Rosie Garthwaite - How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone

A good diet is a varied one. In the long term you need to make sure you are getting a balance of protein, carbohydrate and fats. You need vitamins and minerals too. Sticking to one kind of food will limit your nutrients.

When you’re far from home and a long way from anything familiar, food can be incredibly comforting. My colleague and friend Hoda Abdel-Hamid has spent most of her adult life flying in and out of war zones or dangerous places. Until recently, Baghdad was like a second home for her. It was there that she got engaged over the phone to the man who is now her husband. I was there too, and afterwards we celebrated with all sorts of goodies from the bottom of her bag. She has learnt how to keep herself happy when times are tough out in the field: ‘If I am going for a long stint, I take treats – mainly food like Parmigiano, foie gras and good chewing gum. On a day you finish work early you go to your room, pull out a treat and it turns into a party.’

Food is important in so many ways, not least in keeping up energy and morale. Nick Toksvig recalls: ‘In 1985 we were working on a Lebanese hostage crisis story. It meant 18- to 20-hour days of endless live interviews with the studio back in London. I commandeered the hotel kitchen and made sure the troops were fed. Even journalists march on their stomachs.’

Chris Helgren was Reuters’ chief photographer in Baghdad for almost two years after the war. He spent most of his time training a team of young Iraqi photographers, who had done mainly weddings until 2003. He looked after them as if they were family, and that involved the occasional family feast – usually a barbecue in the back garden. There was always a lot of food. Returning to the Reuters bureau from Basra, where the shelves were still pretty bare and my translator was on a permanent diet, I always looked forward to these parties. Now editor-in-charge at the Reuters UK pictures bureau, Chris has been all over the world with his job, and knows the importance of a good meal when home is far away:

‘I didn’t eat chicken for a year after I left Iraq. Every day for the two years that I was based in Baghdad, lunch and dinner came from polystyrene boxes loaded with chicken and rice. Or rice and chicken. Or rice and rice. Or rice, chicken and rice… Our bureau was outside the American Green Zone, which offered greasy comfort food, and even Chinese take-away. While at a US air base north of the city, I even spied a taco bar in the gymnasium-sized food hall. But for us, there wasn’t much choice when it came to take-away.

‘What to eat while on assignment is a perpetual issue. When I was based in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, we had a cook who used what seemed to be half a kilo of salt in every dish. In other places, such as Jerusalem and Kuwait City, or anywhere for that matter, extended stays in hotels lay bare the problem of never-changing menus. If you’re sick of what’s on offer after a week, a month later it’s unbearable.

‘My advice is learn to cook. In Baghdad my salvation came when I discovered an international supermarket, where, for a premium, you could buy British-brand mayonnaise, Italian pasta, Japanese soy sauce, even pancake mix from the USA. Soon our local staffers were watching me in the kitchen as I prepared spaghetti with a ragu of chorizo sausage, although they wouldn’t touch it themselves. They considered all pasta, whether it was Japanese noodles or ravioli, to be “macaroni”.

‘Food is also a big logistical concern on the road. After American and British tanks stormed across the Kuwaiti frontier into Iraq, we gave chase and lived in the desert for about three weeks. Other journalists were embedded, while we were unilateral. This meant we had to fend for ourselves in procuring food, water, fuel and finding safe places to pitch camp for the night. So, on a rather irregular basis, we would receive huge duffel bags sent from colleagues in Kuwait, loaded with canned meat or beans, noodles, dried fruit, chocolate and cigars. We found that we could easily trade a Snickers bar for a bottle of water from a British Royal Marine, but a cigar could fill a 20-litre jerrycan with precious diesel for “Brenda the Defender”, our armoured Land Rover.’

When you are out of options and forced to turn to nature it can be scary for a mainly urban generation. Survival is hugely reliant on instincts, but sometimes you need to know which bit of wood goes where to make a snare or a fire. The information that follows is all about that. But it is in no way a survival manual to live off for months. I hope the tips here will get you through till a rescue team arrives.

I am not going to list all the possible plants and fruits you can eat in the wild. For that you need to find someone local to help you. If they don’t know if a plant is safe to eat, avoid it.

If you’re on your own, the best advice is to approach everything with caution – even if it looks friendly and familiar. Try a tiny bit, rub it on your skin and wait for an hour. If there’s no reaction, chew a tiny bit in all areas of your mouth, then spit it out and wait a couple of hours for a reaction. If nothing happens, swallow a small quantity and wait five hours without eating or drinking anything else to see if your tummy likes it. If it does, try a bit more, but always be ready to make yourself throw up if you suspect it may be poisonous.

Believe it or not, fishing and hunting are a lot simpler than gathering, and what you catch can be a lot more rewarding and less dangerous than plants and fruits. Here I’m going to pass on some techniques that you might find useful one day.

The best times to catch fish are early in the morning and late at night. You will need a hook and (if you don’t have a fishing line) a length of thin string. It needs to be strong enough not to snap from the weight of the fish and should be tied tightly to your hook. If you don’t have a hook, you can improvise and make one out of a tin can, a hairpin, a piece of barbed wire, a strong barb from a bush, or the loop of a dangly earring.

Failing any of the above, you can simply put a sharp straight stick, like half a toothpick, through a piece of bait and hang it like a T-junction at the end of the string.

It depends where you are fishing, but you might need to use a combination of floats and weights along the line in order to dangle your bait in the right place. If not, the bait might fall flat on the bottom if it’s in a lake with no movement, or the current might push your line back against the bank. You can use corks, polystyrene or empty plastic bottles with the top done up as floats, and stones for weights.