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Comment by Aromasin | Hacker News Reader

In Scandinavia they reguarly added inner bark to flour during famine. In Russia, nettle and orache were used. There a good article which goes through what many cultures eat during famine below [1]. Some of it is pretty horrific:

> “…I have no idea how I managed to survive and stay alive. In 1933 we tried to survive the best we could. We collected grass, goose-foot, burdocks, rotten potatoes and made pancakes, soups from putrid beans or nettles.

> Collected clay from the trees and ate it, ate sparrows, pigeons, cats, dead and live dogs."

It goes further into mentions of infanticide canabilism which I won't quote directly here but is worth reading.

Birch inner bark flour seems to be "common" as far as obscure flour goes. Apparently it wasn't even a famine food as such, and just a normal part of their diet. [2]

[1] https://www.askaprepper.com/ingenious-foods-people-made-fami...

[2] https://practicalselfreliance.com/birch-bark-flour/

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I lived with Karen people in Easter Burma for several years. One year the combination of poor timing for the rains[1] and fighting with the Burmese[2] left food scarce for many, including the village I lived in. We ate thin rice soup with bamboo shoots (bamboo is all fiber and water, very little if any nutrients) and greens for the first few months, and then fresh or fermented bamboo soup.

Normally the village elders have strict rules on where and how much fishing they allow to keep it sustainable, but that year people were so desperate they fished the river clean. You couldn't catch even the smallest fish, and it took several years to recover.

[1] There was too much rain and the slash-and-burn farms never had a chance to dry out. Slash-and-burn farms are very dependent on an old forest (usually 10 to 20 years or more) and a dry period in which to burn it off and expose the rich soil underneath.

[2] The Karen would try to hide their rice silos in the forest so the Burmese troops would be able to find it. If the soldiers did find them they'd take what they wanted and burn the rest.

I wasn't familiar with the Karen people until your comment, thanks for sharing your story. What led you to live with them for several years?

Sylvester Stallone made a film about the plight of the Karen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo_(2008_film)

People dismiss it as just another (bloody) action movie, but it's not - it's a moral and political condemnation

I am not sure what to make of "collected clay from trees" - sap? Lichens? Seems like a problem with the translation.

I assumed sap too. As a kid we had a load of sycamore trees - a close relative of the maple. My dad saw a documentary about tapping maple trees and he set out to tap the sycamore - it tasted vile.

But apparently Birch sap is fine, it seems to be enjoying a fad as a successor to coconut water at the moment.

In some ways that's not terribly different than one of the traditional starch sources in Papau New Guinea, sago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sago

How the hell do you eat a live dog?

Err... to give you a genuine answer - by experiencing real starvation.

Have you never seen any cartel execution/torture videos? Those people are literally just doing it because a higher up told them, they're making money, and stimmed out of their minds on a daily basis.

Eating a dog alive is really nothing to a human that's actually facing death from starvation. Please don't forget we're just animals.

I believe what that means is they found the dog alive, killed it themselves, cooked it (I hope) and ate it. In contrast with finding it already dead, like a road kill, which they eat also...

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