There are a great many survivalist channels on YouTube, full of square-jawed and serious men and women, who know that life is stern and life is earnest and that the time for ripping apart our expensive watches and using the glass faces to start controlled fires in the high desert is now. But there is only one NorthSurvival.
NorthSurvival is a male enchantress. He is without guile. Out of his mouth comes only the truth. He lists his interests on the About page of his channel:
Friends, this I can promise you: if you then click over to the list of videos he has uploaded, you will only find footage of bushcraft, survival, shelters, craftsmanship, outdoor cooking, axes and knives, and hiking, nothing more. He could no sooner lie to you than the sun could set in the east.
Here is a video of NorthSurvival (no mortal knows his true name) cooking an egg in a potato.
He appears before us in a green mask. “This became pretty good,” he ultimately decides, in the most charming and Swedish of voices to ever pour from Swedish mouth. “I give it a t’umbs up!”
(NorthSurvival is not without his detractors. Several disgruntled fellow survivalists point out in the egg-potato video that were he to cook the egg in the shell and eat the potato separately he would nearly double his food intake — to these sayers of nay I would kindly but pointedly say there is a very clear “NOT A SURVIVAL VIDEO” warning plastered on the beginning of the cooking sequence. This video was crafted purely for the purpose of whimsy. Should you like to eat an egg cooked outside of a potato, you are of course free to do so.)
This is the very picture of sincerity! How can you not be charmed?
By the time of “How To Cook Bake A Cake In An Orange,” the mask is gone (For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known).
You could cut the orange in half with a knife, he reminds us,
But what’s the fun in that?
He slices the orange cleanly and dispassionately in half with an axe, like the hunter who slew a dog instead of Snow White and served its heart and tongue to the queen who asked for her death.
I also recommend his twelve-minute tutorial on spoon-carving.
NorthSurvival is not a man who wastes words. He can teach you how to build a long-term survival shelter in the winter without speaking or looking into the camera. His soul is a sound and a gladsome one; his mother was a Valkyrie and his father was a pure and simple thought.
There are plenty of survivalist YouTube stars. Most of them are grim and belligerent, shot through with a distasteful broier-than-thou attitude. Not so NorthSurvival. He chops oranges with axes because it’s fun. He bakes a tiny cake with batter he brought from home for the sheer joy of making a tiny cake.
“I give it a t’umbs up,” he says. NorthSurvival belongs to the world entire.
Tags: survival videos, that swedish survivalist, the great outdoors, youtube
I’m so torn.
On the one hand, I think I love this excellent specimen of Swedish humanity and I want to go live with him in the woods where he will bake me tiny cakes in oranges.
On the other hand, my current husband would probably not appreciate that. Also I would miss the internet and the comfort of my bed and hot showers.
BUT: pristine mountain lakes, the smell of fir trees, a cloudy Swedish sky.
HOW WILL I CHOOSE?
I’m sure he could build you an internet eventually? Or he could, like, drag you on a sled to the nearest cafe on occasion. You’ll be so chill after a week in a Nordic cave with this dude one internet a week will be sufficient.
He will build you a tiny internet inside an orange. It won’t have nearly the range of sites, in fact the Patagonia online store and The Toast will be the only sites accessible and it will be a Swedish translation, but there will be no other comments sections and it will smell whimsical.
What about IKEA?
If you can also access Fallen London via the egg in the potato, then really, what more internet do you need?
I like the terminable implications of “my current husband”
I feel like he would understand if I left him for a Swedish man who would build me a home in the woods. Shit, he might try to marry him first.
After watching the cake in an orange video on Friday we have been saying “But what’s the fun in that?” all weekend.
Disclaimer: Most Swedes (people, not vegetables; can’t speak for vegetables) do NOT boil their eggs inside potatoes. Many of us dislike both eggs and potatoes, even when cooked separately, as well as fir trees. Quite a few of us (though, I admit, not that many) are able to pronounce the word “THUMB” correctly.
