Wellness
Rationing Food and Foraging
Lesson time 19:10 min
Jessie teaches you how to make practical decisions around rationing food and foraging, and she introduces you to a surprising source of protein.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Ration Your Food • Edible Plants: What to Look For • Identifying Edible Berries • Insects: A Great Source of Protein
Teaches Wilderness Survival
Wilderness survival expert and former Air Force SERE specialist Jessie Krebs teaches you the skills to explore nature safely and confidently.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - Water is more important than food. And the reason is, we can go about three days without water. About 30 days, at least three weeks without food. So you're not as hungry as you think you are. And it really is a mental game. Our physiology is really built for fasting. We're really good at going without food for a while. It's really more of our natural state when you think about it. You look at human history. It's much more common for a few times in a person's life to go without food for a while. So keep that in mind when you're out there going like, what am I going to eat? Ahh! Right? We're not that concerned about it. Really. You'll be okay. And just that mental aspect of it can be really important. [MUSIC PLAYING] So when we deal with food, what food we come into a situation with is really important because it can be useful for us. And keep in mind, we're going to eat most of that at the beginning of our stay. When we come into a situation, often we have some food with us. It may just be a granola bar. It could be that we're planning a big backpacking trip, and we have several thousand calories to work with. So let's say I'm planning to go out, and I'm going to go out for 10 days or something. And on day four or five, I end up having problems. Something happens that triggers that switch. Boom. I'm in survival mode. Now what? So I'm going to take what food I have left at this point, and I'm going to divide that up into calories. So I'm going to say, let's say I end up with-- Okay, I've got this many days left. I had a couple of thousand-plus calories per day, and I've got 15,000 calories left in my menu that I have for the rest of this trip. And that's just to make these numbers easy. I'm going to take that food and divide it into thirds. So I've got 5,000 in each of those categories. And now what I'm going to do is estimate how long do I think I'm possibly going to be here. What's the longest I think it's going to be? If I say, okay, I think it's going to be six days. It was six more days till I was done with the trip, another day before somebody was going to notify someone that I was missing, and another day hopefully to find me. So eight days max. I will be out of here in no more than eight days. So now I've got my time fraction that I can work with, and I'm going to divide that half. So food, divided into thirds. We've got our time divided in half. So in those first four days-- the first half of my stay-- I'm going to eat 2/3 of those calories. So 10,000 calories are going to be eaten in that first four days. That last 5,000 I'm going to save for the last four days. And there are several reasons for this. One, when am I most active in a survival situation? The first half of that stay, when I'm finding my shelter area. I'm scouting my area. I'm putting up my shelter site. I'm building my fire and collecting my firewood. I'm taking care of injuries, right? Most of those ca...
About the Instructor
As a former Air Force SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) specialist, wilderness survival expert Jessie Krebs spent 30 years preparing people for the unexpected. Now she’s teaching you the mindset and skills to safely explore the outdoors. Learn essential survival techniques—from signaling for help to reading a map, finding water, making shelter, and more—and embark on your next adventure with confidence.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Jessie Krebs
Wilderness survival expert and former Air Force SERE specialist Jessie Krebs teaches you the skills to explore nature safely and confidently.
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