The Discovery Channel airs an interesting program called Man vs Wild. The star of the show is Bear Grylls, a real life Action Man who demonstrates techniques for surviving in the most inhospitable landscapes.

To accentuate the extreme nature of his adventures — and the diversity of what we eat on planet Earth perhaps — we are treated to the spectacle of watching iron-gut Grylls eat some particularly horrid things, or delicacies depending on your stomach.

Under normal circumstances, goats’ testicles or a wild boar’s fully loaded bowel [cooked of course] is hardly what a good TV dinner is made of. And, while it is fascinating to think you can make a brew from the water extracted from an elephant’s feces, one wonders how any kind of tea can taste good if it is not served in a china cup. I mean, really.

Along with the spectacle of watching Whitie chomping on gonads and piggie-poo we are introduced to a diverse sampling of endogenous people who eat that stuff like it were sushi-grade tuna loins. Remarkable in so many ways, these assorted nomads and savages forage and hunt everything imaginable – or unimaginable, again, depending on your point of view.

The significance of this is threefold:

• Watching our hero gagging on something entirely ghastly while the scrappy looking natives giggle with delight helps me reconcile the extremes of one man’s [extraordinary] struggle for survival and another man’s [commonplace] daily existence – a metaphor for life in the bubble?
• From the relatively simple activities of primitive Bushmen to our own supposedly sophisticated tribal affiliations online, the social way we share the burden and benefits of gathering, distributing and consuming food [read: information] are remarkably similar.
• There is no accounting for “good taste,” not even in the genteel world of recruiting blogs.

I never understood Optimal Foraging Theory which was first proposed in 1966 by Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka, and may not even now. However, watching our host pick maggots out of a rotting carcass it might just boil down to this:

If the time and energy spent on tracking, stalking, chasing, killing and prepping a zebra is going to be greater than the calorific value of a single rump-steak dinner — factoring into the equation the risk of having your head kicked in on the hunt — one has to consider the alternative of a protein rich aboriginal picnic as not being so bad after all.

Certainly, a dinner of maggots and dung-flavored coffee is no more disgusting than what some in polite society would pay top-dollar for.

Bear Grylls and his assorted homies demonstrate that — like most animals — we humans have a foraging mechanism hardwired in our brains. Knowing how to grub out an existence is good for surviving as a species as well as in the cutthroat business of multichannel advertising, don’t you know. Hey, and knowing the best techniques for hunting and gathering never stopped a good salesman or a hardworking recruiter from making a living either!

On the show, traipsing over Africa for example, we see that the optimal diet model — describing how foragers make choices about which prey to go for, bucking zebra or wiggly maggots — and patch selection theory which describes the behavior of a forager whose prey is concentrated in areas where there is some commute involved, are easier to spot on Man vs Wild than to read about in scholarly tomes, even if you “cherry pick.”

Although watching our hero eat his food as he trips over it — or in the case of rotting flesh, sniffs out — makes for better television, we do see on occasion examples of the prey being carried back dutifully to the show’s toothless and potbellied extras. I guess that illustrates central place foraging theory, right?

Building on the basic premise of foraging theory PARC researchers, Messrs. Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card — prolific and terrific — stepped it up a notch with the publication of their paper, Information Foraging. The theories developed in this research and the work of their contemporaries has become central to Web design and usability best practice, optimization too.

In information foraging theory our academic heroes Pirolli and Card put their own spin on OFT describing how our primal hardwiring is manifest in our online behavior, proposing strategies for modern-day competitive advantage.

I guess if we spend more time searching for information online than we do on the hoof searching for food then describing ourselves as “informavores” is fair. And if we have migrated to the machine as a source of feeding why wouldn’t we default to the same types of instinctive behavior for getting our needs met here that we might otherwise exhibit in the wild? It makes sense to me.

But what are we getting ourselves into here, have I learned nothing?

Talk of information patches and information scents and information diet is just as dry as OFT blabber, not something I can relate to as easily as Bear Grylls and his ripping yarns.

No, no more. I just want to watch Whitie disembowel a camel, scoop out the poop, climb inside the carcass and adopt the fetal position as the elements outside make life impossible to endure anywhere else but in the belly of a beast. Now, that I can relate to!

The series so far:

• The Hungry Blogger
• The Man in the Know
• Recursion Excursion