A big part about outdoor survival is knowing what to eat, and how to eat it. In a planned camping scenario, you will usually bring your own food, or at least some of it, but in an unexpected survival situation, you may find yourself with nothing to eat. It is during that time when you realize that nature is literally made of food - but it also harbors many dangerous non-edibles. That's why it's important to educate yourself about the local flora and fauna before trekking out into the woods.
I also highly recommend that you always carry a few basic supplies with you: Tin Foil; Fire starter (matches, flint etc.); a knife; and some sort of waterproof container (Tin foil can be fashioned into a small bowl in an emergency).
These aren't the only supplies you'll need to survive, but they're all you need to cook anything. It won't be gourmet fine dining, but it'll taste better than your shoe leather at least.
This page will include recipes you can make with only the supplies I just listed. Some of them include food you would've had to bring from home, but other recipes are just made from ingredients you can find in the wild.
However, if you clicked on this page because you're hosting a dinner party and need recipes for Beef Stroganof and Creme Souffle, you are really in the wrong spot. Any other place on the internet is more helpful than this page.
I also highly recommend that you always carry a few basic supplies with you: Tin Foil; Fire starter (matches, flint etc.); a knife; and some sort of waterproof container (Tin foil can be fashioned into a small bowl in an emergency).
These aren't the only supplies you'll need to survive, but they're all you need to cook anything. It won't be gourmet fine dining, but it'll taste better than your shoe leather at least.
This page will include recipes you can make with only the supplies I just listed. Some of them include food you would've had to bring from home, but other recipes are just made from ingredients you can find in the wild.
However, if you clicked on this page because you're hosting a dinner party and need recipes for Beef Stroganof and Creme Souffle, you are really in the wrong spot. Any other place on the internet is more helpful than this page.
FOOD TO BRING FROM HOME
If you're going camping, you're probably gonna pack something to eat. Sure, you can get all the nutrients you need from certain kinds from inner tree bark, but why in the heck would you intentionally want to resort to that?
Your diet should be as balanced at the campsite as it would be at home. There are only 3 true food groups:
* denotes food you can find in nature
Your diet should be as balanced at the campsite as it would be at home. There are only 3 true food groups:
* denotes food you can find in nature
FOOD GROUP #1 - MEATS
Beef Venison* Bacon Pork Buffalo Moose* Elk* Bacon Squirrels and Turtles* Antelope Jerky Bacon Fish* Birds* Eggs (Honorary Meat)* Cheese (Honorary Meat) Beans (Honorary Meat) and finally, you guessed it, Bacon. |
FOOD GROUP #2 - POTATOES AND CORN
Potatoes Corn |
FOOD GROUP #3 - OTHER
Fruit that you can make alcohol from Fruit that you can't make alcohol from The green ruffage that deer and other vegetarians eat (avoid)* Bread Coffee (or Black Tea, only if you're British)* Chocolate Whatever Bullion Cubes are made of Raw tree-bark (only eat this to intimidate your father-in-law)* |
When planning your meals during the packing process, keep in mind the following principles: for short periods of time, humans can survive off meat alone and be very productive; starches and fruits offer more immediate bursts of energy than meat, but also make you 'crash'; potatoes and other heavy starches will put you to sleep, but keep you warm.
Thus, what you plan to eat sorta depends on your planned activities. Are you gonna be leisurely sitting in a tent at a park campground? Are you gonna be bushwacking or portaging and requiring lots of sustained energy?
Another consideration is how light or heavy you plan to be packing. Can you handle the space and weight taken up by 3 backpacks full of frozen pizzas and jars of mayonnaise? Or would you prefer to just shove a couple of bullion cubes in your key pocket and hope for the best?
FOOD YOU FIND OUTDOORS
As I've already hinted at, nature is full of food. You should never have to resort to eating your severed foot, or your hat.
Probably the most obvious foodstuff out in the woods is meat. Everything that moves is made of meat. If you passed 7th grade biology you probably knew that already.
MEATS
There are 4 basic kinds of meat - Red meat, White meat, Dark meat, and Soft meat. Red meat is the hardest, most muscular meat, and usually has the most protein and energy to offer; it is found mostly in large mammals. White and dark meat are stringy and less dense than red meat, and offer a little less energy pound for pound, but it's easier to digest. You find in in birds and other small animals. Soft meat is light, flakey, starchy flesh found in primitive animals like fish, crayfish, snails, insects and worms. I'm on the fence about what kind of meat Frogs legs are. Frog meat, I imagine.
