This is part of the Traveling Foods Series, in which I take a look at foods eaten by different kinds of travelers.

In the fall of 1906, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian-born anthropologist, was in a quandary.  He was on an island in the Mackenzie River in far northern Canada, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, waiting for a ship to pick him up.  The cold, dark arctic winter was coming, but unfortunately, the ship was stuck elsewhere in ice and couldn’t get to him.  As he later wrote, “I now found myself, in accord with my own plan, set down two hundred miles north of the polar circle, with a summer suit of clothing, a camera, some notebooks, a rifle, and about two hundred rounds of ammunition, facing an Arctic winter, where my only shelter would have to be the roof of some hospitable Eskimo house.

“These were the ideal conditions for me.”(1)

Stefansson’s goal was to study the Inuit (who used to be called the Eskimo) by living with them.  He survived the winter exactly as he planned it, by living under “the roof of some hospitable Eskimo house” (from the beginning he had doubted that the ship would be able to pick him up).  He lived as the Inuit did, sleeping in their houses, working alongside them, and eating the same food.

In doing so he was able to see just how much food was available to Arctic travelers, if they would stop and look for it.  At that time there were two ways of outfitting an Arctic expedition when it came to food.  The first way was for them to carry everything they needed.  While not much dehydrated food was available in the early 20th century canned foods had been around for decades, and many explorers took canned food with them.  Lots of it, to the point where moving literally tons of food became a logistical nightmare.

The second option Arctic explorers had was the one Stefansson advocated: not taking much food at all, but packing guns and lots of ammunition for hunting.  It might take longer to move through a given area because the group would have to stop and hunt, but they could travel much lighter.

As Stefansson noted, the Arctic areas abounded with meat but had almost no vegetation, which meant that people living off the land would have to eat an all-meat diet.  This was not a problem as the Inuit had been doing this for thousands of years, but there was one important thing to keep in mind: you could not survive purely on lean meat.  You had to eat some fatty meat too.

The Inuit called it “rabbit starvation,” not because the rabbits starved (and there were rabbits that far north) but because you could die from eating nothing but rabbit, which had lean meat.  As Stefansson wrote, those on an all-rabbit diet kept eating more and more food but never seemed to be full.  They ate meals that were three to four times the size of normal meals but, because of the diet of nothing but lean meat, showed “both signs of starvation and of protein poisoning.”  Death came within a few weeks; in fact, Stefansson pointed out that someone living on nothing but water would die at about the same time as someone attempting to survive on rabbit meat and water. (2)

When Stefansson returned from his explorations he publicly advocated an all-meat diet, which was quite different from what most Americans believed would be healthy.  To prove the benefits of his diet he and another member of an Arctic expedition went through an experiment, monitored by researchers, in which they ate nothing but meat for a year.  This was, of course, a low-carb diet taken to the extreme, but the two men ended the year as healthy as they were when they started—and at about the same weight.  Later in his life Stefansson began to feel run down so he went back to the all-meat diet and, he said, lost weight, regained energy, and some of his aches and pains went away.

I should probably mention here that the classic food food used by polar explorers was a food that came from Native Americans called pemmican.  Pemmican was a mixture of lean dried meat, animal fat (usually bear fat), and dried berries.  Stefansson recommended a ratio of 1 ⅓ pound lean meat to half a pound of fat, pre-cooked weights.  Mixing the two materials apparently kept spoilage from happening very quickly, and pemmican was high in both protein and calories, which explorers needed.

(1) My Life with the Eskimo, by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943), 2.

(2) Arctic Manual, by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), 233-234.