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Well, I think it's worth finding out just for the sake of knowing.

But as a cautionary tale, yeah it still matters. Say you meet some guy planning on taking this same "adventure", you show him Into the Wild, he says "no problem, I've been hunting and trapping for 10 years, no way I'll starve".

People who just think "It's a bad idea in general, I don't need to know exactly how he died" were probably not in any danger of making the same mistake. If you want to convince people on the fence, you need specifics.



Whether he died because he either ate a poisonous plant or starved, the issue is the same: lack of proper preparation for a food supply.


Many people view foraging for food in the wilderness to be a perfectly adequate plan for having a food supply. If the theory is correct, he didn't starve to death because of poor planning, he starved to death because he ate something poisonous, which then prevented him from foraging for food.

You seem to be implying that foraging isn't an OK way to feed oneself in the wilderness.


You're right. But nobody ever died because they avoided the poisonous berries.

The story of how he died is a good cautionary tale, and the story of how the exact cause was discovered is also interesting.




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