Question: if you where left on a desert island for a month,and you could take one item of food,what would you take?(based on how it would keep you going, how long it would keep,etc)

Grant Campbell answered on 14 Mar 2013:

For just a month, you don’t need a particularly balanced diet, you just need to survive and, as you say, the main consideration is whether it would keep for a month or go off. Chocolate is quite stable for that time period and very nutritious, but if the desert island is hot it might melt! Muesli is dry, so would keep, and is a nice mixture so would give variety and balance, but you need to add milk to make it pleasant to eat, and the milk wouldn’t keep (and that would be two foods anyway). Cans of food will keep forever (more or less), so you could have anything you like as long as it has been sterilised in a can. No doubt Julie will take cheese, and that’s cerainly a good choice – probably I’d go for that as well.

For longer than a month, you start to have to consider a more nutritionally complete food, in which case the potato is about as ideal as you can get.