Eat This - Not That

Edible Plants and Their Dangerous Doppelgängers

- Andrew Schrader

Most of our readers already know that our preference is for fresh meat in the wild during a bug-out or back country hiking scenario. And as Green Beret Mykel Hawke noted in Issue 23 of RECOIL OFFGRID, it’s much easier to get life-saving nutrients and energy from animals than it is from plants.

That being said, animals aren’t always available to us. And in a true survival situation we may need to end up for aging for plants in order to scrape by. The problem is that foraging for plants, although easier because they can’t run away from you, is complicated by the fact that some plants can harm you and others can kill you. The second issue is that some plants that resemble edible options and look familiar to us can actually be quite harmful if ingested. If you’ve ever seen the movie Into the Wild, this situation was depicted to reflect one of the theories about how Christopher McCandless died.

To help us sort things out, we tracked down professional backpacking and climbing guide Lee Vartanian. These days, besides guiding in his “spare time,” he works as the founder and head of Modern Icon, which handcrafts K9 leashes and harnesses for high-end law enforcement and military applications. He also help strain U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) agencies in “the art of vertical access in non-permissive environments.” In other words, using ropes and climbing skills to gain passage to areas that bad guys don’t want you to access.