Can you survive on pickles alone, for a while?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

Almost every jar of pickles claims a serving of pickles has zero calories. Now clearly, this is incorrect and the result of exploiting some ridiculous FDA loophole, since anyone knows that cucumbers provide calories.

So let’s say you’re in a situation where you lose all access to food, but you’ve got effectively unlimited access to pickles – like, you’re trapped inside a recently abandoned pickle warehouse.

Could you conceivably eat enough pickles to survive for a month? Two months? Or would your body just shut down from all the sodium and acid?

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punkwalrus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenTest about pickles Image

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- frickineh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Oh good, it’s not just me. I came here to say that the odds of shitting pure pickle juice are way too high to make it worth the risk.
  
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- snooggums@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  If anyone hasn't had a butt cam (colonoscopy) before, this basically describes the process for flushing out before the procedure, except the stuff they give you doesn't taste as good as pickles.
  
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  - punkwalrus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Hah! It’s so true.
    
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- THE_ANON@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Is it really possible to shit stomach acid and what would hapeen if it is outside of your stomach will it burn through your skin ?
  
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  - jballs@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    You’ve never thrown up before?
    
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  - fidodo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Could we evolve to spit stomach acid on command and burn our enemies
    
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- thawed_caveman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Question answered OP, this will be your daily life until the sweet relief of death
  
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- AeroSmack@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I was just about to mention this. Go ahead, OP. Eat those pickles.
  
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sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
With a serving size of 20-30g and only 1 g carbs, unfortunately they’re not exploiting labeling. Cucumbers do not have significant carbohydrates, fat or protein and thus neither do pickled cucumbers. Maybe enough carbs to survive but not enough fat or protein, and so you’d end up with protein deficiency and whatever that condition is where people eating just rabbits starve from lack of fat. Probably also a horrific case of heartburn from such an acidic diet.

They do have a decent amount of some vitamins and minerals, and electrolytes such as potassium. It wouldn’t make up for the lack of protein and fat though.

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- LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Would it be at least marginally better to eat the pickles, or would you be better off just fasting? Could they give you a few more days to live, at least, in hopes of rescue?
  
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  - Broken_Monitor@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Are you stuck in a pickle factory? Blink twice if you’re under duress.
    
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  - Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    if you are discussing short-term survive-ability, while waiting for rescue, then eating pickles is better than nothing. They will provide water, vitamins, electrolytes, etc. If you are discussing living of a pickles as a lifestyle, or prolonged diet option, then it isn’t enough.
    
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  - sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    They have some carbs and protein at least, and vitamins and electrolytes. The water would probably help but I’d wonder if it would be too salty.
    
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- Davel23@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  
  whatever that condition is where people eating just rabbits starve from lack of fat
  
  Not sure if you're making a joke, but it's literally called "rabbit starvation".
  
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  - CountVon@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Apparently the technical term is protein poisoning. Digesting protein creates urea, and the body needs at least some fat in order to convert to ammonia that can be excreted. It’s also called “mal be caribou” in French (caribou sickness, I think), which I find fascinating.
    
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  - sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Well, simpler than I thought!
    
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- vexikron@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Yeah… wouldnt you basically be able to live for a while, but not actually having much actual energy to move… and probably basically be having liquid stinging shits the whole time?
  
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finthechat@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Hey are you by any chance trapped in a recently abandoned pickle factory?

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- newcockroach@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  He’s just asking for a friend. Dont bother him and awnser the dammn question👽👽
  
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- Nastybutler@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I suspect he’s locked a hostage in one and wants to know how long he can leave him there before he adds a murder charge to his kidnapping charge.
  
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blazera@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Cucumbers themselves, like basically every green vegetable, dont provide sustainable amounts of calories. But assuming pickles cant have a different calorie count from the cucumbers they started with is a bit nonsense, it's like saying wood ash will burn as well as unburnt wood. It's undergone chemical processes that alter its makeup. If you're talking about conventional vinegared pickles, that's acids breaking down the few carbohydrates and proteins, and if you're talking about lacto-fermented pickles, that's bacteria eating the calories first and converting into carbon dioxide. You can also compare the vitamins for fresh cucumbers vs labeled on the pickle jar. They're not finding loopholes to not label the health benefits of what they're selling, the pickling process also destroys vitamins.

