“Everything on Naked and Afraid Is Real—And I Lived It: When the Discovery Channel Invited Me to Audition for Its Popular Survival-Challenge Reality Show, I Knew It Was Going to Be Rough. What Followed Was One of the Most Intense Experiences of My Life.”, Blair Braverman2020-03-17 (psychology)⁠:

[Memoir of by Blair Braverman of participating in wilderness survival show Naked and Afraid, which drops 2 participants in a location such as the African desert, with one tool and no clothes, and tasked with reaching a certain point. Braverman is partnered with a much more experienced survivalist, who helps her a great deal, and they attempt to do things like construct a spear to trick a wild boar into impaling itself. While she does her best, she discovers what it is like to be truly hungry and pushed to her limits; ultimately, she is forced to bail out, when a wound on her cheek began to necrotize, putting her into a coma.]

I’d eaten about 600 calories total in over a week, and all I thought about now was food. Everything seemed holy. Radishes. Swirling tendrils of heavy cream. I eat mostly vegetarian at home, but now the idea of raw meat made my mouth water. I could fantasize for hours, with pornographic clarity, about chopping an onion. The crew members were skilled and friendly, but they could have slipped us a sandwich at any time, and yet they didn’t, and for that I came to hate them. I started to evaluate everything by two criteria: Can I eat it? If so, can I catch it?

Elephants circled us and threw dirt on the camera guy. I froze, thinking about thin-crust cheese pizza, until they left. They were edible but I couldn’t catch them. Next.

Hyenas chased a young leopard into our boma while we carried water. Couldn’t eat them, couldn’t catch them. Next.

At dusk, thousands of tiny birds swept through the air above the riverbed, darkening the sky in waves. The flock was enormous, flowing like water. They sounded like wind, so we called them the wind birds. “Wind birds”, we’d say, looking up. We could eat them, and maybe we could catch them. After their nightly dance, the birds flew into holes in the riverbank. Maybe we could plug the holes with dirt or catch them with our bags when they came out. Therefore, the wind birds were interesting.

I felt, for the first time, that I understood what it was like to be a dog. Or any animal, really, because I was part of it all, because surely the hyenas, the leopards, the lions that roared in the evenings, assessed me in the same way. It was as if the world was gray, and everything edible glowed in color.