> How well could I survive eating local plants [...]?
I don't recommend this. As someone who has been foraging for over a decade, I believe you are much better off stockpiling food, learning to raise chickens, owning some fishing gear, maybe growing your own crops, and even learning to hunt small game.
Here's my educated opinion:
Foraging is fine as a sort of hobby or interest, but most people shouldn't consider it for survival and the vast majority of people have no business doing it at all. That might sound extreme, but trust me. I've witnessed so much stupidity in foraging communities, online and offline, that I completely gave up participating. Having to constantly correct bad and even dangerous advice got really tiring.
Being good at ID'ing and using plants requires adequate time spent gathering knowledge and experience. Most people won't come close because they don't have the interest.
Many people just don't have the visual processing skills. Foraging is a very visual skill. Some people have it. Foraging came natural to me because I'm highly visual. I can ID things very easily after an experience. Others I've known are nearly incapable of ID'ing plants reliably. I'd say at least half of people are not good at ID'ing and probably never will be without some app on a phone connected to the internet.
Foraging is and historically has been tertiary to hunting and agriculture/livestock. Most wild plants simply don't have the energy density to justify the energy spent to collect and eat them. Those that are energy dense are usually only around for a few months out of the year and still may not be that plentiful.
At best, foraging is a stopgap while crops are growing. I'd love to say that it's practical merely live off the land, and while I think I might be able to get away with it longer than the average person, it's just not viable for most.
And also, Hunting & gathering/foraging will only support a far smaller population than our current agriculture based society.
So sure, you can live off foraging alone. When everyone else is not.
But when _everyone_ starts hunting and gathering you'll quickly realise how far agriculture has displaced us from the basic carrying capacity of the land, and then move onto the realisation of what happens in nature when the population of an animal exceeds the carrying capacity of their territory.
Starvation, conflict. Nothing great.
That's the problem with post-apocalyptic day dreams, they usually posit you as one of the few survivors. In reality, there'll be way more other survivors, either competing with you for resources, or, if you have a sweet bunker filled with supplies, forming a coalition that can overcome any advantage you have in firepower, by sheer numbers of desperate people.
(Peter Thiel take note, if the apocalypse comes, you can't shoot every Kiwi, and we're mighty interested in what's in your bunker. #AotearoaIsNotYourLifeboatRichPeople)
While on the face of it, this sounds right, I've started to think there's a chance we are wrong. Can you really prove that industrialised agriculture has a higher carrying capacity than untamed nature?
Supposedly the population of the USA pre-colonialism was comparable to today's population and, whatever way they were managing food systems, they were able to sustain that for millennia, rather than exhausting almost all the soil's fertility in a few generations.
Then there's recent findings that pre-industrial fisheries were often as productive as early industrialised ones[0]. But again, sustained for long periods rather than rapidly leading to vanishingly small returns.
Findings like this really lead me to the question of whether our current approach to feeding ourselves is actually so great or whether we should return to more "proven" methods.
I have 7 chickens on .24 urban acres. I'd definitely have to convert most of the 'land' to chicken feed if in an apocalyptic scenario but having 2-5 eggs a day is a wonderful blessing.
chickens are great, but in an apocalypse you are feeding chickens things you could eat instead. You would be better off growing potato on that land, as one the most energy per unit land dense crops.
for comparison, potato yields 40 tons a hectar, while wheat does like 8 tons and requires processing that most people won't manage by themselves.
Apples also give 30+ tons but thats a stranger diet.
I don't recommend this. As someone who has been foraging for over a decade, I believe you are much better off stockpiling food, learning to raise chickens, owning some fishing gear, maybe growing your own crops, and even learning to hunt small game.
Here's my educated opinion:
Foraging is fine as a sort of hobby or interest, but most people shouldn't consider it for survival and the vast majority of people have no business doing it at all. That might sound extreme, but trust me. I've witnessed so much stupidity in foraging communities, online and offline, that I completely gave up participating. Having to constantly correct bad and even dangerous advice got really tiring.
Being good at ID'ing and using plants requires adequate time spent gathering knowledge and experience. Most people won't come close because they don't have the interest.
Many people just don't have the visual processing skills. Foraging is a very visual skill. Some people have it. Foraging came natural to me because I'm highly visual. I can ID things very easily after an experience. Others I've known are nearly incapable of ID'ing plants reliably. I'd say at least half of people are not good at ID'ing and probably never will be without some app on a phone connected to the internet.
Foraging is and historically has been tertiary to hunting and agriculture/livestock. Most wild plants simply don't have the energy density to justify the energy spent to collect and eat them. Those that are energy dense are usually only around for a few months out of the year and still may not be that plentiful.
At best, foraging is a stopgap while crops are growing. I'd love to say that it's practical merely live off the land, and while I think I might be able to get away with it longer than the average person, it's just not viable for most.