How Difficult is it to Find Food in the Forest?

in April I released a video where the challenge was to catch a fish with improvised materials I ended up fashioning a hook from bone I found in the forest and making an improvised fishing line however it became apparent that if this was a real survival situation I like we would have perished it took me more than three days to actually catch a fish what would have been better is whilst I was figuring out how to find protein I managed to find sustenance in the forest by foraging so in this video I thought I'd give it a go is it possible to find a day's worth of food in the forest alright here's the script I'm in the woods evidently and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna walk around and using my intuition just pick plants that I think Luke edible let's see where that gets us this is day one hour zero admittedly I'm being deliberately obtuse here but I wanted to see what I would end up with foraging just based on intuition and my limited knowledge of plant life around me would I be able to get a meal or would I pick something toxic these plants here have little thorns on them yeah that spiky so when I avoid a despot here leafy juicy looking stems that looks a lot more edible I'm just gonna take a little thing Wow that came off easy this is one plant I definitely do know and that's Nettles I do know about nettle soup that is something that people make that's something that people eat which means that nettles must be edible stinging me these big stems look at the size of these don't smell like food smells plot but looks like mint there it doesn't smell like mint it's definitely not mint this sort of fungus growing on the end I don't know if it's edible anartha these are bark ups which surely are fine this video has two main purposes one is to be entertaining and somewhat educational and the other one is to encourage you to try foraging it's really fun however you should be aware that before I put anything in my mouth in this video it has been checked by a foraging expert do not eat something that you find in the forest without the guidance of someone qualified and don't use this video as a reference material that's not its intended purpose no really don't anyway on with the video so here's my smorgasbord of 12 different plant species what we're gonna do is just eat these and just see what happens so unidentified mushroom species here goes just kidding that would be super dumb instead I had foraging and bushcraft expert Adam Logan have a look at why I had collected spread okay at first it looked like I might have actually picked up a decent lunch dandelion really is up there as one of the the good ones to forage so the whole plant is safe for human consumption nettle is always mentioned as a good foragers plant to pick you've actually managed to pick a very very good edible in here ground elder said really you can see is forming you know a side of greens and you kneel quite easily however it shouldn't become apparent things were not so good after all these greens are going to be quite low on the the calorie side of things so you've correctly identified or picked a safe plant but not taking the part that has the real food value actually they're very bitter you can have all sorts of reactions death is probably the main one they're actually quite poisonous it's kind of it's very very bitter one of these plants is a definite avoid it's one of the toxic ones unfortunately this is one of most toxic plants not a mistake you want to make out of everything I think you've picked today this is potentially the biggest error and potentially the most dangerous so this is one of our most toxic plant species okay suppress your heart rate and yeah send you out pretty quickly if you ate enough not only had I chosen food that was low in calories I'd also picked a plethora of inedible harmful and downright deadly plants separating what was safe to eat I sat down for a rather sparse lunch you try that just because it doesn't kill you doesn't mean you can eat it okay seems insane to eat nettles hey that's all right just eating weeds that go around the back of the host now when you recommend I just found this over there today in true British fashion as Peston of rain so I'm not going to do any foraging today instead I'm gonna do some learning so normally in this channel I learn from trial and out however in this scenario that would be really really dumb that would be a surefire way to get yourself killed humans over generations have passed down knowledge for how to forage in the forest Safeway by word-of-mouth and today we do that in a more modern way using books so I'm gonna do some reading up learning about foraging and the plants around you is really interesting it's crazy to think this stuff just grows around you for free and you can just go and eat it don't know there was so many different kinds of dandelion 20% of the dry way of the nettles leaf is protein a little bit far and there as well vitamin C vitamin A calcium potassium iron phosphorus magnesium I really recommend trying out with an expert guide or taking a course of which there are many it's a really wholesome thing to do what I needed to do was find food that would be easily identifiable easy to forage and would provide plenty of calories this meant fungi was out too easy to mix up