How to Get Food From a Date Palm Tree

You're not sure how it happened. One minute you're cruising along the sandy roads of North Africa, the next you're lost in the desert. For at least 24 hours, you haven't had a clue as to your location--or how to get back. Luckily, you've been able to find a spring of fresh water, and you've used some items that are at your disposal--rocks, some sticks, a few palm leaves--to erect a makeshift shelter. But your stomach is screaming at you and you know that you need food. Never fear--your geographical position would suggest that you aren't far from a date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) and that means food. Here's how to get it.

Instructions

How to Get Food From a Date Palm Tree

1. Learn well how to identify, without doubt, a date palm tree. Date palms are very tall, between 50 and 85 feet at full height, and look like any other tall palm tree--without branches and with a sizable mound of compound leaves protruding from the top. The date palm produces a 2- to 4-inch-long fruit, cylindrical in shape, that turns yellow when it is ripe.

2. Locate a date palm tree. Look for date palms anywhere in the Middle East, North Africa, or around the world in semi-arid areas.

3. Harvest the date palm's fruit by shimmying up the date palm tree. The trunk is rough but provides plenty in the way of hand- and foot-holds.

4. Eat the fruit. If the fruit isn't yellow (ripe), it will be extremely bitter to the taste, but still edible.

5. Harvest more fruit, then dry it out in the sun for later consumption. This can be done by simply laying the fruit out in direct sunlight for a full day. In this way, you can create a store of food that will enable you to travel away from the place of the date palm itself--and hopefully find rescue.

Tips & Warnings

• In a survival situation, consider using the leaves of the date palm, which are quite sturdy, to add to your shelter or to weave into a basket, a crude carpet, or even clothing.

• If you aren't sure that you are, indeed, dealing with a date palm tree, don't eat any part of it!