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 some kind of survival kit and have to rely on the food you can find around you.
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 are able to 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.
Here a few calorie counts of some wild food and why it would be difficult to maintain your energy without meat or seafood.
Mushrooms
As mentioned earlier, there’s just over 20 calories per 100 grams of mushrooms as these tasty little fungi are mostly water, so lets 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 days worth of calories would be near impossible.
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 to 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 a lifesaver 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 new 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 were 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 its 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 simply string trap, you may have to ask yourself if leaving that patch of mussels clinging to the rocks if worth your life.