Tasting Notes from the Turtle who Ate my Hot Dogs
Note: This essay pairs well with Alone Together by Fall Out Boy.
A new friend asked me a hypothetical question last week. If tomorrow, everyone in the world got, for lack of a better word, raptured, and only me and my partner remained, where would I go to have the best chance of survival by farming?
I had follow-up questions. Are animals still around? Yes, though no animals will be harmed in the carrying out of this hypothetical. Is all the stuff still there? Yes. What about electricity, water, the internet? Yes, all utility bills are paid up through the end of time.
Eventually I answered, but my answer was not (perhaps to my friend’s chagrin) agricultural. In fact, everything I know about gardening and small scale ag and production didn’t figure. Instead, I channeled Jeff, the man who taught me how to un-catch a snapping turtle.
Jeff at the End of the World
Ever since I read The Hunger Games, I’ve had a very normal level of fear of the end of the world, the collapse of society, apocalypses, etc. Now and again, to assuage this anxiety, I like to hedge my bets a little with an investment in something survival-y. Sometimes that looks like buying a nice, sub-zero coat or an intense first aid kit, but last summer it meant signing up for bush survival classes with a dude named Jeff I found on the internet.
Believe it or not, Jeff is eccentric. He’s a middle aged white guy with a short, salt and pepper beard and a pair of Oakley’s on those neck string things. He always wears a ball cap, million-pocket pants, and light colored button-ups made for breathability and/or golf or fishing or dad-ing. He built his own portable solar panel system on his truck for camping, but also believes that America’s number one priority should be drilling more oil. He’s a survival nerd, though he’s not a prepper and he doesn’t believe the end is nigh (though I bet he’d listen to some Coast to Coast AM, if you know what I mean). He mostly just likes driving down Forest Service roads, parking his truck, walking at random through the woods till he gets tired, then building a fire to warm up a can of beans and going home. That’s like, a really good day for Jeff.
I spent six full days with Jeff, five out in the desert, one on the banks of the Rio Grande. He taught me a lot. Some practical rules of thumb, like that you can survive 3 minutes without oxygen, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food, and 3 months without human contact. This rule is why our first two days together were dedicated exclusively to learning to build fires and shelters with found materials, and why food was almost an afterthought on days five and six.
When we did get to the nourishment-procuring part of my training, we started with the most fun stuff— the recurve, compound, and crossbows. We spent two hours screwing around with arrows and targets, talking about wind shear and aim and stalking strategies. It was with shaking arms and a little Katniss Everdeen swagger that I packed up the archery equipment, and Jeff told me a secret about hunting.
“In the big picture, hunting is actually a pretty bad survival strategy.”
After countless stories of Jeff’s hunting prowess, this was unexpected. And in a big picture sense, it didn’t seem quite… right? How many humans, for how long, depended on hunting for an important portion of their diet? But to understand this point required putting aside the how and remembering a simple concept that Jeff emphasized over and over— physical human survival is fundamentally about maximizing the energy equation, maximum energy in for minimum energy out. This concept offers a pretty straightforward way to determine whether a survival activity is worth doing or not— especially when it comes to food. In short, if you expend more energy acquiring the thing than the thing contains, you will, eventually, starve.
Hunting is often a good example. Consider a survival scenario, say, in the backcountry of the Colorado Rockies. Say you’ve figured out how to control your body temperature (that’s what fire and shelter are for), and you’ve found water that hasn’t killed you yet. Now, how to eat?
If in this hypothetical you have a hunting tool with you (a bow or tools to make one, a knife, a slingshot, a gun, etc.) hunting might seem like a good option. There are deer, elk, smaller mammals like rabbits and squirrel, birds, and if you’re really desperate, some predators that could be on the menu. But the problem with hunting is, you might stalk through the woods for days and never encounter suitable prey. You might stalk the woods for days, find something suitable, and fail to fell it. You might stalk for days, find something suitable, kill it, and then fail to safely preserve it, and make yourself sick, or end up with a pile of rotting meat. None of this is promising for survivability, and because of both the risk and the cost. It takes a lot of energy to stalk through the woods, and it raises the possibility of injury, among other things. This is why hunting in a survival situation is, compared to alternatives, a good way to waste energy. And wasting too much energy can be a death sentence.
