Consummate dilettantism!

Monday, August 10, 2009

Real Men Eat Meat And Nothing But Meat

Check this guy out:
The earliest and primary proponent of an all animal-based diet was Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian explorer who lived with the Inuit for some time and who witnessed their diet as essentially consisting of meat and fish, with very few carbohydrates during the summer in the form of berries. Stefansson and a friend later volunteered for a one year experiment at Bellevue Hospital in New York to prove that he could thrive on a diet of nothing but meat, meat fat and internal organs of animals. His progress was closely monitored and experiments were done on his health throughout the year. At the end of the year, he did not show any symptoms of ill health; he did not develop scurvy, which many scientists had expected to manifest itself only a few months into the diet due to the lack of Vitamin C in muscle meat. However, Stefansson and his partner did not eat just muscle meat - they ate fat, raw brain, raw liver (a significant source of vitamin C and others), and other varieties of offal. It is believed that ketosis prevents the depletion of vitamin C from the body by stabilising blood sugar.
Man up, bitches; it's raw brain from here on out. Chillin' with the Inuit eating only bloody caribou? That's some hardcore shit right there.

Seriously, though -- nothing but animal? For a year? In the name of science?! Jesus Christ, that's pretty fucking beast. (But with a name like "Vilhjalmur Stefansson", what would you expect?)

Speaking of the Inuit, here are their thoughts on the matter:
The Inuit ate primarily caribou meat, “with perhaps 30 percent fish, 10 percent seal meat and 5 or 10 percent made up of polar bear, rabbits, birds and eggs.” The Inuit considered vegetables and fruit “not proper human food but they occasionally ate the roots of the knotweed plaint in times of dire necessity.”
"[N]ot proper human food" is right -- we're not rabbits. More on this here:
My host was the seal-hunter whom we had first approached on the ice (...). [His wife] boiled some seal-meat for me, but she had not boiled any fat, for she did not know whether I preferred the blubber boiled or raw. They always cut it in small pieces and ate it raw themselves; but the pot still hung over the lamp, and anything she put into it would be cooked in a moment. When I told her that my tastes quite coincided with hers--as, in fact, they did--she was delighted. People were much alike, then, after all, though they came from a great distance. She would, accordingly, treat me exactly as if I were one of their own people come to visit them from afar...

When we had entered the house the boiled pieces of seal-meat had already been taken out of the pot and lay steaming on a side-board. On being assured that my tastes in food were not likely to differ from theirs, my hostess picked out for me the lower joint of a seal's fore leg, squeezed it firmly between her hands to make sure nothing should later drip from it, and handed it to me, along with her own copper-bladed knife; the next most desirable piece was similarly squeezed and handed to her husband, and others in turn to the rest of the family....

Our meal was of two courses: the first, meat; the second, soup. The soup is made by pouring cold seal blood into the boiling broth immediately after the cooked meat has been taken out of the pot, and stirring briskly until the whole comes nearly (but never quite) to a boil. This makes a soup of thickness comparable to our English pea-soups, but if the pot be allowed to come to a boil, the blood will coagulate and settle to the bottom...
Seal blood soup -- sounds delish!

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