Adventures in Diet By Vilhjalmur Stefannson

[Guest guest]

The classic article written by the Arctic explorer who spent time with

the Eskimos and shared their all-meat diet. He later replicated the

diet as an experiment in 1928 at the Bellevue Hospital in New York for

a year with great success.

 

Originally pulished in Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935.

 

http://www.powerhealth.net/articles/adventuresindietpart1.htm

 

In 1906 I went to the Artic with the food tastes and beliefs of the

average American. By 1918, after eleven years as an Eskimo among

Eskimos, I had learned things which caused me to shed most of those

beliefs. Ten years later I began to realize that what I had learned

was going to influence materially the sciences of medicine and

dietetics. However. what finally impressed the scientists and

converted many during the last two or three years, was a series of

confirmatory experiments upon myself and a colleague performed at

Bellevue Hospital, New York City, under the supervision of a committee

representing several universities and other organizations.

 

Not so long ago the following dietetic beliefs were common: To be

healthy you need a varied diet, composed of elements from both the

animal and vegetable kingdoms. You got tired of and eventually felt a

revulsion against things if you had to eat them often. This latter

belief was supported by stories of people who through force of

circumstances had been compelled, for instance, to live for two weeks

on sardines and crackers and who, according to the stories, had sworn

that so long as they lived they never would touch sardines again. The

Southerners had it that nobody can eat a quail a day for thirty days.

 

There were subsidiary dietetic views. It was desirable to eat fruits

and vegetables, including nuts and coarse grains. The less meat you

ate the better for you. If you ate a good deal of it, you would

develop rheumatism, hardening of the arteries, and high blood

pressure, with a tendency to breakdown of the kidneys - in short,

premature old age. An extreme variant had it that you would live more

healthy, happily, and longer if you became a vegetarian.

 

Specifically it was believed, when our field studies began, that

without vegetables in your diet you would develop scurvy. It was a

" known fact " that sailors, miners, and explorers frequently died of

scurvy " because they did not have vegetables and fruits. " This was

long before Vitamin C was publicized.

 

The addition of salt to food was considered either to promote health

or to be necessary for health. This is proved by various yarns, such

as that African tribes make war on one another to get salt; that minor

campaigns of the American Civil War were focused on salt mines; and

that all herbivorous animals are ravenous for salt. I do not remember

seeing a critical appendix to any of these views, suggesting for

instance, that Negro tribes also make war about things which no one

ever said were biological essentials of life; that tobacco was a

factor in Civil War campaigns without being a dietetic essential; and

that members of the deer family in Maine which never have salt or show

desire for it, are as healthy as those in Montana which devour

quantities of it and are forever seeking more.

 

A belief I was destined to find crucial in my Artic work, making the

difference between success and failure, life and death, was the view

that man cannot live on meat alone. The few doctors and dietitians who

thought you could were considered unorthodox if not charlatans. The

arguments ranged from metaphysics to chemistry: Man was not intended

to be carnivorous - you knew that from examining his teeth, his

stomach, and the account of him in the Bible. As mentioned, he would

get scurvy if head no vegetables in meat. The kidneys would be ruined

by overwork. There would be protein poisoning and, in general hell to

pay.

 

With these views in my head and, deplorably, a number of others like

them, I resigned my position as assistant instructor in anthropology

at Harvard to become anthropologist of a polar expedition. Through

circumstances and accidents which are not a part of the story, I found

myself that autumn the guest of the Mackenzie River Eskimos.

 

The Hudson's Bay Company, whose most northerly post was at Fort

Macpherson two hundred miles to the south had had little influence on

the Eskimos during more than half a century; for it was only some of

them who made annual visits to the trading post; and then they

purchased no food but only tea, tobacco, ammunition and things of that

sort. But in 1889 the whaling fleet had begun to cultivate these

waters and for fifteen years there had been close association with

sometimes as many as a dozen ships and four to five hundred men

wintering at Herschel Island, just to the west of the delta. During

this time a few of the Eskimos had learned some English and perhaps

one in ten of them had grown to a certain extent fond of white man's

foods.

 

But now the whaling fleet was gone because the bottom had dropped out

of the whalebone market, and the district faced and old-time winter of

fish and water. The game, which might have supplemented the fish some

years earlier, had been exterminated or driven away by the intensive

hunting that supplied meat to the whaling fleet. There was a little

tea, but not nearly enough to see the Eskimos through the winter -

this was the only element of the white man's dietary of which they

were really fond and the lack of which would worry them. So I was

facing a winter of fish without tea. for the least I could do, an

uninvited guest, was to pretend a dislike for it.

