Foraging, past and future

As many of you know, Dew is under contract to this blog site to provide offbeat (mostly), inane (frequently), or insightful (rarely) commentary.  Recently, he advised that I should be "foraging [my] future".

So, I ruminated on this a bit.  In a half-century of living, I have to admit my understanding of foraging had to do with animals in the wild, and wild west festival suttlers selling reproduction War Between the States forager's belts, pictured below:

http://www.walker47.com/w47/services/leat%20belts.htm

Or, perhaps a Confederate soldier's forage cap:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=forage+cap&_frs=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m359

This WWII Russian forage cap caught my eye:

Anyway, thanks to the Dew, I was able to expand my understanding of the concept of foraging to a whole new level, even doing some interweb research on the subject.

Excerpted from the 54 volume boxed set Wiki-pedia:

Foraging is the act of searching for food...Human societies that subsist mainly by foraging wild plants and animals are known as hunter-gatherers...Optimal foraging theory was first proposed in 1966, in two papers published independently, by Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka,^[2] and by J. Merritt Emlen.^[3] This theory argued that because of the key importance of successful foraging to an individual's survival, it should be possible to predict foraging behavior by using decision theory to determine the behavior that would be shown by an "optimal forager" - one with perfect knowledge of what to do to maximize usable food intake...

There are many versions of optimal foraging theory that are relevant to different foraging situation. These include:  ...Central place foraging theory, which describes the behavior of a forager that must return to a particular place in order to consume its food, or perhaps to hoard it or feed it to a mate or offspring...

Important contributions to foraging theory have been made by: ...Sir John Krebs, with work on the optimal diet model in relation to tits and chickadees;...

Hey, this could be more interesting than I thought...