Nutrition and Physical Regeneration

See also: What To Eat In A Crisis
______

Pemmican, in my opinion, is the superfood, especially for those who are following a traditional style diet where it is fully understood that animal fats are not only important and tasty but essential.

I always have a difficult time when I am looking for something to snack on. You can no longer buy properly prepared tortilla chips at retail. To the best of my knowledge no manufacturer produces them, Kettle Brand Chips being the last manufacturer to do so (the dangers of untreated starches due to persorption cannot be overstated).

A bag of "healthy" potato chips doesn't work because store bought chips are usually cooked with PUFA oils heated at very high temperatures (for the lowdown on the dangers of polyunsaturated vegetable oils see Chris Masterjohn's Special Report). The only real options are to make your own snacks in advance.

I like beef tallow chips when I want something crunchy before a meal (note: you can make your own chips from masa tortillas or thinly sliced potatoes cooked in beef tallow), or chicken drummettes, or sliced charcuterie with cheese, but when it doesn't matter pemmican fits the bill just fine.

Even more, as you will see below, pemmican is capable of sustaining your health entirely on its own, should you ever find yourself in such a situation or simply want to go on an all meat diet for awhile.

It has no equal when it comes to food for hiking and backpacking. Instead of loading up on various types of not very palatable or not very healthy MRE's or other freeze dried foodstuffs, you can pack enough pemmican for a day or even a week without taking up much backpack space.

This is why I call it a superfood. It can fully sustain you now or in a crisis when other foods may not be readily available due to personal economic reasons or market disruptions.

Given the current economic crisis, and the uncertainty about the solutions offered by the US government, many average ordinary run of the mill folks are stocking up on foods and purchasing food storage programs. These people are not died in the wool survivalist types but your Mr. and Mrs. Joe neighbor.

That is all fine and well but for those of us who reject the displacing foods of modern commerce that Dr. Weston Price so ably demonstrated were at the heart of much modern disease, we don't have very many choices when it comes to storage options. Almost all food storage programs are grain based (long term) and/or canned food based (short term), neither of which works well for many of us as a primary strategy.

Getting proper animals fats is key, even in relatively small amounts, and grains, beans, and rice don't fit the bill. Pemmican on the other hand meets that need just fine, and unlike the options mentioned above, Pemmican can last for twenty years or more. No food storage program that consists of healthy foods can come close to matching that kind of longevity, especially food storage of animal products.

In a future post I will address the issue of food storage for traditional nutrition consumers and their fellow travelers (update: you can see that post here), covering foods that work for those who use animal products as an essential part of their diet, but right now the topic is Pemmican, which you can eat now as well as consume later.

Ray Audette, in his book NeanderThin, had this to say about Pemmican:

Many aboriginal North Americans and European explorers ate an exclusive raw meat diet in the form of pemmican. This high energy food is produced by mixing extremely dried and powdered raw lean meat and hard animal fat in a one to one ratio. Eighty-five percent of the calories in pemmican are derived from fat, making it the closest nutritional equivalent to human mother's milk. Pemmican will keep for decades without refrigeration and sustain a person without vitamin deficiency (scurvy, beriber, etc.) indefinitely.

It provides those who eat it with very high energy from very little consumption (1/2 to 1 1/2 pounds per day if eaten exclusively). Because pemmican is almost entirely absorbed by the body (without the assistance from intestinal bacteria), very little waste results from digestion (one sixth normal solid waste). The benefits of pemmican and other native foods so impressed the polar explorer Vilhjamur Stefansson that he adopted the Inuit diet in his early twenties and kept to it nearly his entire life (he died at age eighty-three).

Now I'm not sure about Ray's facts in several areas or the relevance of some of his commentary. For example adopting the Inuit diet is not the same as adopting a 100% pemmican diet. Nor did Stefansson spend nearly his entire life on the Inuit diet. Apparently his wife wasn't completely on board with an all meat diet, and his social/business activities made it difficult for him as well to maintain such a diet in "proper" society. Also pemmican made with a 1:1 ratio of fat to lean provides 69% of calories from fat, not 85%. Leaving such issues aside, Audette does get it right when he says:

Pemmican will keep for decades without refrigeration and sustain a person without vitamin deficiency (scurvy, beriberi, etc.) indefinitely. It provides those who eat it with very high energy from very little consumption (1/2 to 1 1/2 pounds per day if eaten exclusively).

Hard to go wrong with that advice since Audette's info is taken straight from Stefansson's Not By Bread Alone.

