From time to time, everyone finds themselves stuck in a situation where they’re without food, they’re stuck somewhere unfamiliar and there’s no way to change their location very easily.

As a common example – while you’re on a trip to Bermuda, dead people begin to rise from the grave, biting living people and turning them into dead people. You’re on a plane back from your trip and the pilot starts to shriek over the intercom. He’s been bitten by the co-pilot and is rapidly dying. Your plane starts to turn, loses altitude quickly, and you plummet into the ocean next to a small deserted island. You make your way to the island, but you didn’t even get a chance to grab your carry-on luggage. You start getting hungry, so what do you do?

You’re going to need shelter, and you’re going to need a fire, but you’re also going to need to start looking for sources of nutrition. Animals you can kill and cook are your best nutritional bet in a survival-type situation, but you can also suppliment your diet with available plant life.

The biggest problem with plant life is that it rarely comes out of the ground labelled. While scientists are working on this issue with great alacrity, until they figure out the solution, your challenge remains: when you’re surrounded with unfamiliar plants, how can you tell what you can eat and what you can’t?

When you find yourself in this situation, you want to follow a few general guidelines:

Avoid mushrooms and other fungi. While mushrooms can be tasty and nutritious, they can also be unpleasant and deadly. Even the most experienced mushroom hunters can sometimes have difficulty telling a deadly variety from an edible one. This means that, for you, the possible nutritional benefit you may gain is heavily outweighed by the risk you take in trying unfamiliar fungus.

Cook it if you can. Boiling is good. While boiling won’t destroy all poisons, it will destroy some of them. And some poison gone is better than no poison gone. Also, boiling will remove some of the tannins that make food like acorns taste absolutely horrible.

If it smells like almonds, don’t eat it. Cyanide smells like almonds. Cyanide is bad for you.

Avoid white or yellow berries, as well as plants with beans, seeds, or milky white sap. Castor bean seeds, for example, contain the deadly toxin ricin. Eating just a few castor bean seeds can be fatal. Purple or black berries are worth a try. Red fruit is iffy. While some red berries are good to eat, many others like yew berries, holly berries and, woody nightshade berries are not.

Avoid plants that look like parsley or carrots unless you’re absolutely sure about it. Hemlock resembles both those plants. Also, remember: “leaves of three, let them be” – groups of three leaves being the sign of poison ivy and poison oak.

Find something that is relatively abundant. It makes no sense to waste time testing the edibility on a plant that could turn out to be both poisonous and scarce.

If you have children (or better yet, a baby) test the plant on the youngest child first. Babies and toddlers are very sensitive to hazardous plants. Also, if you die from the plant, you’ll turn into a zombie and the baby will be your first meal. If the baby dies from the plant, you can probably take on a zombie baby and come out on top.

Once you’ve selected a plant that passes the above tests, here are the steps to the Universal Edibility Test:

• Pick out one part of the plant to test — for example, just the leaves and not the roots. Or just the stem, not the roots or leaves. Or just the berries. One part of the plant may be poisonous while the other part of the plant is not.
• Make sure you haven’t eaten anything for the last six to eight hours. This will help make sure that nothing else you’ve eaten will influence the test and give time for anything you ate earlier time to act up.
• While you’re waiting, hold the plant against your wrist or inside elbow for 15 minutes to see if it irritates your skin.
• Touch a small amount to your lips for three minutes.
• Touch it to your tongue for 15 minutes.
• Chew it but don’t swallow for 15 minutes.
• Swallow. If you don’t get sick after eight hours, try a quarter cup of the plant and repeat the above test steps.

If you’re still breathing after eating a quarter cup of the plant, you’re probably safe eating it in larger quantities. Probably.

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