How few foods could you live on?
Put one thing on the plate, plus water, and watch the days go by. Then add a second and see what changes. Assume you can eat as much as you like. The question is what's missing.
The glass of water is always included — without it nothing on this page lasts more than about three days.
The pantry
Water's already there. Pick up to three more, one at a time.
What's on the plate covers…
Try these
Every food on its own
The green bar is how long you'd keep going; the red mark is the wall. The scale stretches as it goes — a week, then a year, then ten. Tap a row to put it on the plate.
The four ways it ends
Every food on this page runs into one of these. Your body is a factory that can't make a handful of its own parts — it has to be handed them.
So what's the trick?
Look at the foods that last longest on their own: potatoes, milk, meat and offal. They don't win because they're the healthiest — they win because they're the least incomplete. Each one has a small list of gaps.
Now look at what happens when two foods with different gaps meet. Potatoes have no vitamin A, no B12 and no fat; milk has all three but no iron and hardly any vitamin C — which potatoes have plenty of. Put them together and there's no wall left that anyone has ever measured. That, in one sentence, is why every cuisine on Earth grew up around a mix: rice and beans, bread and cheese, fish and greens, tatties and milk.
This is a thought experiment for a healthy adult, built from historical accounts and standard nutrition tables. The numbers are rough — real bodies vary enormously, fat reserves buy time, and sunlight covers vitamin D. Combinations assume you split each day between the foods. None of it is advice, and please don't try the lettuce one.
Stories drawn from: Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Karsten Andersen's meat-only year at Bellevue Hospital (1928); Kanehiro Takaki's Japanese Navy diet trials (1882–84); Chris Voigt's 60 days of potatoes (2010); Angus Barbieri's 382-day supervised fast in Dundee (1965–66); and the Royal Navy's adoption of lemon juice (1795).