The axe and the orange, though, are spot on.
The question is WHY you would pronounce “thumbs” correctly if you could get away with saying “t’umbs.”
AS A FELLOW SWEDE I CALL BULLSHIT, WE MAKE EGG *COFFEE* WE FUCKING LOVE EGGS
I think that egg as an enricher in coffee was a thing generally, back in the days. I could go and take a photo of our coffee machine here at work to prove that there is no button marked EGGS (however lovely it would be to press a button and have the machine go *glorp* and spew out an egg).
But do you make it in a potato? And do you then proceed to pour it in the used egg-shells and use as them minuscule but awesome cups?
And now I wish this could have been the way the fikas we used to have when I was studying in Sweden (yay!) went!
I still find it strange that the “fika” is such a peculiar Swedish thing.
And yes, of course there is a stack of eggshells beside the coffee machine, and yes, of course the coffee is made by being boiled in a potato. I didn’t know there was another way.
I think it’s the fact that is has a name. I mean, people everywhere have coffee (avec or sans eggs;)) and sweets with their friends, but it doesn’t usually have a special name. But in Sweden is so important, it deserve its own name, like breakfast or dinner. I love it.
In my student corridor we had ours on Sunday and the person who was responsible for taking out the trash (divided into a *whole* bunch of recycling categories) that week, was also responsible for bringing the goodies. Often, they were bought with recycling money – the dead battery machine gave you moniez, I think…. Ah, good times, good times 🙂
Oh! And picture my amused amazement when in the middle of a chamber concert I went to (in the mansion of some aristocrat or other, of all places! He also shook hands and exchanged words with each one of us when we were leaving) there was a break…
… for coffee and sweets 😀 Happened at all the other concerts I went to, so it wasn’t a fluke. I’ve never felt more bourgeois in my life. Still makes me giggle 😀
Well… yes. Normally, when I see something people write about our tiny, elongated, land I go “Oh, but you don’t UNDERSTAND”, but yes, I can relate to all of this (I thought “what’s weird about that?” when I read about the concert). I don’t know of any workplace that doesn’t have Official Fika at least once a week. Not showing up for it is a Big Deal.
(And the recycling money must have come from the used bottles… )
Cans! It was the cans! It’s all coming back to me 🙂
(Another thing I used to find strange at first was that the rest of the guys were perfectly happy to just sit and drink coffee and eat pie in silence at our fikas…. coming from the much more talkative South that was something new and even uncomfortable for me. But it wasn’t always that we didn’t talk much anyway, just some of the more introverted folk:))
I loved living there and I loved the people and I loved the nature. And I’ve loved Astrid Lindgren for as long as I’ve existed (one of the first books mum ever read to us was Karlson and the Brothers Lionheart is still one of the things I love most in this world!) so Sweden is always going to have a special place in my heart 🙂
Oh god, I tried that once after seeing it on Tastemade. Not cool, Swedes. Not cool.
But with no potatoes, how do you make lefse?
I was NOT AWARE that “Survivalism” was a YouTube genre.
My future is full of foods cooked outdoors in other foods and self-crafted weaponry.
Also a Pinterest genre. That was a bit of a surprise when looking for camping recipes. Do dooo doo, dutch oven stews and cakes in oranges and… knives? Scary murder knives?
Pinterest has a bunch of weird subgenres you wouldn’t expect. You’re just humming along looking for slow-cooker recipes and then BAM! “15 Reasons A Male-Headed Home Is Best!” or something. Whoa. Okay.
Pinterest is just weird.
I am learning so much right now.
I am so mad that Youtube is blocked at work because the screenshots are compelling me to watch this man. He has an axe! And an orange! And apparently a cake comes from it!
Craftsmanship is making a home for your egg in a potato. Baking a little cake in an orange.
Just from these elegant gestures alone, we know that life with our Swedish friend would not be mere animal survival, but a passionate enjoyment of the pleasures of the wild that he shows us how to create from simple ingredients and tools. The rest of those so-called survivalists are mere brutes. He is an artist.
