[vanattab]

This is the correct answer. Alone is not really a how to live in the woods show, it's a managed starvation show. The contestants are limited to about a 1 sq mile area which may or may not have a good source of clay. They purposely set them out just a few weeks before winter so they do not have a long time to prep. Conserving and replenishing calories is the name of the game.

[hinkley]

Humanity didn’t really take off until we figured out how to make use of inedible calories though. Making lots of tea and thin soups in the winter should have been a target for many of them.

One person did quite well finding wild onions but as I recall got some stomach distress from them. Raw onion doesn’t agree with people when you aren’t eating much else. But those greens would have made soup for days.

[cogman10]

A big thing that enabled that was having a community.

It's really hard to make a pot if you are trading making that pot with finding food for the day.

That's why when they did the season with couples, they were able to get a lot more done simply because 1 person could spend the day building a shelter while the other person foraged.

The moose guy that won did so because he had a huge calorie surplus from killing the moose. That freed him up to spend pretty much all his time foraging for plants or building shelter.

> Making lots of tea and thin soups in the winter should have been a target for many of them.

Most plants have almost no calories. Soups are useful as a preservation technique but only work if you are constantly adding fairly calorie dense items (like meat) into the mix. If you haven't sourced beans, potatoes, or rice plants then a soup won't really do much to improve your survival.

The benefit of tea or soup is you are boiling the water which prevents a good number of diseases.