Charles Washington over at the Zeroing In On Health blog in a series with several long articles on pemmican, gives some interesting commentary on the use of Pemmican:

      In fact, when Stefansson left the Arctic he dedicated a large portion of his years
      arguing the benefits of Pemmican and even tried to convince our armed services to
      consider pemmican as a survival ration. He learned this from the Plains Indians and
      his studies concerning a nutrient-dense form of food that was called the “bread of
      the wilderness” by many writers…

      …Pemmican is the best concentrated food known to mankind. A US Navy admiral
      declared that pemmican contains more nourishment per ounce than any other
      complete food and he considered it to be the only condensed ration that could
      sustain a man’s health and strength indefinitely, using it as the main dish at every
      meal 365 days in the year. He used it for twenty years and never tired of it

      …Despite his experience, the nutritionists of the US Navy said, no, pemmican shall
      not be used…A general of the US Army used pemmican and studied the history of it
      but Army dietitians reported that they tried it out on soldiers, who found it
      unpalatable and would not eat it. They lost their strength within three days and
      became ill from it such that they would rather starve than eat it. Seems they never
      heard of Induction.

Historians all agree that pemmican was the best food in terms of preservation. Packages that were merely shielded by rawhide would
      remain in good condition after twenty or more years without any preservative such as
      salt and without protection from the rain of summer other than that given by the
      leather covering.

      …Thousands of Europeans used pemmican in the exploration and colonization of
      North America. Only a few kept diaries that were preserved. The main ingredients in
      authentic pemmican were just lean and fat. The berries…were added later by Whites
      and those Indians influenced by them.

      …The Indians knew that pemmican was a complete food upon which one could rely to
      maintain full health and strength indefinitely. The chief deterrent to pemmican was
      always its costliness in labor and time…

      The common figure is that a buffalo, weighing perhaps 1,000 pounds on the hoof,
      would make one piece of pemmican. Naturally, pemmican was used only at feasts, on
      journeys, or in time of famine…A single piece of pemmican could serve the
      average business man who also does significant muscular expenditure approximately
      three months. [emphasis added]

      …They took the hide from the animal from which the pemmican was made. It was
      about the size of a pillow case. When filled, it was 80 to 100 pounds with the average
      not being far from 90. They would fill the bag with lean and then they would render
      suet and pour the liquid fat into the bag covering every part of the shredded lean.
      They would knead the fat and lean and stir it so it was thoroughly mixed as they
      added in more fat and lean until the bag was full. They would then pile the bags once
      the bag settled and the fat dried. This bag was then known as a “piece” of
      pemmican. This made it highly transportable and was the perfect size for travel.

      …To the Indian, pemmican could be stored against famine indefinitely and still be as
      fresh as the day it was packed…Numerous references showed it still good at 20
      years. It kept well because all water was removed from the lean and the fat
      preserved all the lean. Plain pemmican was the real article. Berry pemmican contained
      dried fruit of some sort such as choke cherries or Saskatoon berries.

      Many testified that pemmican made properly would keep indefinitely and Stefansson
      provided some examples where pemmican was left open or found after a period of
      time, used, and found to be in excellent condition….Bad pemmican was that which
      was carelessly made or made with deliberate intent to cheat through leaving water in
      contributing to the weight which would fetch a higher price.

Fortunately, due to modern technology, the making of pemmican is no longer as time consuming and can be easily produced at home. Nearly all the commercial products sold under the label pemmican are not the genuine article.

To my knowledge the only retail outlet that sells genuine pemmican is US Wellness Meats (note: I have an affiliate arrangement with this fine company).

Below are some helpful links in making your own pemmican.

Danny Roddy's Pemmican Adventure.

Danny gives a more thorough and updated guide to his adventures in producing pemmican.

Charles Washington throws his hat into the pemmican production ring (beginning at post #37).

For making pemmican with berries (which is great for hiking and camping) you can check out Mark's Daily Apple.

For the most complete and thorough guide for making pemmican see Lex Rooker's The Pemmican Manual.

Finally an admonition on how not to make pemmican. The author of the video below may have some very useful information for hanging out in the wild, but for making pemmican the way many historians describe the process, and for making it at home, this probably is not the way to do it. What makes pemmican work is the fat content. A diet which depends heavily on lean meat may be very problematic and can lead to what Stefansson described as protein poisoning:"

If you are transferred suddenly from a diet normal in fat to one consisting wholly of rabbit you eat bigger and bigger meals for the first few days until at the end of about a week you are eating in pounds three or four times as much as you were at the beginning of the week. By that time you are showing both signs of starvation and of protein poisoning. You eat numerous meals; you feel hungry at the end of each; you are in discomfort through distention of the stomach with much food and you begin to feel a vague restlessness. Diarrhoea will start in from a week to 10 days and will not be relieved unless you secure fat. Death will result after several weeks.

Keeping that in mind, enjoy the video anyway. Unless you have a hankering for living in the wilderness, you will be very grateful for modern technology after viewing it.

The Bread of the Wilderness -- Pemmican by Michael Miles is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Discuss this post in the forum