In
1906 I went to the Arctic 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 Arctic 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 he had 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 McPherson
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 an 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 tea 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.
Part 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 dwelling 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 dishes 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 pre-Columbian
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 today 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.
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Part III
During
the first few months of my first year in the Arctic, 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 Arctic 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 into 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 Arctic 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 of 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, they
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 and 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 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 last 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.
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