Desert Survivalist

 is an achievement in Fallout: New Vegas which is awarded for successfully healing 10,000 points of damage using food.

Food Regen Explained
The important thing to realize when consuming food is that you immediately receive points (equal to the amount of healing power the item has) toward this achievement when eating food, not slowly while the food is healing you. If consuming the food will cause your HP to be > 100%, then you only get points for the difference. For example, if you have 200 health, and your max health is 250, consuming anything that grants more than 50 HP will be wasted, as you'll only gain 50 points towards the award.

This also means that you can't "over-heal" with something that grants more HP than you currently have with the intention of adding more points towards this achievement. For example, a Wasteland Omelet grants +6/(60sec), or 360 HP total. If your current HP is 100 with a max of 250, consuming the omelet will only grant 150 points towards the achievement. If you take 50 points of damage while the omelet is healing you, common sense says this should give you an extra 50 points, but this is incorrect. You still only receive the 150 initially granted.

One other thing to note, there seems to be a limit to the amount of unique things that you can eat at once that actually take effect. After hitting that limit, you no longer gain stat adjustments/rads/FOD/points towards Desert Survivalist. If this occurs, simply wait until some of the food items "wear off," then continue consuming.

Ruby's Casserole Method
Go to Goodsprings Cemetery and go down the hill to the North East where there are 15-20 Radscorpions that re-spawn after you wait three days (Searchlight Airport and Scorpion Gulch are also high concentrations), kill them and loot them to get their glands. Take the glands to Ruby Nash in Primm and she will turn them into Ruby's casserole 5 at a time, eat all the "casserole" at once(if doing the casserole method you need to have lost HP equal to or greater than the amount of health that will be gained from one) with a survival skill of 100 only require 112 casseroles (+3HP(30s) each). This will work for other food items by eating many of the same item at once and having lost HP greater than the amount gained by one, however, Ruby's casserole is a very effective and easy to acquire food item. This works because the game counts the amount of health gained from food before you begin healing so as long as you have enough damage to use all the healing of one "casseroles" it will consider the amount that you healed as all of "casseroles" (i.e. if you gain +1(30s)HP and eat 40 it will record the amount healed by food as increasing by 1200 however if you only have 20 damage to heal the amount healed by food will only increase by 800)

Boomer Method
If you've got the caps, and have already met the Boomers (and are neutral or above), go to Nellis Hangers and the building on your left has 3 Boomer Chefs inside. These generally don't wear hats, and hang in or around the kitchen area, so are a bit easier to find. Simply buy all the food they have, wait 3 days and buy it all again. To hold more, have a follower with you and give them a full inventory of food. Now injure yourself, down to low health. This can easily be done by 'drowning' in a deep enough pool of water until you have very low health. Once at low health, eat all the food you bought. Repeat until the achievement is awarded.

Wasteland Omelet Method
If you want to spend the money, just buy Wasteland Omelets from Ultra-Luxe Casino. Wait 3 days and the omelets will be restocked. Repeat this until you have about 40-50 omelets. Then go outside, get your health low with a rocket launcher or grenades, then eat all of them at once.

If you want your money back, just reload from a previous save.

Good Locations for Food

 * William Farber inside the Terminal Building at Camp McCarran stocks a large amount of vegetables.
 * Etienne at the Westside Co-op stocks a large amount of vegetables and other food.
 * Genaro sells a variety of suspect meats inside Freeside's North Gate
 * In the refrigerator inside the McBride house there are 10 Brahmin steaks