 

The issue of fish and water against fish and teas was, in any case, to

me six against a half dozen. For I had had a prejudice against fish

all my life. I had nibbled at it perhaps once or twice a year at

course dinners, always deciding that it was as bad as I thought. This

was pure psychology of course but I did not realize it.

 

I was in a measure adopted into an Eskimo family the head of which

knew English. He had grown up as a cabin boy on a whaling ship and was

called Roxy, though his name was Memoranna. It was early September, we

were living in tents, the days were hot but it had begun to freeze

during the nights, which were now dark for six to eight hours.

 

The community of three or four families, fifteen or twenty

individuals, was engaged in fishing. With long poles, three or four

nets were shoved out from the beach about one hundred yards apart.

When the last net was out the first would be pulled in, with anything

from dozens to hundreds of fish, mostly ranging in weight from one to

three pounds, and including some beautiful salmon trout. From

knowledge of other white men the Eskimos consider these to be most

suitable for me and would cook them specially, roasting them against

the fire. They themselves ate boiled fish.

 

Trying to develop an appetite, my habit was to get up soon after

daylight, say four o'clock, shoulder my rifle, and go off after

breakfasts on a hunt south across the rolling prairie, though I

scarcely expected to find any game. About the middle of the afternoon

I would return to camp. Children at play usually saw me coming and

reported to Roxy's wife, who would then put a fresh salmon trout to

roast. When I got home I would nibble at it and write in my diary what

a terrible time I was having.

 

Against my expectation, and almost against my will, I was beginning to

like the baked salmon trout when one day of perhaps the second week I

arrived home without the children having seen me coming. There was no

baked fish ready but the camp was sitting round troughs of boiled

fish. I joined them and, to my surprise, liked it better than the

baked. There after the special cooking ceased and I ate boiled fish

with the Eskimos.

 

II

 

By midwinter I had left my cabin-boy host and, for the purposes of

anthropological study, was living with a less sophisticated family at

the eastern edge of the Mackenzie delta. Our swelling was a house of

wood and earth, heated and lighted with Eskimo-style lamps. They

burned seal or whale oil, mostly white whale from a hunt of the

previous spring when the fat had been stored in bags and preserved,

although the lean meat had been eaten. Our winter cooking however, was

not done over the lamps but on a sheet-iron stove which had been

obtained from whalers. There were twenty-three of us living in one

room, and there were sometimes as many as ten visitors. The floor was

then so completely covered with sleepers that the stove had to be

suspended from the ceiling. The temperature at night was round 60*F.

The ventilation was excellent through cold air coming up slowly from

below by way of a trap door that was never closed and the heated air

going out by a ventilator in the roof.

 

Everyone slept completely naked - no pajama or night shirts. We used

cotton or woolen blankets which had been obtained from the whalers and

from the Hudson's Bay Company

 

In the morning, about seven o'clock, winter-caught fish, frozen so

hard that they would break like glass, were brought in to lie on the

floor till they began to soften a little. One of the women would pinch

them every now and then until, when she found her finger indented them

slightly, she would begin preparations for breakfast. First she cut

off the head and put them aside to be boiled for the children in the

afternoon (Eskimos are fond of children and heads are considered the

best part of the fish). Next best are the tails, which are cut off and

saved for the children also. The woman would then slit the skin along

the back and also along the belly and getting hold with her teeth,

would strip the fish somewhat as we peel a banana, only sideways where

we peel bananas, endways.

 

Thus prepared, the fish were put on dished and passed around. Each of

us took one and gnawed it about as an American does corn on the cob.

An American leaves the cob; similarly we ate the flesh from the

outside of the fish, not touching the entrails. When we had eaten as

much as we chose, we put the rest on a tray for dog feed.

 

After breakfast all the men and about half the women would go fishing,

the rest of the women staying at home to keep house. About eleven

o'clock we came back for a second meal of frozen fish just like the

breakfast. At about four in the afternoon the working day was over and

we came home to a meal of hot boiled fish.