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- CyanFen@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  But they are using a technicality that allows them to label them as 0 calories. While pickles don’t have many calories, they don’t have 0. According to fda guidelines a serving between 0-5 calories can be claimed as 0 calories and even the nutrition facts is allowed to say 0.
  
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  - blazera@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    It's not a technicality, it's just rounding. Go check out the nutrition labels on various foods you got. The majority of them will be rounded to the nearest tenth. A few low calorie ones might be rounded to the nearest fifth. Less than that is for all practical purposes 0 calories. You will not get a significant amount of calories no matter how many pickles you eat. Forget the sodium and acidity, your body cant hold enough pickle mass to add up to a snack's worth of calories.
    
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  - tamal3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Like gym bros putting spray butter on everything because it has “zero calories,” hahahha.
    
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wetnoodle@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I don’t know enough to answer but I like this question

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ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
So there are a lot of “basically nothing” foods you can survive on for a time until nutrient deficiencies kill you. However in the case of pickles I think you’d be better of literally not eating for a month. Like how drinking saltwater dehydrates you, eating pickles would blow anything of nutritional value out of you and then some

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- PRUSSIA_x86@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I have you tagged on Connect as “ask about the stick”, and so now I must ask, about the stick?
  
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  - ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    No idea what Connect is but maybe you’re talking about this comment? lemmy.ml/comment/5223327
    
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  - bartolomeo@suppo.fi ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Wasn’t rating sticks banned on some instances for not being sophisticatedly pretentious enough?
    
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  - ettyblatant@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Was this a good stick?
    
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tamal3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I don’t know, but let us know how it goes.

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Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Imagine the shit you would have to take after a few days of even trying.

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HubertManne@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
calorie negative food requires more energy to digest than they give you. The more you preprocess them like cooking, the more that changes. It the basis for the cabbage soup diet that while this wikipedia page pans my wife swears by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_soup_diet . Although she does not eat just the soup but uses it as a supplement cruch that does have a lot of non caloric nutrients to stay full. I have no idea why the wiki page say medical professionals say the weight lost is water. I find that hard to believe given the amount of water consumed as part of eating soup. Im just skeptical of what medical professionals or what proportion said that particular thing.

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- Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  
  The cabbage soup diet has many names, usually linking the diet to a mainstream institution, including the “Sacred Heart Diet”, “Military Cabbage Soup”, “TJ Miracle Soup Diet”, and “Russian Peasant Diet”. All of the institutions named have denied a link with the diet.
  
  Russian peasants: "Don’t blame us for this shit!”
  
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- GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Do she be fartin?
  
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  - Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Asking the real questions here
    
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  - HubertManne@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    maybe but my wife is one of those women who won't use the bathroom away from home, does not want anyone to hear or in anyway know she farted and does not like the bathroom door open when she is in there on the toilet.
    
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- spittingimage@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  People who are trying to eat healthy are probably also cutting back salt (intentionally or by eating less processed food), so their body retains less fluid in its tissues.
  
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- volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  For the water part, in the wikipedia article it is said in context with the claim that people lose 4.5 kg within a week. That weight is unrealistically just fat. A kg of body fat has about 7700 kcal iirc (I remember it is not exactly 9000 kcal/kg but less and google spat out 7700), so that would necessitate an energy expenditure of 3850 kcal/day (if you wanted to lose 4.5 kg/7 days). This would be a lot, at least for a regular sized person with moderate activity levels (mostly we estimate 2000-2500 kcal/day as an energy need). You also have something like 2000 kcal saved in your body as glycogen, which will also be broken down of you fast. Glycogen is stored in a kind of “water shell”, so when you burn through glycogen, you also “lose water” (1 g of glucogen : 3 g of water I think). Considering you’ll put your body in a kind of “fasting mode”, the diet will also cause a metabolic response where your metabolism will slow down and cling on what you have. Muscles will also be broken down for gluconeogenesis from amino acids.
  
