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Eskimo Diet

How did the Eskimos feed themselves? Today, the Eskimo has the double-edged “benefit” of modern civilization, so we have to go back to quite old studies, archives, and records. Anne Keenleyside is a Canadian researcher with special interest in paleopathology, the analysis of ancient bones. She found that, with virtually no vegetation in their environment and winter temperatures dropping to below –40 deg F, the Eskimos had to rely almost entirely on animal sources for their food. Dr. Keenleyside and many other researchers have built up a picture of the traditional Eskimo feeding pattern. Eskimos hunted fish, seal, whale, walrus, musk ox, caribou, polar bears, wolves, birds, rabbits, ducks, and geese. They ate every part of the animal—brains, blood, intestines and even the feces. On occasion, the women would gather eggs, crabs, mollusks, and shellfish.

The Eskimos were particularly fond of the rather sour contents of the caribou paunch. These are the partly digested remains of lichens and mosses. They cut the blubber off the kill for use as lighting oil and other external uses. They ate most animal food raw, sometimes after considerable putrefaction. Other foods, particularly seal meat, were eaten frozen. Some foods were lightly cooked over a seal-oil lamp or boiled or roasted. Because the Eskimo lives above the tree line, a campfire was a rare luxury fed by dried seaweed and other dried plant remains. In times of plenty, the Eskimo could consume prodigious amounts of meat: 9 pounds in a day has been measured as a normal occurrence. They drank prodigious amounts of water too (we will see why later when we discuss acid/alkali balance). It was only in the short summer that the Eskimo ate any plant food. The treeless plains of the Arctic have a permanently frozen subsoil, known as tundra, and no plants grow more than knee high. The women would forage for berries, roots, stalks, buds, and leaves. They gathered some kinds of algae and seaweed too. It is estimated, however, that plant food represented no more than about 5% of the diet, even during the growing season.

The muscle meat of seal and whale shares similar characteristics with our ancestral wild game—there is little “marbling,” or fat permeating the muscle. The small amount of muscle fat and the visible fat (blubber) are particularly rich in a essential fatty acids (EFAs), notably one called eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA).

Dr. George Mann, in a report for the U.S. National Defense Committee in 1962, stated that by eating all the animal parts, the Eskimo obtained enough of the “classic” micronutrients to survive including vitamin C. This might come as a surprise, since we think of vitamin C as only coming from plants. However, the skin and guts of animals like seal and caribou are also rich in this vitamin. On the other hand, the Eskimo diet was very deficient in “background” micronutrients. [Deadly Harvest ]