Many people are familiar with the practice of juicing fruits and vegetables, to make nutritious and tasty drinks. Everyone is probably aware that increasing your intake of fruit and vegetable matter (and this includes fresh juice) is very healthy, and can improve the quality of your life. But how can a juicer machine save your life?

I recently read an interesting discussion claiming that grass – not wheat grass, but plain old lawn grass – is an overlooked source of food in times of famine, war, and other times of need. Now before the scientifically minded amongst you jump up and down and say “no no grass can’t be eaten – you need a rumen, or the enzyme cellulase to break it down”, this is how it works:

Although grass fibre ( mainly cellulose, and it’s true you DO specifically need the enzyme cellulase to break it down to a simpler form) is of very little use to humans, it is still possible to crush the juice out of the grass and drink this. What does it taste like? It tastes like wheat grass apparently, and although it is not the best flavour in the world, it still contains a mixture of simple sugars that are sustaining enough to potentially get you through an emergency.

So, you need some way to crush lawn grass. Of course an electric juicer is a great way to juice, but an electric machine isn’t going do much good to as if electricity grid is down! In this case, the best option is a hand juicer. A hand juicer is any juicer which is powered manually, and the most common types are those which you clamp to a surface like a kitchen bench, and then turn a crank handle while feeding in ingredients. Hand juicers are generally used to juice wheat grass, so they aren’t really going to struggle when juicing lawn grass.

This information probably sounds quite wacky, and you should probably be careful when applying it! However, whichever way you look at it a compact hand juicer does sound like a useful survival tool. There are many things that you could find that you could juice if you had to,  which would not be very palatable to eat. Think of edible native plants such as thistles, which are edible but very stringy and difficult to chew. A hand juicer can be purchased for as little as $50, and could be an excellent investment one day.