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Jackcooper@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Missing some vitamins and minerals as well as some obligate amino acids so without getting to the calories, no

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Skasi@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I feel like Lemmy probably lacks the expertiese on pickles. Beans on the other hand…

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Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
It would take more energy to digest the pickle than the pickle would provide.

One example that I like to use is this: would a cockroach eat it? Roaches eat everything from food crumbs to wallpaper paste. Anything with calories. Do you know something that roaches WON’T eat? Cucumbers.

So long as the pickles don’t have sugar in the brine, I would say you would likely starve to death.

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- tryptaminev@feddit.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  That is a poor metric. Pickles are salty and acidic as fuck. Covkroaches dont literally eat everything with calories.
  
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  - geogle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    He mentioned that roaches wouldn’t eat cucumbers, not pickles.
    
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  - Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Nature has a way of providing an observable metric.
    
    Let me correct my statement. Given no alternatives, cockroaches will eat anything without a caloric deficit. Hence my statement about wallpaper paste. A true infestation of cockraoches will eat anything that will sustain the intrusion. If there is no available “food” around, cockroaches will crawl over cucumbers to eat the paste holding the wallpaper to the wall.
    
    So long as there is no additional sugar in the brine (hence calories), the roaches will not eat the pickles.
    
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Blackout@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I just bought some pickles today, AMA.

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- LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Have you eaten any? If so, did you survive?
  
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  - SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Well it’s been 20 minutes so
    
    I call their speakers
    
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  - Blackout@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    I have eaten some before, not today. I survived and it was 3 pickles too.
    
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Wild_Mastic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Is this the no poop question made months ago?

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- jballs@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I feel like eating nothing but pickles is the polar opposite of the no poop question.
  
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  - AtmaJnana@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    First the one, then the other.
    
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dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I’d give it 3 or 4 days, if literally all you have is pickles. All that salt and vinegar will dehydrate you pretty damn good, despite all the liquid you’re ostensibly consuming.

Even if you had fresh water present as well, I think you’d wind up with one hell of a stomachache by day 2 or 3.

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- skydivekingair@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Yeah they said only pickles, and even with the liquid in the pickles it’s so briny that unless they are also drinking additional water their kidneys would keep using more water the same way drinking salt water would cause. I took the question as only pickles and that, as you said, would only last until dehydration sets in. Now if they have unlimited fresh water I’d say until malnutrition so maybe a few weeks, a few horrible weeks. Just playing along and speculating, I am not a MD.
  
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  - dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Yeah, I think I’d rather spend my time seeing if I could use the pickle juice to corrode some component of the place that’s keeping me locked in. Fuck all that noise.
    
    I’d take, like, one or two jars of pickles with me when I left, though.
    
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OurTragicUniverse@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
If you're also drinking water and only eating a few pickles a day for the salt and mineral content, you can water fast safely for a good while if you have enough body fat.

Folk with morbid obesity have safely water fasted up to a year.

The pickles would only be sustaining you so far as salt and minerals though, your body fat would be doing the rest to keep you alive.

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- snooggums@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  
  Folk with morbid obesity have safely water fasted up to a year.
  
  With medical supervision, supplements for vitamins & nutrients, and other considerations for their particular condition. Certainly not something a person should do on their own.
  
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  - Devi@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    I don’t think he’s actually planning to try this… is he?
    
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qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I’m pretty sure this would kill you in a short amount of time. Chubbyemu had a video on Youtube where a single, large jar of pickles was enough to nearly kill someone (www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF69voHU_ys).

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- BloodSlut@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  til the ld50 of pickles is disappointingly low
  
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- roguetrick@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  That's just simple electrolyte imbalance. If you've got working kidneys and access to water, you can extract enough calories for general functioning from pickles alone. You just have to spread out your pickle consumption. You will start to run into macronutrient and micronutrient problems fairly quickly though. How that presents itself depends on body composition, as you start to autocatabolize your muscles for spare parts. Could survive for 2 years if you're a good meal for yourself.
  
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pan_troglodytes@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
vinegar pickles or pickled foods? lactofermented foods are technically pickles and I’ve seen quite a bit of pickled meat. pickling is a food preservation method, you dont need high levels of sodium, though it certainly helps.

