I spend more time than I would like to admit on reddit 50/50…

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of berries around. You can pick 10 L of blueberries in not too many man-hours, the same goes for cloud berries. Lingon berries are also abundant for that matter.

As mentioned, they definitely had these things as part of their diet, but it was nowhere near being a primary calorie source. The reason for that is probably that fishing or harvesting seagull eggs was a much, much more efficient way to get the calories you need. When you’re already sustenance farming, you typically maximise efficiency when possible. My primary point was really that when maximising calorie-efficiency (which they largely did) you end up living primarily off boiled fish and boiled potatoes.

Source: Grandparents that grew up on a plot of land (read: hunk of rock) on the west coast and lived off sustenance farming (which includes a significant amount of fishing) as late as the 1930’s.

Sure, berries and some other foraging products was part of their diet, but not a very significant one. It was mostly whatever would grow on that plot. Mostly potatoes and onions, with some other minor stuff. While berries are abundant, picking them gives you a lot fewer calories per man-hour than fishing, so fishing takes priority.

Significant point: “Edible” is subject to discussion. Not more than 100 years ago, the expected diet in large parts of Norway was boiled fish, boiled potatoes, and some form of boiled grain. For every meal. Your entire life. Vitamins? Go chew on that shrub until the scurvy goes away.

I think a crucial part of it is also that you, as a simple soldier on the ground, don’t really have a good way of figuring out the big picture.

If your sergeant tells you to “prevent anyone from entering or leaving the parliament building”, you’re very likely to assume that something bad is happening and that the army has been called in to secure the building. You basically have to trust your commanders to see the bigger picture, so that when they tell you that “the guys over there are the baddies”, you can engage them without walking over to check for yourself. If those guys are in police uniforms, that probably means the baddies got a hold of uniforms to try to sneak past you.