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[Hague]

It would be a nice little addition that if your dwarves are starving they'll make a meal out of leather goods. Nothing quite like Ibod the Marksman starving to death and watching him eat his quiver in the dead of winter.

Got this idea when I saw the "Glovebreakfast" thread and watching the movie "Ravenous."

[Tamren]

Boil your belt and eat it? Sure why not!

[Apegrape]

You do know that there's a difference between leather and skin, right? Leather has been processed with chemicals and stuff, so i doubt anyone would eat their +bonobo leather caps+ just like that.

[Derakon]

It's better than starving to death, no?

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I'd love to see starving dwarves who can't even find vermin look around for dwarves who have no friends.

Then kill and eat them. Even the chunks.

OM NOM NOM

[dwarfed one]

They also should look for worms, eat grass and bark. All needed to be cooked, so there would be fight in the kitchen.

[Jetman123]

I doubt leather has any nutritional value, so all of your dwarves will probably munch on leather and do absolutely nothing to stave off starvation.

[Footkerchief]

The nutritional value of leather was noted at Leningrad:

Grass and leaves, along with glue and anything leather, were the staples of their diet, as all dogs and cats had long ago been eaten.

In real life you'd have to soak and boil it for a good while, but yeah.  Hunting vermin shouldn't be the only way they avoid starving.

[Naze]

Yummmm, thank you almighty Nenpe, the Itches of Phlegm, my god of death, blight and disease for the wonderful opportunity you presented us to sample the work of your fine craftsman Ebdi Ashcirice's, he prepared for us shoeloaf, trouserpie, vestcakes, and coatscrapes as well as a large pile of uncooked red meat we happened to find near Ebdi's abandoned workshop.

To get to the point, in the long run, I believe leather would be a good dietary supplement, better than rocks or trees.

[Jetman123]

Huh. I didn't know that.

[dwarfed one]

Jack London, Burning Daylight:

Of the squirrels, nothing was lost. Even the skins were boiled to make broth, the bones pounded into fragments that could be chewed and swallowed. Daylight prospected through the snow, and found occasional patches of mossberries. At the best, mossberries were composed practically of seeds and water, with a tough rind of skin about them; but the berries he found were of the preceding year, dry and shrivelled, and the nourishment they contained verged on the minus quality. Scarcely better was the bark of young saplings, stewed for an hour and swallowed after prodigious chewing.

[Slartibartfast]

I would really recommend against eating any of that leather.
The real-world technique that is probably used in DF* to process leather is partly described as:

Skins typically arrived at the tannery dried stiff and dirty with soil and gore. First, the ancient tanners would soak the skins in water to clean and soften them. Then they would pound and scour the skin to remove any remaining flesh and fat. Next, the tanner needed to remove the hair fibers from the skin. This was done by either soaking the skin in urine, painting it with an alkaline lime mixture, or simply letting the skin putrefy for several months then dipping it in a salt solution. After the hair fibers were loosened, the tanners scraped them off with a knife.

Once the hair was removed, the tanners would bate the material (see below) by pounding dung into the skin or soaking the skin in a solution of animal brains. Among the kinds of dung commonly used were that of dogs or pigeons. Sometimes the dung was mixed with water in a large vat, and the prepared skins were kneaded in the dung water until they became supple, but not too soft. The ancient tanner might use his bare feet to knead the skins in the dung water, and the kneading could last two or three hours.

It was this combination of urine, animal feces and decaying flesh that made ancient tanneries so odiferous.

So that leather was first soaked in urine, and then pounded with feces and animal brains.
Somehow I don't think any dwarf that understands that process (Which is all of them, considering all of them can work in a tannery) would be very likely to munch on leather.
If you want to suggest something, how about some seriously negative thoughts for working in a tannery?

*-DF time somewhat corresponds to a time in our history when this was how leather was processed, so it's a fairly safe assumption that this is how they process leather.

[Pyrorex]

Well I still see eating shit as better than dying.

[Align]

I think doing that might kill you, actually.

[SHAD0Wdump]

Oh well,either finish yourself off early(sparing you of the pain and suffering)with a slim chance of survival,or die anyway...

Your choice...