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- LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I’m thinking about dill pickles specifically, which are made with cucumbers. At least here in the US, that’s what people mean when they just say “pickles” with no further context.
  
  I do like other pickled foods, though. My mom makes amazing pickled beets, and my grandma used to make watermelon pickles!
  
  The only pickled foods I’ve tried in my life that I strongly dislike are pickled fish and pickled eggs.
  
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lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
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- CyanFen@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Hey man maybe just eat regular food
  
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  - INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    You don’t need to! That’s the point.
    
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pastaPersona@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Do different pickle varieties play into this at all? IE there’s pickles with little bits of pepper, dill, garlic etc. Those things must add some nutritional value at least

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- MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Bread and Butter pickles have sugar added, so theres calories at least
  
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Kapow@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
No

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moon@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Would eating Pickle Rick be extra calories?

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Tatters@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Easy. If I was trapped in a recently abandoned pickle factory, then I would survive on the food in the staff canteen, starting with what had just been prepared, such as pizza and sandwiches; after a day or so I would move on to see what was in the refrigerators, and finally work my way up to the frozen food. Oh, by the way, when they abandoned the factory, they forgot to turn off the power, so all the perishables are still nicely preserved.

Also, lots of things can be pickled, not just cucumbers. The word “pickles” makes me immediately think of pickled onions. There is usually quite a bit of sugar in the picking vinegar.

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- LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Yes, but imagine it’s a pickle warehouse, like strictly a warehouse somewhere that houses product.
  
  Also, I’m not sure where you live, but if a place in the US put pickled onions on your burger when you asked for pickles, I think we’d have a problem. “Pickles” without further context always means pickled cucumbers. That’s even how they’re labeled in supermarkets.
  
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  - Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    
    if a place in the US put pickled onions on your burger when you asked for pickles, I think we’d have a problem
    
    Hell nah. Pickled onion is really good on a burger. I wish it was more common.
    
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cabron_offsets@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
No fat, no protein. You’d starve to death in a matter of weeks.

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numberfour002@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
It would vary quite a bit depending on the person and the circumstances.

First, I’m assuming you’re talking about brine pickled cucumbers based on the context, but brining isn’t the only way to make pickles and cucumbers aren’t the only thing you can make pickles from.

I think 2 of the biggest considerations here would be whether I have access to clean, fresh water and whether I’m in good health, with no major health issues.

If I don’t have access to fresh water, then I wouldn’t eat the pickles to begin with. And I would probably only have a matter of days to live.

If I had major health issues that would be potentially fatal without medical treatment, then that would probably be the limiting factor in how long I survive and would be dependent on the condition.

If I do have access to fresh water, I would give the pickles a lengthy soak (or even boil them if I could) before I ate them. That would mitigate at least some of the concerns about too much sodium. I could further mitigate some of the concerns by ensuring that I’m drinking lots of water (at least I would assume that would help somewhat).

I’ve read that the average person can go without any food for at least a month or two (with 3 weeks being the minimum), so if I did my sodium mitigation, then I would expect to at least survive at the upper limit of that. From a purely caloric standpoint, the average pickling cucumber (not that there really is such a thing as average/standard) is something like 20 - 50 calories each, and I feel like that alone would extend the window of survivability.

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- LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I never considered water. The pickle juice wouldn’t keep you hydrated at all, would it? It would be like drinking sea water.
  
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  - numberfour002@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    The pickle juice would dehydrate you and if the pickles or juice were consumed in any significant amount, would likely reduce your survival time … potentially by quite a bit.
    
    But also, you’re in a location with an unlimited amount of pickles (in theory), so even if you don’t directly have fresh water, there’s a chance you could rig up some way of distilling / evaporating the pickle juice to extract fresh water from it. In that case, duration of survivability would increase quite a bit depending on how much fresh water you could successfully extract from the brine. First priority would be to drink only fresh water and not consume the pickles (or consume only a small amount). But if you have lots of left over water, then you can start soaking/boiling the pickles to reduce sodium levels.
    
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