Provisions
A guide for what you need to buy, read or consume to enhance your travel experience.
Buy
“Extreme Food: What To Eat When Your Life Depends on It,” by Bear Grylls
$15.99, William Morrow, 272 pages
Hopefully, you won’t be forced to use this as a cookbook, because, if you did, it means you’re stranded out in the wilderness, bereft of hope and Clif bars. But Bear Grylls, of “Man Vs. Wild” fame, is here to help you live and eat as well as possible under extreme conditions. As he writes so mouth-wateringly in the introduction: “I’ve eaten some pretty extreme things in my time – live tarantulas, raw goat testicles, elephant dung, you name it.” As Grylls writes, “you have to think about food in a different way.” As a means to survive. Grylls shows how to trap animals, braise cockroaches and eat woodlice (taste like prawns, he says).
Read
“Keep the ‘Wild’ in Wildlife: Don’t Touch or Feed”
Seen that TV car commercial about a couple “rescuing” a bird from cold weather and dropping it off in warmer climes? The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service did, and it is not amused. What the fictional couple did was illegal and dangerous. Read the “Open Spaces” blog for a primer on why Fish & Wildlife does not want people “helping” injured or seemingly lost animals. Bottom line: “Wild animals are hardier than we think.”
The List
“10 Best Cities To Visit in Europe”
This list by Smarter Travel writer Kate Sitarz is hard to dispute, except for the low rating for Paris. Only fifth? Really?
1. Barcelona
2. Copenhagen
3. London
4. Madrid
5. Paris
6. Venice
7. Brussels
8. Lisbon
9. Istanbul
10. Berlin
Compiled by Sam McManis/smcmanis@sacbee.com
This story was originally published June 5, 2015 at 4:20 AM with the headline "Provisions."