> I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself.
Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. Avoid berries that resemble blueberries or currants unless you're able to identify the plant: we grew up with blueberries and know the leaves, but we avoid anything currant-like because we'd have no idea if they're actually, say, chokeberries. Avoid anything that looks like baneberries.
Here in Maine, we forage for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and (mostly low bush) blueberries, but don't risk others.
You won't find enough berries, never mind edibles berries if everyone in your area suddenly shifted to foraging. Game animals would be exhausted quickly or they would migrate further out from human settlements. Even if you had the skills hunting or foraging isn't all that useful anywhere around a city, especially if everyone else is doing it.
True, fruit and nut-based food forests, like those in the Pacific Northwest [1], seem to provide a significant, sustainable food source. Berries make a nice dessert + vitamins a few times a year.
Historically here in Maine, the core diet seems to have been seafood, freshwater fish, maize, Capreolinae, game birds, eggs, honey, roots, and greens. While only a tiny fraction of fish/seafood remain, deer are over-populated and make a fine sustainable food source, the limitation mostly being the contemporary appetite for venison.
The edible himalayan blackberry infestation that plagues all of the coastal PNW is widely available. It's almost impossible to kill and it fruits for long periods of time.
Blueberries are easy, they have a star shaped "opening" on the bottom. Native Americans called them starberries. No other berry is blue and has that. It's the only berry I trust myself to eat while I'm hiking.
I would recommend you buy a local book on foraging. Keep in case of emergency. But give it a read (at least the first few chapters) so you can get a basic understanding of how to forage without killing yourself. I also recommend keeping viable seeds and a camping shovel around as an insurance policy.
These items aren’t in my earthquake bag (I have enough energy bars to last until the National Guard shows up). Instead these are for a Carrington Event type of solar storm, civil war or some sort of other long-term disaster.
On the seeds front, you really have to be practicing growing food from seed for several years before depending on them for basic caloric needs - after a few years of providing a fraction of our household calories on the property I can see the pitfalls, effort and planting diversity needed were we to need to scale it to that level. The previous me would have had some seeds and a dream, and have died real quick. Even now I give myself 50/50 that water, weather, pests, poor soil, or something unexpected would lead to starvation.
Yes we provide a few hundred annual calories from seed. Not nearly enough to survive. But hopefully enough to learn from while foraging or enough to link up with actual experts who might just be lacking in seeds or labor.
But you could probably devise a scheme by which you feed all of your students an assortment of berries and figure out which ones are safe based on which students get sick or die.
You are close. You first rub the berry on your skin (or leaf, or whatever). Wait 24 hours to see if a rash develops. Then you taste it, wait another 24 hours. Then you eat one, and see if you get sick after another 24 hours. Now you can eat several, and build up from there.
Yes, that is a lot of time to go hungry and testing just one item. And then you still don't know what actually gives you nutrition vs just not killing you (for example leaves that you can break down such as leaf lettuce, vs eating grass).
Assuming this is in the context of some apocalyptic event requiring you to do this, relying on animal husbandry seems obviously wrong. Plus you only get ~10% of the energy from the lower trophic level.
The prevalence of meat comes from a society of abundance.
Evidence of early hominids and other less advanced proto-human or human groups shows a pretty significant amount of calories came from meat. Some suggest 60-80% of calories came from proteins, largely meat, at various times in history.
Both of these estimates are way higher than what we know people eat today, where meat and dairy are 18% of worldwide calorie consumption (27% in the US).
So I think the abundance we see today is actually due to the availability of non-animal dietary sources.
That is the Universal Edibility Test and gets repeated ad nauseam in all the survival circles. You would miss out on some fine choice foods if you did that.
Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) is one of them. Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) too.
Source - used to teach these skills before it was cool to be a "survivalist" on TV and social media.
Yes I don't know how someone figured out that if you cook pokeweed and change the water multiple times then you can finally eat it without it killing you.
as an NYC-born, growing up with bi-monthly boy scout meetings and yearly "wilderness camps" (pitching tents in open fields, pit latrines, war games/survival, etc.) really helped fill in that gap :)
I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself.
However, I can teach advanced maths to a largish group of students without much trouble.