So Jeff showed me some better ways to survive. Namely, traps. Traps may not be as glamorous or majestic as the hunt, but they are fricken cool. Of the dozen or so traps I learned, most involved a series of precariously perched sticks and a heavy rock, log, or a small loop of rope I made from a yucca leaf. Others involve a tall stick and a piece of wire, or a carefully flexed sapling. Most work best when you put them on a clear animal trail, near an occupied den, or among trees or bushes well populated by birds. I even learned how to make a fish trap.
Traps, Jeff taught me, are no guarantee and they’re far from foolproof, but if you have one hour of time, you could either spend it wandering, rolling the dice on finding something to hunt, or (with practice) you could set up about five traps, and five traps will keep on hunting for you long after you get tired, dehydrated, or cold. Plus, you’re way more likely to catch small animals more frequently, so you can catch and cook a rabbit today, and have a fresh quail tomorrow, without stressing about lugging a deer corpse around and using up a ton of energy in the process.
It wasn’t till the next day that Jeff introduced what’s generally the most efficient calorie-procurement strategy in survival scenarios— fishing. Our aquatic adventure started with creating our tools from trash. We scavenged lengths of abandoned fishing wire, some weathered PVC piping, wire that we fashioned into hooks, all baited with some rotting hotdogs Jeff brought from home. With our improvised rods, we settled in for a day of hanging out riverside (peak low energy spend), taking occasional walks into the riparian woods to forage for mulberries or Russian olives to snack on. By midday we’d had little luck, only a few nibbles and yanks that inevitably resulted in reeling in a stick or more often, a freshly empty hook.
In the scorching afternoon sun, there was another nibble, another yank. We were down to our last rotten hotdog half, so I jerked on the pole hard, it caught, and just like that, I was in a life or death battle. For a few minutes I pulled and finagled and Jeff coached, both of us getting more and more excited as the line inched closer to the shore and the surface grew turbulent. It was just feet from the bank now, I was fighting with everything I had, and Mike was standing up to his ankles in water, ready to grab my prize. And then it’s head popped out of the water, and it was a huge, green snake.
I screamed. Jeff screamed. But by gods, I did not let go of my PVC pipe.
I stumbled backward, pulling the river monster towards me, and the leathery snake revealed its secret— a long, slipper shell, probably 20 inches from top to bottom. It wasn’t a snake at all, it was the biggest snapping turtle I’d ever seen.
“What do I do?!” I yelled at Jeff, thinking he might just cut the line and be done with it.
“The hooks in its nose,” he yelled back, with just a touch less panic, “we’ve gotta get it out.” Without much thought, I kept the tension on the line, and Jeff, in a truly fearless act of insanity, waded out to the turtle, grabbed its shell with one hand while pulling out his multitool with the other and, deftly avoiding the six inches of super flexible neck and bone-cracking beak, grabbed the hook with the tool, snipped off the pointy end, and pried what remained from the thick green flesh. The whole endeavor lasted less than ten seconds. Then Jeff released the shell and the turtle disappeared back into the Rio.
“Damn turtle,” Jeff huffed, cool as a cucumber by the time he was helping me up, “he’s why we didn’t catch anything. He’s probably been floating around here all day, eating our hotdogs.”
Lazy Finders, Lazy Eaters
Jeff was a good teacher. But when it came to driving home the lesson of eating to survive, the turtle was a very good teacher. In one day and a 10 second skirmish, the turtle illustrated what maximizing the value of energy looks like. The turtle could have caught fish, dug for worms, munched on plants, coasted for bugs, even hunted for crawdads to feed himself that day. But why— when someone’s dropping free hotdogs into your corner of the river? Why spend a lot of energy to get a little energy, when you could spend a little energy to get a lot?
