff most grasses is to dry them first, then rub them between your hands over a bowl or tarp, then toss them in the air on a windy day; the chaff will blow away and the seeds will fall back into the container. It's a ton of work, but it's one of the best foods for seasonal storage that you can find wild on every habitable continent.

>>912273
Enjoy the hemlock poisoning anon.