What I love about him is the dedication to survivalism coupled with the use of items that seem highly unlikely to be available if society actually came crashing down around us. My evidence: a) He lives in Sweden and yet cooks a cake in an orange. How is he going to get his hands on an orange in the Swedish countryside? How is that a useful/transferable skill? b) He brought the cake mix from home. Will anyone of us have an ample supply of cake mix available to us when the world ends? Is this really the most useful skill needed for survival in an apocalypse? But otherwise he is quite charming.
I’m sure these skills are transferable to other, non-citrus items.
I can’t stop giggling at the word bushcraft.
There’s a book called How To Be A Bush Pilot: A Field Guide To Getting Luckier. I have not read it.
Oh, bless.
Now I’m just thinking of that “Penetrating Wagner’s Ring” book, the author of which pleaded total ignorance of the innuendo. To be so innocent…
When I helped in a charity shop, we had book named Biggles Takes It Rough.
He was on safari. Obviously.
I think Biggles liked a bit of rough whatever he was doing, iirc.
Sounds like this dude could teach the Maine hermit a thing or two.
We can only hope that one day NorthSurvival will become a contestant on Naked and Afraid, although he seems too pure of heart for that kind of thing…
He would lead the other contestant, all the camera crews, producers, and viewers on a path of enlightened, joyful survival. They would emerge from the forest shining with the light of whimsy.
NorthSurvival is now the only Winter Boyfriend I will accept. I have been ruined for other men.
Needs beard.
I want to revive “gladsome” as a commonly used word. It’s wonderful.
I have baked a cake in an orange peel! That’s not survivalism, it’s Girl Scout camp. (Also, let me just say that our Girl Scout orange-cakes came out looking much more appetizing than NorthSurvival’s.)
Yes! Fellow Girl Scout camper!
I believe that Girl Scout Camp is actually a sub-genre of survivalism, just as Boy Scout Camp is a subgenre of pyromania.
My understanding from boys I knew in high school is that Boy Scout camp also has a strong connection to the “hitherto-unexplored bisexuality” genre. (This is probably also true of Girl Scout camp but I wouldn’t know, I stopped going when I was about 11.)
Can confirm; I missed out on a lot of camp gossip and intrigue by being heterosexual (although by the time I became aware of this, most of it was “thoroughly-explored bisexuality” and “thoroughly-explored homosexuality.” In theory, SOME of the years I was at camp must have featured people discovering hitherto-unknown orientations, but I never picked up on it…).
Do we think the cake-in-orange would be replicable in, say, a toaster oven?
DO IT
I was a little disappointed in the egg potato recipe, as I watched the orange cake one last week and it is very much the same thing. He could have simply ended the orange cake video by saying “After eating this delicious dessert and having a fulsome sleep on your long term survival shelter, you can have an egg for breakfast cooked inside a potato using this same method.” However, if I had seen the videos in reverse order, then the orange cake one would have been worth watching for the reveal of North Survival’s ruggedly handsome face.
I hear his “t’umbs up” as “tongues up” and I gotta say I prefer it that way.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, because they aren’t tiny cakes baked in oranges, it profiteth me nothing.
I have not watched the video, but if you cook the egg in the potato, can you not eat them both? Do you not have essentially a cooked egg AND a cooked potato? This sounds very efficient and portable to me.
You scoop out most of the potato innards to make room for the egg, so even if you do end up with an edible partial potato, there’s some waste there compared to cooking the two separately.
And what’s left is only appetizing if you really like the taste of graphite.
I’m really envious of his orange-pulp-removing skills. Despite the fact that I grew up in Florida I just can’t manage to remove pulp from any citrus fruit without getting soaked in juice and ending with a pile of torn-up pulp instead of neat sections.
He mise-en-place’d his campfire! This guy is great.
One of my favourite trashy books as a teenager featured a scene in which characters cooked cakes in oranges. I hope the Swedish man has also read it.
