Why long-term survival situations are harder for vegans

Surviving in the wild in any kind of situation you didn’t plan on being in is difficult to say the least, especially if you don’t have any kind of survival kit and have to rely on the food you can find around you.

(A selection of salad leaves, mushrooms, berries, and nuts, all of which will take a long time to gather and give you no more than a few hundred calories)

The good news about wild food is that it isn’t hard to find if you know what you’re looking for, the bad news is that the vast majority of wild food in the UK has an extremely low-calorie count. There are over 15,000 different types of mushrooms growing wild in the UK, with many of these species being edible. Even if you can find a huge supply of mushrooms and know how to identify them safely, there are just over 20 calories in 100 grams of regular field mushrooms, with the other species not faring much better on a nutritional level.

The number of vegan-friendly wild foods in the UK that have a higher calorie count than your average salad is limited to nothing more than types of nuts, such as acorns, but these are seasonal and won’t do you any good for most of the year. The ethical implications of eating living things you find in the wild are up to the individual, but in the event that someone wants to stay vegan in a survival situation, they would need to find an enormous amount of the same things.

Here are a few calorie counts of some wild foods and why it would be difficult to maintain your energy without meat or seafood.

Mushrooms

As mentioned earlier, there are just over 20 calories per 100 grams of mushrooms as these tasty little fungi are mostly water, so let’s be generous and up it to 25 calories per 100 grams. At this estimate, you would need to eat about 10kg, or 22 pounds of mushrooms every day just to reach your calorie count.

This is of course just an example and mushrooms would be mixed with whatever other food could be found, but the chances of finding enough mushrooms for nothing but a single day’s worth of calories would be near impossible in a survival situation.

Edible leaves and flowers

Dandelions have about twice the calorie content of a standard mushroom, but this still means you’ll need close to 5kg to survive on them alone. Most flowers contain very little in terms of fat and protein, but they aren’t bad when it comes to carbohydrates, and certain flowers such as elder flowers have a decent sugar content. The problem is that they will probably make you feel sick if you eat too many, as people often have trouble digesting things they aren’t used to, and the human body is rarely subjected to large flower-based diets.

As for edible leaves, the problem is again in their nutritional values. There are a few out there that have high levels of protein, for leaves that is, but something that they all lack together is fat, which is very important when surviving in the wild.

Nuts and roots

Edible roots are either lifesavers or not even worth the effort they take to gather. The wild carrot is quite a large plant for the size of its root, but what you’ll get out of digging one up will barely be worth the effort of doing so. On the other hand things like Burdock can grow in abundance but only tend to be in certain areas, and you would still need a huge amount to meet your calories.

If you’re lucky enough to be stranded somewhere during nut season and happen to be close to a ton of trees, then you’ll be able to get your much-needed supply of fat. Nuts are pretty much the only thing in the wild that a vegan can eat that contains any decent amount of fat, and the colder the area the more important this resource is.

Even if you’re in an area where there’s a huge amount of wild food that you know how to identify, the main problem would be the season. Wild garlic is easy to identify when the flower is out and the leaves have sprouted, but less so in winter when it’s wilted and there’s little above ground to give it away.

With shellfish just sitting there all year round, along with fish and non-hibernating land animals such as rabbits which you can catch with a simple string trap, you may have to ask yourself if leaving that patch of mussels clinging to the rocks is worth your life.