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I saw a youtube video where this guy skinned a spruce tree stick and ate the bark while claiming it is nutritious. That got me curious since trees are everywhere and this could be a great tip so I tried searching for what kind of nutritional value it would have exactly. All i found was this page which says that the bark is "relatively nutritious" and packs around 500-600 calories per pound.

I'm not sure they realize that a grown human being on average needs 2000 calories a day to survive for longer periods of time so you'd have to eat around a metric ton of the stuff per day. Maybe it was a typo and they meant kilocalories but that would mean the bark has to be mostly fat and all the sources I've seen say its mostly carbs.

Does anybody have solid information on what kind of nutrition tree bark has?

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Karl
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    2500 kcal = 2500000 calories – Karl Jul 18 '14 at 08:28
  • yes 1200 isn't great but from what I've gathered its the bare minimum required for prolonged periods of time. If it's not a typo then eating the bark wouldn't even make up for the amount you lose chewing it. If it is a typo then it would be a really excellent source of food that could keep you going for months with very little effort. – Karl Jul 18 '14 at 08:40
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    Bloody bear gryls.... –  Jul 18 '14 at 09:01
  • Apparently spruce has some nutritional value, but not so much in the bark. Moose and deer only eat bark in winter. Spruce grouse (Fool's Hen) eat a lot of spruce berries and word is they taste like turpentine. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce#Food_and_medicine – orangejewelweed Jul 18 '14 at 11:36
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    i would imagine this varies substantially from one species of tree to the next, not to mention that surely not all tree bark is edible. Certainly some could be poisonous. – Michael Martinez Jul 18 '14 at 18:05
  • @Karl My guess would be that the article means 500-600 kCal. It is common, although not strictly correct, to drop the kilo when talking about calories and food. If I say a Snickers bar is 280 calories, would you assume I meant 0.28 kcal? – ppl Jul 19 '14 at 05:24
  • Around here(estonia, eu) all food wrappers have the same kind of nutritional badge or a table kind of thing and it uses kcal as unit. I have heard that Calorie with a capital C is sometimes used to refer to kcal but that wasn't the case on that page. – Karl Jul 20 '14 at 01:31
  • I am a bit skeptical about 500-600 kcal in tree bark though. If that was the case, you'd expect to see some kind of bark product right next to potatoes and corn in the supermarket as a staple food. – Karl Jul 20 '14 at 01:39
  • @Karl the reason I misunderstood you is because a lot of (but not all) food packaging in the UK states kcal as cal, so 500cal to me was a lot more than it was for you :) the reason you probably won't find bark in a supermarket is because it would not appeal to the general public - insects are high protein but you don't really see them in your local store. – Aravona Jul 21 '14 at 11:40
  • I understand that during poverty in North Korea, the tree barked was stripped off trees to help feed the population. – Anon Jul 30 '14 at 15:38
  • Note that a cal(orie) isn't a Cal(orie) 1kcal = 1 Cal. (@Aravona) all the example UK/European packaging I have to hand is in "kcal" (except one "Kcal" in Italian) ; I have a couple of products labelled for the US or Canadian markets with "Cal" or "Calories" (note capital "C"). I can find no examples of "calorie" with a lowercase "c " and no "k" – Chris H Feb 09 '23 at 11:30

4 Answers4

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According to this entry in the Swedish wiki, flour made out of pine bark contains about 82kcal/100g, or 400 kcal/pound (thanks to a comment).

This flour is not made of the bark itself, but the thin layer between the bark and the wood. It is harvested in the spring when rising sap makes it come of rather easily. To make it into flour you have to dry it, roast it and then you sift it and presto. You have your flour.

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Mwigs
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Most probably the numbers were typo. There are numerous websites on pine tree bark eating. So far the best I found is this one from Survival Topics. I agree with the statement, this option should be an emergency option. The 2500 kcal requirement is more than the actual minimal need of energy per day. More like 1700-1800 given by the numbers of FAO research. So if we ask for survival, those few pounds of bark could save your life in emergency and give enough energy to hunt, find more suitable food for yourself, with @MarcusWigert's answer the nutrition fact would end up with 400 kcal/pound.

CsBalazsHungary
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This doesn't really answer the question of how many calories per pound, but why eat the bark when the pine has so many good edible parts: Pining for You (Eat The Weeds).

Ken Graham
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thomasw_lrd
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  • Can you add to this a little bearing in mind the help center answer guidelines: Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline. – Aravona Jul 23 '14 at 07:22
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I'm a biochemist, and if there's 82 kilo calories (or "calories" as used by nutrition science and how I will use the unit term from now on - because in standard conversation no one uses kcals), per 100g of pine flour then there's slightly less (12%) than 82 calories per 100 g of pine bark. There's 12% moisture in pine bark solids to evaporate when drying to obtain the flour. So, simply add 12% back to the weight of the sample and you have 82 calories per 112g of solid pine bark which translates to 82÷112×454=332.39 calories per pound.

Katajojo
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