What food do people eat in deserts?
Nowadays, people in hot deserts eat pretty much the same things that people eat elsewhere. They just import it. Do you think that you’d have to change your diet if you moved to L.A. or Tucson? There’s also the old joke about eating the sandwiches there (sand which is there). Actually, the main problem in being stranded in a desert is water, rather than food. If you have a sheet of plastic and a container, you can often rig a solar still to keep yourself hydrated. In the Western Hemisphere you can get both food and water from cactus. Some cacti have been introduced in the Eastern Hemisphere as well. I had my first prickly pear in Yemen. Not that you need the protein, but you can get a bit of meat from catching lizards. If there is water anywhere near, you may also find date palms.