the species and the risks of getting it wrong were just too high I focused on finding just five different plant species that would provide a full day's worth of nutrition and would be easy to find so burdock the plant where I harvest harvested the leaves it has big tuber like roots below it wild garlic this is what looking for quite unmistakable which is perfect for me so apparently they're quite smelly love leaves are broader than all other garlic's the next day with better weather I set out again this time armed with some knowledge I'm really looking for three plants in particular here that will give me a lot of calories who's our burdock pigna and wild garlic those plants all have tubers that I can harvest and hopefully they contain a lot of color now that I knew about their distinguishing features it was surprisingly easy to find ant identify the plant species I was after the ground alder has this u-shaped stem we've got these weird asymmetric leaves these are safe to eat and apparently very good for you okay so this is wild garlic I can tell because of flowers but also even from here I can smell it stinks of garlic low carbohydrate storage takes a couple of seconds to forage that's amazing this plant here is another one I've been looking for peg nut I know that it's picked up because of the white flowers but also because of these leaves so that's straight away jackpot took about three seconds so finally you can just [Music] yeah that's the nicest thing I've packed so far so this is a little cluster of burdock plants and below my feet supposedly are the troopers which hold all the carbohydrates starchy content that I need for food that doesn't look like much but nice food like when you have a feel down oh oh oh keep going wild bar top two bars I was like what 25 minutes so this is our hall of edible safe foods so here we've got some wild garlic which is kind of like scallions or spring onions peg not here tiny little tubers we've got some nail tops leafy green ground alder which would be like our salad side salad to our other salad the main bulk of our calories and the meal will be made up of these Bardock tubers which will kind of act like our potato or sweet potato quite a big amount of food here for a minimal amount of effort really this simple meal could see you through a tough situation if you are in dire straits however despite the food being safe and full of nutritious calories I wasn't exactly winning any Michelin stars [Music] that's tough it's extremely better and it just tastes of plant obviously in a real survival situation you wouldn't complain wow it's pretty stringy is pretty what's the word it tastes like crap if you could cook this stuff up however not only would you unlock more of the calories it would likely taste better too so I set about making fire [Music] we're gonna do two different methods here one bear girl style and one more ramier style [Music] shut up nicely it in with the garlic so actually just forest - slamming just over there except out like a shoe here we go [Music] way way back that fried garlic so it's alright I could eat it better nurse has gone and so is the harsh texture not gonna get a metro and star for this but it's more possible there's more available calories because it cooked easier to digest it that's hot job done look I've entered the clean plate club so you can stay well-fed in the wilderness even if you suck at fishing if you know what you're looking for if you want just a taste of the wilderness but you don't want to take on the potential danger of picking something incorrect and getting poisoned then you should try cooking over a wood-fired grill I kind of got into this after cooking in the forest and that's a lot of fun if you want to do it right then check out this course from Skillshare that shows you how to build a fire specifically for cooking how to prep meat and vegetables and how to actually grow food rustic style without destroying it like I usually do this is one of more than 29,000 other classes delivered by people who are not only experts in their field but excel at teaching that means you don't have to worry about crappy audio confusing instructions you can just learn what you need quickly and get back to doing perhaps you want to better yourself this summer or maybe you want to learn a new skill for work where Skillshare really excels is when you have a project where you need to learn multiple different things quickly I use the skill share classes in the past to learn JavaScript audition and illustrator to create my own web game I also have three classes on Skillshare that you can take to how to solve the Rubik's Cube the easiest way a beginners guitar course and a class that shows you how to optimize your learning process and provide you strategies to avoid giving up on new projects skill shares annual subscription as less than 10 bucks a month but my viewers can get two months for free by using the link in the description and by using that link you'll be helping to support the show thanks to skill share for sponsoring this episode and thanks to you for watching I'll see you next time peace [Music]

Channel: Mike Boyd

Views: 832,641

Rating: 4.9439673 out of 5

Keywords: forage, foraging, food, wild, find, forest, woods, mushrooms, eat, survival

Id: B7RLXUIKLUQ

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2019