Can you survive on pickles alone, for a while?
Can you survive on pickles alone, for a while?
Almost every jar of pickles claims a serving of pickles has zero calories. Now clearly, this is incorrect and the result of exploiting some ridiculous FDA loophole, since anyone knows that cucumbers provide calories.
So let's say you're in a situation where you lose all access to food, but you've got effectively unlimited access to pickles -- like, you're trapped inside a recently abandoned pickle warehouse.
Could you conceivably eat enough pickles to survive for a month? Two months? Or would your body just shut down from all the sodium and acid?
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It would vary quite a bit depending on the person and the circumstances.
First, I'm assuming you're talking about brine pickled cucumbers based on the context, but brining isn't the only way to make pickles and cucumbers aren't the only thing you can make pickles from.
I think 2 of the biggest considerations here would be whether I have access to clean, fresh water and whether I'm in good health, with no major health issues.
If I don't have access to fresh water, then I wouldn't eat the pickles to begin with. And I would probably only have a matter of days to live.
If I had major health issues that would be potentially fatal without medical treatment, then that would probably be the limiting factor in how long I survive and would be dependent on the condition.
If I do have access to fresh water, I would give the pickles a lengthy soak (or even boil them if I could) before I ate them. That would mitigate at least some of the concerns about too much sodium. I could further mitigate some of the concerns by ensuring that I'm drinking lots of water (at least I would assume that would help somewhat).
I've read that the average person can go without any food for at least a month or two (with 3 weeks being the minimum), so if I did my sodium mitigation, then I would expect to at least survive at the upper limit of that. From a purely caloric standpoint, the average pickling cucumber (not that there really is such a thing as average/standard) is something like 20 - 50 calories each, and I feel like that alone would extend the window of survivability.
I never considered water. The pickle juice wouldn't keep you hydrated at all, would it? It would be like drinking sea water.
The pickle juice would dehydrate you and if the pickles or juice were consumed in any significant amount, would likely reduce your survival time ... potentially by quite a bit.
But also, you're in a location with an unlimited amount of pickles (in theory), so even if you don't directly have fresh water, there's a chance you could rig up some way of distilling / evaporating the pickle juice to extract fresh water from it. In that case, duration of survivability would increase quite a bit depending on how much fresh water you could successfully extract from the brine. First priority would be to drink only fresh water and not consume the pickles (or consume only a small amount). But if you have lots of left over water, then you can start soaking/boiling the pickles to reduce sodium levels.