Red meat, in the wild, comes from Moose, Elk, Deer, Bears, Buffalo, Pronghorn, Sheep and Mountain Goats. Technically it's also found in Dogs and Felines, but I speak for most people I know when I say I would never eat wolf meat. Frontiersmen left us with a special piece of wisdom: animals that only eat meat taste terrible.
There are only two kinds of birds when it comes to food: Fish Ducks, and Chickens. Fish Ducks eat alot of fish (no kidding, Sherlock), so their flesh tastes like bad fish or some vulgar analogy I would never put in writing.
Every other bird, for the purposes of eating quality, is just a chicken. If you start lecturing me about how a partridge and a chicken taste nothing alike, I'm gonna assume you're a wine connoisseur. Turkey? Chicken. Canada Goose? Chicken. Whooping Crane? Chicken. Snowy Owl? Chicken. All birds other than fish ducks are chickens, because that's what they taste like, and that's final.
We're pretty fortunate in Canada in regards to fish. Unlike some countries, there are no wild freshwater fish that are poisonous to eat, on their own. There are certain areas were both natural and man-made pollution have tainted the fish with trace heavy metals and other toxic elements - I'm not joking about this. The MNRF makes a data set available that lists all the watersheds in Ontario where the fish are probably not safe to eat (or in the case of the Moira River, definitely not safe. (To be fair, if you find yourself anywhere near the Moira River on purpose, you're probably re-evaluating your life anyways)).
Some movies depict people in survival situations eating raw, fresh-caught fish. If you're one of the few 'men' who enjoys sushi, you're probably not very opposed to this concept. However, eating raw wild fish is a vague gamble at best. Just remove the bun from your hair and cook it like anybody else would, nature boy. Any meat is prone to have bacteria, viruses, parasites, or other brickerbrack that you can't anticipate, so it's best practice to cook your meat, especially in a survival situation where projectile diarrhea would be considered a setback.
Don't even talk to me about eating snails.
Not only are frogs fun to catch - their fun to eat too! Believe it or not, there are rules in Ontario about what kind of frogs you're allowed to hunt. These rules are important to prevent all the evil poachers (the same ones that you saw on Bambi) from killing all the frogs and selling frog ivory on the Chinese black market. All joking aside, the only legal 'Game Amphibian' is the Bullfrog, and no wonder, since that's the only frog we have that's worth hunting. Leopard Frogs are way more common, but they already get enough hunting pressure from their two primary natural predators, Lawnmowers and Poodles. All the other Canadian amphibian species are way smaller than Bullfrogs, except the American Toad, but what kind of swamp-witch would you have to be to want to eat a toad?
Anyways, after checking the regulations and confirming they are in season, Bullfrogs are best prepared either like fish, or like hotdogs over an open fire. Just eat their legs like little chicken wings.
Squirrels are absolutely delicious, but only bother with the Black ones. Red Squirrels only have about as much meat as one chicken wing and are so much harder to kill. Cook them like a bird or any small mammal - just make sure you clean and wash a squirrel really well. You're not allowed to eat Flying Squirrels. The government is trying to prevent people from acquiring the power of flight by eating their magical flesh. So be warned.
Like penguins, you're not allowed to hunt turtles. You used to be able to hunt Snapping Turtles, but when people started noticing that more than 5 a year were being run over by cars (the same cars that allowed the evil poachers from Bambi to transport his mother's murdered carcass to the Chinese black market!), the government quickly saved the entire species by closing down their hunting season. This was very disappointing to 4 people in Coe Hill.
Incidentally, in a survival situation, the sort of situation where breaking game laws just once might be warranted, I still would recommend not eating a turtle. Turtles, while not poisonous, are usually so chock-full of bacterial garbage that eating one would be equivalent to eating a soiled mattress. Back in the pre-ban days, hunters had to 'blanch' turtles by placing them in barrels of water, and changing the water daily for a week while the turtle purged itself. This used to be the theme of an annual tournament in Bobcaygeon.
Most snakes are not good for eating. If you hate eating pike because you're annoyed by all the little bones, you're not going to like snake. Rattlesnakes, being on the larger end of the snake-scale, can be eaten, though their absent through most of Canada, and in the places where they are present they're usually protected.
You can eat bugs, but I'm gonna have to be the voice of reason here and ask why...
Probably the most obvious foodstuff out in the woods is meat. Everything that moves is made of meat. If you passed 7th grade biology you probably knew that already.
