Phase 01 — First days: water, fire, shelter / About year 1
01.22
Safe-food list
plants and shellfish tested and agreed by all
AWhat it needs
Needs 1 other product.
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- 01.22 Safe-food listFood Year 1 needs 1 product
- 01.01 Base camp siteHome Year 1 raw materials only
Open a box to see what it needs. A dashed box is a product already drawn in full: click it to jump there. In the org chart, drag to move around.
BWhy
The island grows every plant of Earth, the deadly ones beside the good. One wrong mouthful can kill, and a hungry person is a careless one. The list is the camp's shared memory of what may be eaten, held by everyone, so that no one has to guess.
CYou need
- One person who truly knows plants
- Two poles set up in the camp (01.01): the food pole and the warning pole
- Strips of bark to tie samples on
DSteps
- The first rule: eat only what someone can name with certainty and knows as food. If it cannot be named, it is not food.
- To name a plant, match at least three things: the leaf, the stem or bark, and the flower, fruit or smell. One likeness is not enough.
- Never eat, without a certain name: any mushroom; any plant with milky sap; anything that smells of bitter almonds; any plant with flat umbrella-shaped flower heads; shiny leaves growing in threes; white or yellow berries; unknown beans, seeds and bulbs.
- Some good foods are poison raw. Taro and its relatives must be cooked long. Bitter cassava must be grated, soaked and cooked. Acorns must be soaked until the bitterness is gone. Kidney beans must be boiled hard. These go on the list with their rule.
- Shellfish: take only live ones that are shut tight. Cook until they open and throw away any that stay shut. Take none when the sea is stained red or brown.
- Fish: leave any that puff up, are covered in spines, or have a beak in place of teeth.
- A new food, even a named one, is first eaten cooked and in a small amount by one person, who then waits a full day. Next, two people eat a meal of it. Only then the camp. Never the healer, and never two new foods on the same day.
- Tie a sample of each safe plant to the food pole. Tie a sample of each dangerous one to the warning pole, which is ringed with charcoal.
- At every council, the poles are walked and every sample is named aloud by someone different. A person who cannot name them does not gather alone.
EIt worked if
- Any of the 24, picked at random, can name every sample on both poles.
- Nobody has been made ill by something they gathered.
FWhat goes wrong
- A look-alike. Most poisonings are a deadly plant taken for a good one. Hang the pair side by side and learn the difference.
- Hunger overrules the rule. Keep a reserve of known food so no one gathers in desperation.
- One person holds the whole list. If that person is lost, so is the list. The naming at council is how it is copied into 24 heads.
GSafety
- If someone has eaten something wrong: make them vomit at once if they are awake, give boiled water, keep them warm, and do not leave them alone. Keep a sample of what they ate.
HIn the story
Ulani knows more plants than the rest of them put together and tastes things as she walks, which terrifies Grace. On the seventh day the two poles go up. For now the list is a habit and not a law. It takes a near death in the fourth month to make it one, and the near death is Ulani's own.
IFigures