 

Also we came home to a dwelling so heated by the cooking that the

temperature would range from 85* to 100*F. or perhaps even higher -

more like our idea of a Turkish bath than a warm room. Streams of

perspiration would run down our bodies, and the children were kept

busy going back and forth with dippers of cold water of which we

naturally drank great quantities.

 

Just before going to sleep we would have a cold snack of fish that had

been left over from dinner. Then we slept seven or eight hours and the

routine of the day began once more.

 

After some three months as a guest of the Eskimos I had acquired most

of their food tastes. I had to agree that fish is better boiled than

cooked any other way, and that the heads (which we occasionally shared

with the children) were the best part of the fish. I no longer desired

variety in the cooking, such as occasional baking - I preferred it

always boils if it was cooked. I had become as fond of raw fish as if

I had been a Japanese. I like fermented (therefore slightly acid)

whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive

oil with a salad. But I still had two reservations against Eskimo

practice; I did not eat rotten fish and I longed for salt with my

meals.

 

There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had been

protected by longs from animals but not from heat and was outright

rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October and later

catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There was less of

the August fish than of any other and, for that reason among the rest,

it was a delicacy - eaten sometimes as a snack between meals,

sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw.

 

In midwinter it occurred to me to philosophize that in our own and

foreign lands taste for a mild cheese is somewhat plebeian; it is at

least a semi-truth that connoisseurs like their cheeses progressively

stronger. The grading applies to meats,. as in England where it is

common among nobility and gentry to like game and pheasant so high

that the average Midwestern American or even Englishman of a lower

class, would call them rotten.

 

I knew of course that, while it is good form to eat decayed milk

products and decayed game, it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. I

knew also that the view of our populace that there are likely to be

" ptomaines " in decaying fish and in the plebeian meats; but it struck

me as an improbable extension of the class-consciousness that

ptomaines would avoid the gentleman's food and attack that of a

commoner.

 

These thoughts led to a summarizing query; If it is almost a mark of

social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight

face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste

to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with

several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory

servers, like it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the

next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.

 

About the fourth month of my first Eskimo winter I was looking forward

to every meal (rotten or fresh), enjoying them, and feeling

comfortable when they were over. Still I kept thinking the boiled fish

would taste better if only I had salt. From the beginning of my Eskimo

residence I had suffered from this lack. On one of the first few days,

with the resourcefulness of a Boy Scout, I had decided to make myself

some salt, and had boiled sea water till there was left only a scum of

brown powder. If I had remembered as vividly my freshman chemistry as

I did the books about shipwrecked adventurers, I should have know in

advance that the sea contains a great many chemicals besides sodium

chloride, among them iodine. The brown scum tasted bitter rather than

salty. A better chemist could no doubt have refined the product. I

gave it up, partly through the persuasion of my host, the English

speaking Roxy.

 

The Mackenzie Eskimos, Roxy told me, believe that what is good for

grown people is good for children and enjoyed by them as soon as they

get used to it. Accordingly they teach the use of tobacco when a child

is very young . It then grows to maturity with the idea that you can't

get along without tobacco. But, said Roxy, the whalers have told that

many whites get along without it and he had himself seen white men who

never use it, while the few white women, wives of captains, none used

tobacco. (This, remember, was in 1906.)

 

Now Roxy had heard that white people believe that salt is good for,

and even necessary for children; so they begin early to add salt to

the child's food. That child then would grow up with the same attitude

toward salt as an Eskimo has toward tobacco. However, said Roxy, since

we Eskimos were mistaken in thinking tobacco so necessary, may it be

that the white men are mistaken about salt? Pursuing the argument, he

concluded that the reason why all Eskimos dislike salted food and all

white men like it was not racial but due to custom. You could then,

break the salt habit as easily as the tobacco habit and you would

suffer no ill result beyond the mental discomfort of the first few

days or weeks.

 

Roxy did not know, but I did as an anthropologist, that in

preColumbian times salt was unknown or the taste of it disliked and

the use of it avoided through much of North and South America. It may

possibly be true that the carnivorous Eskimos in whose language the

word salty, mamaitok, is synonymous with with evil-tasting, disliked

salt more intensely than those Indians who were partly herbivorous.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the salt habit spread more slowly

through the New World from the Europeans than the tobacco habit

through Europe from the Indians. Even to-day there are considerable

areas, for instance in the Amazon basin, where the natives still abhor

salt. Not believing that the races differ in their basic natures, I

felt inclined to agree with Roxy that the practice of slating food is

with us a social inheritance and the belief in its merits a part of

our folklore.