That, in a sentence, is why fishing is a better survival technique than trapping, and why trapping is better than hunting. Two other food acquisition techniques, gathering and farming, I’d sandwich on opposite ends of this spectrum. If there’s food plants in your given landscape and you have the knowledge to find them, they can be even lower risk than fishing and with better returns of energy. On the far end, farming is exceptionally more risky and labor-intensive than hunting, requiring a ton of energy output often for only a chance at some energy back.
Maximizing the value of energy is still very much a driving force in our food system. We still have, deep down in our turtle brains, the desire to get full with the least effort. On the consumer side, that’s easy to believe— the narrative of the US consumer as fat, lazy, and motivated by a good deal is all too familiar. But it’s just as true that “the least effort” extends into our production system, and there, the idea of lazy farmers is not very familiar at all. Farmers are hard-working by definition, laziness is therefore anathema to Farmer. But farmers are people, with deep down turtle brains just like ours, so in fact they are lazy, just like the rest of us.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. We use laziness as a pejorative in our culture, but it doesn’t have to be. Being finely tuned to maximize the value of energy is a highly successful survival technique— if we were obsessed with expending effort and using energy just for the sake of doing it (hustle culture, amirite?), we would have died out as a species long ago. But I think the important thing to remember is first, that it’s true, we are lazy, and after a while, human beings will pretty much always find ways to be lazy, to minimize the effort they have to exert while maximizing their reward for it.
We also have to remember that the equation changes constantly, and requires continuous evaluation. Hunting may generally be a costly energy exercise, but if you’re miles from the nearest fishable stream say, or a deer with a broken leg just limped into view of your campfire, the question of energy cost, risk, and value can skew wildly in hunting’s favor. Many social and cultural realities of modern life have made it seem like farming is the only strategy that makes sense anymore. But I think that’s just because we’ve stopped asking the question. We’ve taken for granted the idea that farming all our food is the least energy-intense, and most energy-generating, option. But with a more open-minded and intentional analysis, I think we’d find that that’s not true in every place, at all times, or for all communities.
So I finally answered the question
I think my friend found my answer to his hypothetical unsatisfying. In short– I wouldn’t farm.
My explanation began with the confession that I think I’d last at best a few weeks as the last woman on Earth. I think the sheer loneliness would get me long before my local grocery store ran out of boxed mac and cheese.
But then I hit on all this– that farming for survival is an incredibly labor-intense, long-term, and risky business. It is possible to grow enough calories to feed two people, especially if they have no use for money and no community to attend to– but one hail storm, one hot stretch, one rain failure, one destructive pest invasion, and you’d starve to death in *checks watch* about 3 weeks.
So the answer I gave was, if I didn’t succumb to the excruciating hopelessness, I guess I’d choose a landscape with highly accessible nutrient-density, where I could exert the least amount of energy to get the most nutritious and exciting food. I’d choose somewhere where fruit-bearing perennials are native, somewhere well-watered, and somewhere that hasn’t been too damaged by human activities. The first place that came to mind was Florida, then the Yucatan peninsula. In a true end of the world scenario, I think a bit more research would be my first step.
But on the whole, if I’m going to be the last woman on Earth, I don’t think I’d be too eager to alter much ground to make it dependent on my expended energy. I’d rather find a nice feral mango tree or some citrus to call my neighbors, set some traps or cast some lines, raid grocery stores whenever that’s easy, and wait to join my friends.
What I’m making: The Only Thing That Lasts, subscribe now before episode 1 drops!
What I’m reading: Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade
What I’m watching: Echo
What I’m eating: Corn crunchies!
Next week: People Eat the Books Club ft. Creatures of Empire
Thanks for all the kind messages last week y’all. You’re the best.
Rock on,
Sarah
Great to read your writing again, Sarah.