Food for Survival

Food for Survival Includes What Our Ancestors Always Ate

Let's rethink food for survival.

After all, don't we eat all food to live on? We don't think of our day to day lives as "survival" because we don't feel threatened, because we're living in a civilization that shelters us from most of the immediate threats to our lives that people used to face on a daily basis.

Before humanity learned to grow its own food, starting roughly 10,000 years ago along the Mekong River, the Nile River, the Ganges River, the Mississippi River and maybe other places around the globe, we spent over two million years living by hunting and gathering.

Notice the extreme discrepancy in those two time periods. Two million years versus ten thousand years. The Agricultural Revolution is very recent in human history.

All Food is Food for Survival

Before that time, men (and that may well have included masculine lesbians) went out to hunt while women (and that may well have included feminine gays) hung out closer to the cave or campground and gathered leaves, roots, berries, insects and firewood. Children probably climbed trees to bring down bird eggs. Little boys probably also practiced hunting birds and lizards.

As the men returned with the spoils of the hunt, meat was cooked with the vegetables and everybody gorged on what they could.

Obviously, what they ate also depended on their geography and the season. The humans who migrated north to Europe ate mostly meat during the winter. Humans who remained closer to the tropics of the Equator ate more plant food because it remained easily available.

Here's what's interesting and applicable to storing emergency foods - those people were a lot healthier in general than the farmers who came after them, and that includes us. We're not farmers but we live on grain products.

Sure, cave people suffered from food shortages, especially during winter. They suffered from exposure to the cold. The men died and incurred injuries while out hunting. The women died in childbirth. They probably had a high infant mortality rate.

But the children who survived past the age of five had a good chance to live a long life. They didn't have heart attacks, cancer, high blood pressure or the other diseases of agricultural civilizations.

There's a lot of reasons for that, too many to explain here, but they boil down to grain-based foods such as bread, rice and corn being high glycemic load foods, which raise our insulin, which throws our body's hormones out of whack, inducing chronic inflammation which slowly damages and ages us.

Let's Go Back to Eating Food for Survival and Good Health

Therefore, if we are thrown back on our own again, we'd be smart to keep our gardens of vegetables and fruit, but not try to revive grain farming, as some survivalists plan.

We can keep raising and hunting animals and fishing for protein. We need that. We can keep raising and foraging vegetables for nutritional carbohydrates. We need those.

Vegetables are high in vitamins, minerals and polyphenols. I know the thought of raising enough tomatoes and lettuce to fill us up every day is daunting, but much healthier in the long run.

It'd be very difficult to return to the days of small farmers growing fields of wheat and corn. Why bother, when we know those foods are not the best for us?

I don't want to go back to living in caves. Houses are much more comfortable. And we don't want to return to the uncertain, sporadic eating of our cave ancestors. But houses have yards to grow gardens in, and the rest of nature contains many edible plants to forage.

So my contention is that we'll be much better off if we truly eat healthy food for survival.

Next: survival food supply -- check out foraging wild foods.