Teaser, I read a little bit of that article and I find too many things that are obviously wrong. For example:
Quote:
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.
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That's a contradiction. Moist muscle meat won't store, because of the moisture. Take out the moisture, it can then be stored for years, especially when sealed with rendered fat, where the moisture there has also been removed. I think water is the key for long-term storage of meat, but when you think about it, it applies to basically everything, from metals to fabrics.
As for eating stomach contents for supposed nutritional value, I just killed a 800lbs animal with 100lbs of fat on its back, but most especially an adrenal gland with all the vitamin C that me and my entire family would ever need for a long time (consumed immediately, of course), until the next 800lbs animal I kill. It's a myth and it keeps going for reasons that sound good but fail to pass the test when we dig just a little bit deeper.
Here's an idea. Inuit tribes talk to each other. What one tribe knows, all other tribes know. Also, they talk to other tribes across the continent so for example, if one figured out how to make pemmican to preserve meat for years, this obviously essential knowledge would quickly pass on to every other tribe on the continent, and supercede basically every other inferior methods for long-term storage. So, we get caribou pemmican, fish pemmican, buffalo pemmican, pemmican made with basically every large game species they hunt. It's the same for adrenals and vitamin C, they couldn't know about vitamin C, but they sure knew about the cause-effect relationship. With the same context, let's make the same argument for eating the stomach contents of a freshly killed large game animal.
Here's another idea. Inuits were obviously not dumb. I mean, if we think they were just smart enough to survive the extremely harsh conditions, let's see what smart European tourists did in those same harsh conditions. Oops, they all died of some stupid thing or other. So, those smart European tourists were just not smart enough, not as smart as the dumb Inuits. So who wrote all these texts about what the Inuits did to survive the harsh conditions? 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. Maybe from somebody who saw somebody else do it, but I doubt it. I haven't read anything that describes this in unambiguous terms, i.e. "I saw him to it, I did it myself", it's all "they say, they talk about it, it is said that, I heard about it, etc". We could keep the myth going, or somebody just try it for himself, go out and kill a caribou, cut out the stomach and eat it right there on the spot, then write about his experience.