 

Through this philosophizing I was somewhat reconciled to going without

salt, but I was nevertheless, overjoyed when one day Ovayuak, my new

host in the eastern delta, came indoors to say that a dog team was

approaching which he believed to be that of Ilavinirk, a man who had

worked with whalers and who possessed a can of salt. Sure enough, it

was Ilavinirk, and he was delighted to give me the salt, a half-pound

baking-powder can about half full, which he said he had been carrying

around for two or three years, hoping sometime to meet someone who

would like it for a present. He seemed almost as pleased to find that

I wanted the salt as I was to get it. I sprinkled some on my boiled

fish, enjoyed it tremendously, and wrote in my diary that it was the

best meal I had had all winter. Then I put the can under my pillow, in

the Eskimo way of keeping small and treasured things. But at the next

meal I had almost finished eating before I remembered the salt.

Apparently then my longing for it had been what you might call

imaginary. I finished without salt, tried it at one or two meals

during the next few days and thereafter left it untouched. When we

moved camp the salt remained behind.

 

After the return of the sun I made a journey of several hundred miles

to the ship Narwhal which, contrary to our expectations of the late

summer, had really come in and wintered at Herschel Island. The

captain was George P. Leavitt, of Portland, Maine. For the few days of

my visit I enjoyed the excellent New England cooking, but when I left

Herschel Island I returned without reluctance to the Eskimo meals of

fish and cold water. It seemed to me that, mentally and physically, I

had never been in better health in my life.

 

III

 

During the first few months of my first year in the Artic, I acquired,

though I did not at the time fully realize it, the munitions of fact

and experience which have within my own mind defeated those views of

dietetics reviewed at the beginning of this article. I could be

healthy on a diet of fish and water. The longer I followed it the

better I liked it, which meant, at least inferentially and

provisionally, that you never become tired of your food if you have

only one thing to eat. I did not get scurvy on the fish diet nor learn

that any of my fish-eating friends ever had it. Nor was the freedom

from scurvy due to the fish being eaten raw - we proved that later.

(What it was due to we shall deal with in the second article of this

series.) There were certainly no signs of hardening of the arteries

and high blood pressure, of breakdown of the kidneys or of rheumatism.

 

These months on fish were the beginning of several years during which

I lived on an exclusive meat diet. For I count in fish when I speak of

living on meat, using " meat " and " meat diet " more as a professor of

anthropology than as the editor of a housekeeping magazine. The term

in this article and in like scientific discussions refers to a diet

from which all things of the vegetable kingdom are absent.

 

To the best of my estimate then, I have lived in the Artic for more

than five years exclusively on meat and water. (This was not, of

course, one five-year stretch, but an aggregate of that much time

during ten years.) One member of my expeditions, Storker Storkersen,

lived on an exclusive meat diet for about the same length of time

while there are several who have lived on it from one to three years.

These have been of many nationalities and of three races - ordinary

European whites; natives of the Cape Verde Islands, who had a large

percentage of negro blood; and natives of the South Sea Islands.

Neither from experience with my own men nor from what I have heard of

similar cases do I find any racial difference. There are marked

individual differences.

 

The typical method of breaking a party in to a meat diet is that three

of five of us leave in midwinter a base camp which has nearly or quite

the best type of European mixed diet that money and forethought can

provide. The novices have been told that it is possible to live on

meat alone. We warn them that it is hard to get used to for the first

few weeks, but assure them that eventually they will grow to like it

and that any difficulties in changing diets will be due to their

imagination.

 

These assertions the men will believe to a varying degree. I have a

feeling that in the course of breaking in something like twenty

individuals; two or three young men believed me completely, and that

this belief collaborated strongly with their youth and adaptability in

making them take readily to the meat.

 

Usually I think, the men believe that what I tell of myself is true

for me personally, but that I am peculiar, a freak - that a normal

person will not react similarly, and that they are going to be normal

and have an awful time. Their past experience seems to tell them that

if you eat one thing every day you are bound to tire of it. In the

back of their minds there is also what they have read and heard about

the necessity for a varied diet. They have specific fears of

developing the ailments which they have heard of as caused by meat or

prevented by vegetables.