The part that really did it for me was when he had to reference a note for the ingredients for the cake.
You guys, his Facebook profile pic is a tiny WordArt campfire. The cover picture is of wolves snuggling. This is a Good Man.
Also, I highly recommend the comments on his Facebook profile for that rare thing almost only ever found here on The Toast; genuinely friendly comment threads. I swear, it’s all ‘nice cake, man’ and ‘do you like this sort of nature, i sure do’.
“Thats very creative way to cook and eat a cake nice man”
*goes there immediately*
We don’t have proof that NorthSurvival isn’t Ronbledore, that’s all I’m saying.
This reminds a bit me of a dear friend and former roommate of mine, who is a forest fire fighter and a student of philosophy and goes to a lot of 10 day silent meditation retreats and who you can tell is having lots and lots of feelings when he is doing incline pushups.
We could not be more different, but we love each other.
Unscientific poll: has he ever come out of a ten-day mediation retreat and confessed his undying love for someone? I… I’ve noticed this is a thing.
Hmmmm. He often goes to them after undying love goes unrequited, I think, but also he has a bad habit of dating hot busy ‘poly’ chicks with jealous boyfriends who are clearly verrrrrrry into his bod* but not actually into making time or emotional space for him, and, when that doesn’t work out, 19 year olds.
He’s so lovely, but has a lot of emotional work to do. He is, in many ways, a babe in the woods. So to speak.
*It’s insane. Once I absentmindedly rubbed his chest while we were standing in the kitchen, and it was like rubbing a marble statue, I shit you not. ETA: One of those really built marble statues. I think more like a renaissance re-make than an actual classic? You know, pretty bulgy all over. Like one that would be fighting a lion, and then later posing with a discus.
I feel this calls for me to learn how to post a gif.
I worked with a guy like that. At some point in his teen years he was at a drinking in a field party that was busted by the cops, and while running he got clotheslined by a chest-high barbed-wire fence.
All summer long, we’d feed him beers, and use a girl who hadn’t been there the last time as an excuse to get him to tell all his drinking anecdotes (country boys have great drinking anecdotes, often involving escaped chickens) eventually looping back to that anecdote again. She’d say (coached) “You have scars?!” and he’d obligingly take off his shirt as evidence, and we’d all inspect the scars. Yes.
Damn. Here: http://becausehiddles.tumblr.com/post/17854681323
Peggy Carter understands me.
Damnit, I keep trying to reply to you Elizabeth:
I watched the one where he makes a tiny wooden matchbox, and cuts himself over and over as he works. That one was great. Because when survivialisting, having a large box of matches inside say, a ziploc baggie, is definitely not preferrable to a tiny whimsical container of only a few matches that requires lots of glue.
Also one where he built a sort of fence to hold in the warmth of a fire for his lean-to, using pre cut wood lengths from another project. Seems like if you have that many woodlengths, wouldn’t you build a fully enclosed shelter instead? I dunno. What do I know, I’m no survivalist.
Perhaps he’s doing a performance art thing?
He would probably build an enclosed shelter if he were really survival-ing, but for youtube, he wants to demonstrate lots of types of projects.
Guys he calls spruce branches “spruce rice” and that is the most adorable translation attempt I have ever heard.
I was wondering about that! SPRUCE RICE. This is my favorite thing ever and I will look forward to it every winter.
is that… “She’ll be coming round the mountain”? at the end of the spoon video? This must be performance art!
Y’all need to visit northern Minnesohtah if you like this sort of thing. Lots of Norwegians, Swedes and Finns, doncha know. You’ll never need to shave your legs, and you’ll never go hungry.
Y'all need to visit northern Minnesohtah if you like this sort of thing. Lots of Norwegians, Swedes and Finns, doncha know. You'll never need to shave your legs, and you'll never go hungry.
Be with Northsurvival or be Northsurvival yourself? The gay man’s dilemma….
Oh man, I’ve seen these videos before this post! All of them! They’re fascinating, and I’m not even into survival shite!