Into The Wild

This week we watched the movie Into The Wild. We saw a lot of different ways that food and nutrition affected Chris McCandless. Towards the beginning of his adventure you weren’t able to see how much he struggled with getting food. It didn’t seem like he did, but I wouldn’t really know since it wasn’t really shown. Once Chris reaches Alaska, you see this change very drastically. You see right from the beginning that there really isn’t an abundance of food. He didn’t bring a lot of food their expecting to be able to get everything from the wild which did not help him in the end. He is slowly running out of his load of rice and the food he is actually able to get from the wild is a small amount and didn’t have much meat on it. He is starting to go hungry and is getting desperate with his options. His biggest source of food that he thought would be like a feast for him but ended in disaster was the moose killing. He killed the moose and was so excited to have his first big kill. He was not fast enough at the carving of the moose though. He learned from an acquaintance that you can never ever let the flies get to the meat or you need to throw it away because then the maggots and such come to it. When Chris was doing this the flies came as he was cutting and when he tried to store the meat he realized there were already maggots covering it. This was Chris’ biggest down fall. He was already starving and lost his only source of nutrition and food. From what we saw, it seems that food and nutrition were some of the biggest issues while he was in Alaska so it played a huge part in his big journey.

The biggest issue he had which actually determined his fate was also dealing with food and nutrition. He was completely trapped in the wild and wasn’t able to get out so he had to make way with what he had. He discovered plants and berries and had not looked closely enough, only to eat a poisonous plant. This was Chris McCandless’ reason for death. He survived living on Alaska on his own but died because of his need for food and his starvation. So truly in the end, food and nutrition determined his fate.