 

We secure our food in the Artic by hunting and in midwinter there is

not enough good hunting light. Accordingly we carry with us from the

base camp provisions for several weeks, enough to take us into the

long days. During this time, as we travel away from shore, we

occasionally kill a seal or a polar bear and eat their meat along with

our groceries. Our men like these as an element of a mixed diet as

well as you do beef or mutton.

 

We are not on rations. We eat all we want and we feed the dogs what we

think is good for them. When the traveling conditions are right we

usually have two big meals a day, morning and evening, but when we are

storm bound or delayed by open water we eat several meals to pass the

time away. At the end of four, six or eight weeks at sea, we have used

up all our food. We do not try to save a few delicacies to eat with

the seal and bear, for experience has proved that such things are only

tantalizing.

 

Suddenly, then we are on nothing but seal. For while our food at sea

averages ten percent polar bear there may be months in which we don't

see a bear. The men go at the seal loyally; they are volunteers and

whatever the suffering, they have bargained for it and intend to grin

and bear it. For a day or two they eat square meals. Then the appetite

begins to flag and they discover as they had more than half expected,

that for them personally it is going to be a hard pull or a failure.

Some own up that they can't eat, while others pretend to have good

appetites, enlisting the surreptitious help of a dog to dispose fo

their share. In extreme cases, which are usually those of the

middle-aged and conservative they go two or three days practically or

entirely without eating. We had no weighing apparatus; but I take it

that some have lost anything from ten to twenty pounds, what with the

hard work on empty stomachs. They become gloomy and grouchy and, as I

once wrote, " They begin to say to each other, and sometimes to me,

things about their judgment in joining a polar expedition that I

cannot quote. "

 

But after a few days even the conservatives begin to nibble at the

seal meat, after a few more they are eating a good deal of it, rather

under protest and at the end of three or four weeks they are eating

square meals, though still talking about their willingness to give a

soul or right arm for this or that. Amusingly, or perhaps

instructively, the often long for ham and eggs or corned beef when,

according to theory, they ought to be longing for vegetables and

fruits. Some of them do hanker particularly for things like sauerkraut

or orange juice; but more usually it is for hot cakes an syrup or

bread and butter.

 

There are two ways in which to look at an abrupt change of diet - how

difficult it is to get used to what you have to eat and how hard it is

to be deprived of things you are used to and like. From the second

angle, I take it to be physiologically significant that we have found

our people, when deprived, to long equally for things which have been

considered necessities of health, such as salt; for things where a

drug addiction is is considered to be involved, such as tobacco, and

for items of that class of so-called staple foods, such as bread.

 

It has happened on several trips, and with an aggregate of perhaps

twenty men, that they have had to break at one time their salt,

tobacco, and bread habits. I have frequently tried the experiment of

asking which they would prefer; salt for their meal, bread with it, or

tobacco for an after-dinner smoke. In nearly every case the men have

stopped to consider, nor do I recall that they were ever unanimous.

 

When we are returning to the ship after several months on meat and

water, I usually say that the steward will have orders to cook

separately for each member of the party all he wants of whatever he

wants. Especially during the lat two or three days, there is a great

deal of talk among the novices in the part about what the choices are

to be. One man wants a big dish of mashed potatoes and gravy; another

a gallon of coffee and bread and butter; a third perhaps wants a stack

of hot cakes with syrup and butter.

 

On reaching the ship each does get all he wants of what he wants. The

food tastes good, although not quite so superlative as they had

imagined. They have said they are going to eat a lot and they do. Then

they get indigestion, headache, feel miserable, and within a week, in

nine cases out of ten of those who have been on meat six months or

over, they are willing to go back to meat again. If a man does not

want to take part in a second sledge journey it is usually for a

reason other than the dislike of meat.

 

Still, as just implied, the verdict depends on how long you have been

on the diet. If at the end of the first ten days our men could have

been miraculously rescued from the seal and brought back to their

varied foods, most of them would have sworn forever after that they

were about to die when rescued, and they would have vowed never to

taste seal again - vows which would have been easy to keep for no

doubt in such cases the thought of seal, even years later, would have

been accompanied by a feeling of revulsion. If a man has been on meat

exclusively for only three or four months he may or may not be

reluctant to go back to it again. But if the period has been six

months or over, I remember no one who was unwilling to go back to

meat. Moreover, those who have gone without vegetables for an

aggregate of several years usually thereafter eat a larger percentage

of meat than your average citizen, if they can afford it.