Just went and looked up some stuff on a Foraging Diet, though Ab's and others may find these of interest.
What Is The Foraging Diet? -
LiveStrong website
The Foraging Diet focuses on eating the quantities and types of foods that primitive hunter - gatherer societies ate. This includes seasonally available plant material, nuts, berries, tubers, fungi, whole uncooked grains, clams, mussels, insects, worms & grubs, honey, water, and to a lesser degree, game meat, fowl and fish. Additionally, the quantity of food consumed at any one time is minimal, so several small meals are eaten throughout the day.
Nature's Garden and The Forager's Harvest -
The Heavy Table Website
Foraging for wild foods is a hot topic among the food-obsessed these days, the natural progression, perhaps, in a line that runs from farmers markets to CSA shares to backyard gardening and urban chicken coops. For some people, the quest for an unmediated, authentic food experience won’t be complete until they walk into the forest empty-handed, and come out with dinner.
But heading out into the woods to forage for one’s supper can be a daunting prospect for the uninitiated. It helps to have a guide.
Optimal Foraging -
Biol 380 - General Ecology NEIU Website
Behavioral ecology deals with the study of behavioral adaptations (generally of animals) to ecological problems, such as
- finding food, choosing food, avoiding being eaten
- finding and choosing mates
Most predictions about what animals ought to do are based on the assumption of optimality: that an animal species can evolve to behave in a theoretically optimal way. There may very well be constraints that prevent optimal behavior. Often these constraints can be deduced when real behaviors consistently differ from the predictions of optimality models.
Food preferences
Most animals exhibit food preferences: the most general recognition of this is when we call animals generalists or specialists. But within these groups, animals may eat only a limited number of the foods available to them.
Preference may depend on the inherent food value or availability, but can also depend on experience --> Induced preference -- animals prefer some food because of prior experience
Carnivores tend toward choosing the best quality food because food items tend to be relatively similar in which nutrients they contain. Herbivores more often choose a mixed diet to balance energy and nutrient requirements or sometimes to minimize exposure to certain allelochemicals.
Diet width -- most consumers choose a smaller range of foods than are potentially available.
Predictions about which foods will be eaten are based on several assumptions:
• foraging behavior has been molded by natural selection in the past to enhance fitness
• foraging behavior is observed in an environment the same as or similar enough to that in which it evolved
• increased net energy intake leads to increased fitness, and therefore, foraging behavior has evolved to maximize energy intake
Complications:
• there may be another overriding concern: e.g., maximizing energy gain is irrelevant if the individual gets eaten in the attempt
• dietary constraints, such as scarce nutrients or minerals, might be maximized instead of energy
Models make predictions as if consumers were omniscient--that they know all about food values, etc. This is of course not true, but natural selection leading animals to make choices that maximize fitness will give the appearance of omniscience.