MEATS
There are 4 basic kinds of meat - Red meat, White meat, Dark meat, and Soft meat. Red meat is the hardest, most muscular meat, and usually has the most protein and energy to offer; it is found mostly in large mammals. White and dark meat are stringy and less dense than red meat, and offer a little less energy pound for pound, but it's easier to digest. You find in in birds and other small animals. Soft meat is light, flakey, starchy flesh found in primitive animals like fish, crayfish, snails, insects and worms. I'm on the fence about what kind of meat Frogs legs are. Frog meat, I imagine.
Red meat, in the wild, comes from Moose, Elk, Deer, Bears, Buffalo, Pronghorn, Sheep and Mountain Goats. Technically it's also found in Dogs and Felines, but I speak for most people I know when I say I would never eat wolf meat. Frontiersmen left us with a special piece of wisdom: animals that only eat meat taste terrible.
There are only two kinds of birds when it comes to food: Fish Ducks, and Chickens. Fish Ducks eat alot of fish (no kidding, Sherlock), so their flesh tastes like bad fish or some vulgar analogy I would never put in writing.
Every other bird, for the purposes of eating quality, is just a chicken. If you start lecturing me about how a partridge and a chicken taste nothing alike, I'm gonna assume you're a wine connoisseur. Turkey? Chicken. Canada Goose? Chicken. Whooping Crane? Chicken. Snowy Owl? Chicken. All birds other than fish ducks are chickens, because that's what they taste like, and that's final.
We're pretty fortunate in Canada in regards to fish. Unlike some countries, there are no wild freshwater fish that are poisonous to eat, on their own. There are certain areas were both natural and man-made pollution have tainted the fish with trace heavy metals and other toxic elements - I'm not joking about this. The MNRF makes a data set available that lists all the watersheds in Ontario where the fish are probably not safe to eat (or in the case of the Moira River, definitely not safe. (To be fair, if you find yourself anywhere near the Moira River on purpose, you're probably re-evaluating your life anyways)).
Some movies depict people in survival situations eating raw, fresh-caught fish. If you're one of the few 'men' who enjoys sushi, you're probably not very opposed to this concept. However, eating raw wild fish is a vague gamble at best. Just remove the bun from your hair and cook it like anybody else would, nature boy. Any meat is prone to have bacteria, viruses, parasites, or other brickerbrack that you can't anticipate, so it's best practice to cook your meat, especially in a survival situation where projectile diarrhea would be considered a setback.
Don't even talk to me about eating snails.
Not only are frogs fun to catch - their fun to eat too! Believe it or not, there are rules in Ontario about what kind of frogs you're allowed to hunt. These rules are important to prevent all the evil poachers (the same ones that you saw on Bambi) from killing all the frogs and selling frog ivory on the Chinese black market. All joking aside, the only legal 'Game Amphibian' is the Bullfrog, and no wonder, since that's the only frog we have that's worth hunting. Leopard Frogs are way more common, but they already get enough hunting pressure from their two primary natural predators, Lawnmowers and Poodles. All the other Canadian amphibian species are way smaller than Bullfrogs, except the American Toad, but what kind of swamp-witch would you have to be to want to eat a toad?
Anyways, after checking the regulations and confirming they are in season, Bullfrogs are best prepared either like fish, or like hotdogs over an open fire. Just eat their legs like little chicken wings.
Squirrels are absolutely delicious, but only bother with the Black ones. Red Squirrels only have about as much meat as one chicken wing and are so much harder to kill. Cook them like a bird or any small mammal - just make sure you clean and wash a squirrel really well. You're not allowed to eat Flying Squirrels. The government is trying to prevent people from acquiring the power of flight by eating their magical flesh. So be warned.
Like penguins, you're not allowed to hunt turtles. You used to be able to hunt Snapping Turtles, but when people started noticing that more than 5 a year were being run over by cars (the same cars that allowed the evil poachers from Bambi to transport his mother's murdered carcass to the Chinese black market!), the government quickly saved the entire species by closing down their hunting season. This was very disappointing to 4 people in Coe Hill.
Incidentally, in a survival situation, the sort of situation where breaking game laws just once might be warranted, I still would recommend not eating a turtle. Turtles, while not poisonous, are usually so chock-full of bacterial garbage that eating one would be equivalent to eating a soiled mattress. Back in the pre-ban days, hunters had to 'blanch' turtles by placing them in barrels of water, and changing the water daily for a week while the turtle purged itself. This used to be the theme of an annual tournament in Bobcaygeon.
Most snakes are not good for eating. If you hate eating pike because you're annoyed by all the little bones, you're not going to like snake. Rattlesnakes, being on the larger end of the snake-scale, can be eaten, though their absent through most of Canada, and in the places where they are present they're usually protected.
You can eat bugs, but I'm gonna have to be the voice of reason here and ask why...