4 ms·

He ate poison berries because he was starving. The poison berries sure as shit didn't help, but he was still generally clueless as to get food anyway and was i

He ate poison berries because he was starving. The poison berries sure as shit didn't help, but he was still generally clueless as to get food anyway and was in serious trouble. He didn't know what plants he could eat (hence the poison berries), didn't know how to clean and preserve animal meat, etc.

geoka9 6y ago
> He ate poison berries because he was starving. I think the parent poster is right - he died because he ate poison berries: It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he’d been poisoned, and the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end, “extremely weak,” “too weak to walk out,” and, having “much trouble just to stand up.” He wasn’t truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition. He’d simply become slowly paralyzed. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandless-died https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccand...
- catalogia 6y ago
  Months before his death he killed a moose then let it rot because he didn't know what to do with it. He'd not have been eating those berries in the first place if he knew how to feed himself in that region. If he didn't have the poison berries, what would he have been eating? He had very little else. It's also quite possible the berries wouldn't have killed him if not for the fact that he was already starving. From wikipedia: > In 2013, a new hypothesis was proposed. Ronald Hamilton, a retired bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania,[7] suggested a link between the symptoms described by McCandless and the poisoning of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp in Vapniarca. He put forward the proposal that McCandless starved to death because he was suffering from paralysis in his legs induced by lathyrism, which prevented him from gathering food or hiking.[26] Lathyrism may be caused by ODAP poisoning from seeds of Hedysarum alpinum (commonly called wild potato). The ODAP, a toxic amino acid, had not been detected by the previous studies of the seeds because they had suspected and tested for a toxic alkaloid, rather than an amino acid, and nobody had previously suspected that Hedysarum alpinum seeds contained this toxin. The protein would be relatively harmless to someone who was well-fed and on a normal diet, but toxic to someone who was malnourished, physically stressed, and on an irregular and insufficient diet, as McCandless was.[27] and > The article notes that while occasional ingestion of foodstuffs containing ODAP is not hazardous for healthy individuals eating a balanced diet, "individuals suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin".[7]

geoka9 6y ago

> He ate poison berries because he was starving. I think the parent poster is right - he died because he ate poison berries: It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he’d been poisoned, and the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end, “extremely weak,” “too weak to walk out,” and, having “much trouble just to stand up.” He wasn’t truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition. He’d simply become slowly paralyzed. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandless-died https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccand...

catalogia 6y ago
Months before his death he killed a moose then let it rot because he didn't know what to do with it. He'd not have been eating those berries in the first place if he knew how to feed himself in that region. If he didn't have the poison berries, what would he have been eating? He had very little else. It's also quite possible the berries wouldn't have killed him if not for the fact that he was already starving. From wikipedia: > In 2013, a new hypothesis was proposed. Ronald Hamilton, a retired bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania,[7] suggested a link between the symptoms described by McCandless and the poisoning of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp in Vapniarca. He put forward the proposal that McCandless starved to death because he was suffering from paralysis in his legs induced by lathyrism, which prevented him from gathering food or hiking.[26] Lathyrism may be caused by ODAP poisoning from seeds of Hedysarum alpinum (commonly called wild potato). The ODAP, a toxic amino acid, had not been detected by the previous studies of the seeds because they had suspected and tested for a toxic alkaloid, rather than an amino acid, and nobody had previously suspected that Hedysarum alpinum seeds contained this toxin. The protein would be relatively harmless to someone who was well-fed and on a normal diet, but toxic to someone who was malnourished, physically stressed, and on an irregular and insufficient diet, as McCandless was.[27] and > The article notes that while occasional ingestion of foodstuffs containing ODAP is not hazardous for healthy individuals eating a balanced diet, "individuals suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin".[7]