Acorns were the staff of life before wheat. The Emory oak produces a yearly crop of acorns that do not have to be leached to remove tannin. You can eat them as is. In Mexico, they are served in cantinas insted of of the peanuts or pretzels we (in the U. S.) are accustmed to. They call them belotta.
The tree

The fruit of the tree 

And the hungry bull elk

When I was in mexico earlier this year I found an almond tree and tried to open an almond. I could not get it open! I even tried pounding it with a rock and stomping and everything but that little nut prevailed. It even broke the rock I was using on it!
I would a starved lol

My idea of wild food is to venture into the actual produce isle rather than the canned-veggie isle....

Acorns, interesting. Can you make flour out of them ?

Wild food: i've eaten tiny wild strawberries (sour); boletus mushrooms (the ones with the yellow foam under the cap); and shellfish collected off the beach (quite delicious, gave me severe indigestion)

grape, plum, chokecherry, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, mulberry, prickley pear pads and fruit, pecan, hickory, walnut, morel & chantrelle mushrooms, small game and birds, honey/honeycomb, I was never fond of field greens
lots of stuff out there to eat in the correct season.

Curious Aardvark wrote on Aug 13^th, 2015 at 10:10am:


This is one of my favorite things since moving to the UK!  Wild blackberries are everywhere! A few of my neighbors have plum trees and apple trees that they don't mind me plucking from. I even have a strawberry plant in my front yard that is starting to bear fruit, if I can just out smart the Jackdaws I'd get to eat more of them.

Thearos wrote on Aug 14^th, 2015 at 4:29am:

Crack the acorns open to remove the nutmeat and grind or smash the nutmeat with water to form a paste. Then the paste can be dried into flour (after leeching the tannins out.) The only way I know how is to mix equal parts cold water and acorn flour in a jar, store the jar in the fridge, pour off and replace a large portion of the water at least once a day, agitate the mixture at least once a day, and drain off all of the water (through cheesecloth) once the flour tastes bland instead of bitter. Usually takes less than a week, but not always. Definitely not a survival skill when done my way, and definitely shows why access to the ultra-low tannin Emory Oak would be a good thing.

Those are the same tannins. 

They will give you a case of constipation that will be fatal.  The western Native American tribes that depended heavily on acorns actually had plants with laxative side effects as part of their regular diet.

The way to leach tannins on a much larger scale is to prep as Mas said, then put them in a pillow case in running water.  You will have to agitate two or three times a day until the bitter taste is gone.  Then spread and dry in the sun.  You can use a T shirt in a survival situation. 

That is why I recommend dicing them as fine as you can instead of smashing them to a paste, they dry better and quicker.  They will mold up quickly, even if you dry them in an oven, after using tap water on them.  Once they are dry, grind them and freeze them.  (Stick them in a cheap coffee grinder and run them trough a couple of times on the finest setting, if they wad up, they need to dried some more.)

And they are less likely to cause digestive problems if you mix them with some other type of flour, such as corn meal.  Or cattail pollen or root flour.  But the tannins that remain will cause constipation if you don't drink lots of water.

And keep in mind that the tribes that depended  on acorns were mostly western tribes, the humidity is pretty low and it is usually sunny and hot and the acorns dried pretty quick.  Eastern tribes used chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts and several other different types of nuts instead of acorns for a reason.

And last, if you want to try this, white oaks have less tannins than red oaks.  Or, the darker yellower to orange the meat is, the more tannins you will have to  remove..