Calories and survival

I am curious what your ideas are for getting enough calories to stay functional/healthy in an SHTF situation?

 

1500 -2500 per adult in a non-combat situation. More maybe for strenuous work,

 

You will have to store calories. You won't get enough to survive from most garden vegetables or wild game. Without them you will not be able to perform the labor necessary to garden and hunt anyway. My goal is an average of 2200 calories per day per person. Children less, adults more.

 

Fats, oils, starches, etc are going to be your friends. Once read a story of a Russian who wanted to get out of Russia and had to do it on foot. He left where he was and the government was looking for him. They searched the area and expanded the search each day based on how far they thought he could have traveled. He kept up such a fast pace that he kept ahead of their search pattern and got to Finland and at the border, the soldier on guard recognized him, admired what he had done enough to not "recognize" him and let him thru. He knew that he could not stop to look for food and stealing or begging for food would get him caught. He had hoarded butter and carried enough of it, roughly 3200 calories a pound, to be able to keep up a very fast pace for days. The area he was traveling thru had enough water and forests that he could replenish his water supply, make shelters, and have fire materials, so in the short run he could get by with just calories and very little else. 20 pounds of butter would give you enough calories for 20 days of hard exercise. Olive oil, about 240 calories per ounce, and other oils are even higher in calories. Hormel plant in Minnesota canned pork during WWII that was sent to the USSR and given to tank crews and bomber crews for food, kind of like spam, US government came down on them as there was too much fat in it to meet our standards, they reduced the fat content and increased the meat content, and the Russians screamed bloody murder about the sub standard food, so they went back to the high fat content. At 30 to 50 below, you need all the calories you can get in order to work and survive. The LDS survival plan calls for oils and fats for a lot of the calories in their food. Bread made with fats, powdered milk, and sugar and with cheese, butter, or peanut butter on it , would be of much more use than just a wheat only cracker. Many of the survival food plans would be adequate for a person sitting in a shelter at 68 degrees, but contain about half the calories needed for hard work in a cold climate. There was a reason for the Inuit to hunt seals, whales, etc as they needed the calories from the fats to survive. Can die on a diet of straight cod fish, roughly 100 calories in 4 ounces and less than 10 of them are fat calories.

 

Although I agree in principle concerning "fats, oils, and starches" carrying much of the energy supply load; but such a diet ought be considered a short term / emergency regimen. Long term, for most people, without some variety and necessary, proteins, vitamins, and minerals etc, it would be difficult to sustain such a diet without adverse health affects.

Escaping and evading poses particular challenges concerning portability of food/energy whereas being in a relatively fixed location portability isn't so much of an issue.



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I knew I was saving the bacon fat for a good reason.

 

Don’t forget the original long term survival food used by trappers, explorers, and American Indians, Pemmican, which is a mixture of dried red meats, blue berries/choke berries and suet.

Suet is different from tallow. Tallow being rendered muscle fat. Suet is from rendered organ fat. While all animal tallows have a shelf life of around six months, the self life of Suet is indefinite. Pemmican can be made from either types, but just remember. Tallow based pemmican has to be consumed before the fat becomes rancid.

 

Gardening is a key, but if your unable to pursue agriculture then you will have to forage for your calories. Wilderness foraging - Fact vs. Fantasy, one of my earlier vids, not very good visual effects but listen to the message.

 

Rawles blog article, 12-15-17, was about survival and hunting. lists venison at about 600 cal per lb, and a 150 lb doe has about 50 lbs of usable meat, 30,000 calories, or the equivalent of about 15 lbs of butter. While it is a lot healthier with protein, vitamins, ,minerals, etc, it would supply 1 person with a 2,000 daily calorie supply for 2 weeks. Smaller game and fish are even worse as a calorie sources. A lot of food for thought in survival there..

 

Is he including all the excess fat (deer are pretty lean but theres still some that tends to get "discarded" ) & all the offal bits?

 

I don't know. I know from road kill deer here in New Hampshire that the quantity of fat varies by an unbelievable amount. Deer harvested in November have a fair amount of fat, but a young doe carrying 2 fawns was hit in our road in March and from the amount of fat she had, I don't know if she would have survived anyway. There is also a tendency for the animals to have the least fat resources at the same time that you will need them most. Preparing a large garden by hand and living on very lean venison might be a challenge. When you get hungry, there are a lot of foods, tripe, blood sausage, head cheese, etc, that all of a sudden don't sound so bad. I would expect that the 30,000 calories is a little low, but I doubt very much that you could really expect to increase it much. The nutritional value of bone stock is very high, but the calories supplied are minimal.

Ghrit, the real numbers of calories on meat are all over the place, the 850 calories are for hamburger with 15 % fat, and thus it would be totally different for a lean steak, not marbled with fat, or for bacon which might be 50 % or more fat. Pound for pound, bacon and using all of its greases to cook with, or salt pork, are probably one of the most calorie dense food out there.

 

We save ours in jars....along with the bacon

 

Rabbit starvation comes to mind..

& whats wrong with blood sausages?. that stuff is freaking delish!

 

When times are tough, we all will either learn to eat what is available, blood sausage made with steel cut oats and served fried for breakfast with some honey or maple syrup was a treat when I was growing up and pickled beef heart and tongue cut thin and served on homemade wheat bread is still a favorite,or go hungry and perhaps die.. Dad was a butcher and most people didn't want the head, heart. tongue, kidneys, blood, etc and gave them to him, Dad also smoked some cuts and they were delicious. In the 1940's a lot of food were very filling, but quite short of meat or veggies in the winter.