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The centuries-old Inupiaq custom of storing caribou with the hide on helps both preserve the meat and create a traditional delicacy, with the hide acting like “super butcher paper” if you will, minimizing “freezer burn” while retaining more moisture in the meat.

This isn't really a contradiction, just a different way of preserving meat. People in warmer climes were dependent on drying meat out for preservation, the Inuit had a ready-made freezer in the environment.

I'm not saying that the Inuit needed to eat the stomach contents. I could see an acute need causing people to try foods they otherwise wouldn't. I don't think blue cheese is a necessary foodstuff--but you could see cheese going "bad" in this way, and due to necessity/food shortages, somebody ends up trying it, and finds that it's an acquirable taste.

There's nothing unbelievable about people eating stomach contents of the caribou, to me. Or bird's nest soup. Or natto. I might not line up for some anytime soon, but people eat all kinds of stuff that sounds weird to our cultural palate.

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If it's the dumb European tourists who all died of some stupid thing, how could they even begin to write about it with any accuracy? In the grand scheme of things, I'm going to favor the writings of somebody who went there, stayed there for years, adopted all the local customs therefore abandoned all his previous customs, and lived to tell the story. In the Bellevue all-meat experiment, the subjects didn't eat the stomach contents of anything, not even once. Where does this idea come from, that they ate the stomach contents of a freshly killed caribou, that it had a sweet appealing taste of any kind? Certainly not from somebody who actually did it.

The peoples we call the Inuit are not a homogenous group. Steffanson ate with some Inuit. He didn't travel across the land, eating in every northern village from Alaska to Greenland. Steffanson is evidence that eating the stomach contents wasn't necessary for the avoidance of scurvy--but he's not proof that the practice didn't exist.