Survival and CR

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

In the cold war years, I had fears of food shortages and would imagine what

might

happen regarding my hoarding and protecting food supplies to carry me over the

period of food shortages that a nuclear holocaust might cause. When people are

thrown into conditions of severe food restriction, such as in plane crashes in

remote environments without adequate food supplies, the same scenario may apply

and

movies of such events are a personal favorite. Until I left St. 's, I had

stored things like flower, rice and vitamins in the freezer, just in case such a

scenario occurred.

The pdf-available below paper may represent such a story. How would we survive

a

food emergency? Food variety may be good to avoid something like the theorized

overdose of vitamins from eating dog livers of the vegetarian in the below

paper.

Me, I would eat any food in periods of necessity. Even beef would I eat.

Carrington- D.

Mawson and Mertz: a re-evaluation of their ill-fated mapping journey during the

1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

Med J Aust. 2005 Dec 5;183(11/12):638-641.

PMID: 16336159

During the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1914, Mawson and

two

companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, undertook an ill-fated mapping

journey. Ninnis died when he fell down a crevasse, together with the sledge

carrying

most of their food supplies, and later Mertz became ill and died. Only Mawson

returned. In 1969, Cleland and Southcott proposed that Mertz died of vitamin A

toxicity and Mawson suffered from the effects of hypervitaminosis A because,

with

little food left, they were forced to eat their surviving dogs, including the

liver.

This hypothesis was supported by Shearman in 1978. After re-evaluating this

hypothesis, I propose that Mawson and Mertz suffered from the effects of severe

food

deprivation, not from hypervitaminosis A, and that Mertz died as he was unable

to

tolerate the change from his usual vegetarian diet to a diet of mainly dog meat.

I

also suggest that Mertz's condition was aggravated by the psychological stress

of

being forced to eat the dogs he had cared for for 18 months.

Al Pater, PhD; email: old542000@...

__________________________________________________