With the survival rations running low, Pi strictly follows the emergency instructions and reduces himself to two biscuits every eight hours. The constant hunger consumes his thoughts, and he daydreams about impossibly abundant, perfectly cooked meals that grow grander the less he has to eat.

As starvation deepens, Pi’s standards for eating drop. Pi stops carefully cleaning fish and begins biting into them after only a rinse, savoring any variety he can catch. Pi also starts eating parts he once discarded, including fish heads, and discovers he can suck a fresh-tasting fluid from fish eyes and even their vertebrae.

Sea turtles, once treated mainly as convenient food for Richard Parker, become Pi’s favorite meal and a major source of nourishment. Pi drinks sweet fluid from turtle veins, eats turtle meat, eggs, fat, and organs, and eventually consumes nearly everything a turtle offers, including algae-shelled crabs and barnacles and even the turtle’s stomach contents.

Pi also finds practical uses for turtle shells: as shields, as cutting boards and bowls, and later as makeshift protection from the sun when blankets are destroyed. Pi recognizes how dependent his emotions have become on calories, noting that good mood follows a full belly and that his existence feels controlled by access to turtle meat.

When the last biscuits are gone, Pi becomes able to swallow almost anything as long as it is not salty, developing a lasting revulsion to salt. Remembering an early desperate attempt, Pi describes catching a fresh fecal ball from Richard Parker and trying to eat it, only to find it nutritionally worthless and spit it out, then using the rest of the tiger’s feces as fish bait. Within weeks, Pi’s body begins to fail: his feet and ankles swell, and standing becomes exhausting.