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Eat Your Environment: Enjoying Greenland’s Local Food

Eat Your Environment. This has been my mantra for the last few years, but it’s only recently taken on a more serious and natural aspect for me. I’m not a scientist or a nutritional therapist or a doctor—I am a chef. I’ve been a chef for nearly four decades, and yet it’s taken until now for me to pull the curtains aside to reveal the bare bones of human evolution and our relationship with diet. I don’t know why it took so long. It all makes so much sense that I’m frankly amazed (and not a little disappointed) that I didn’t spot it before. It is like a bad “whodunit” where the baddie actually turns out to be the one you suspected from the start.

In my career in food, I’ve traveled all over the world—from cruise ships to tiny restaurants to big-event catering to beach-shack barbecues. I’ve cooked everything from terrible, mass-produced food—the cheapest stuff imaginable—to simple but great home-cooked food, to Michelin restau­rant services involving six chefs around each plate, tweezers twitching like we’re all cheffy Edward Scissorhands.

It took an epic adventure to change my en­tire perspective on food: a solo kayak adventure from the south of Greenland to the north along almost the entire west coast. I initially conceived the idea over a beer while I was trying to twist my tongue along the Greenlandic language. Greenlandic is a Scrabble player’s dream (or nightmare, depending on your perspective). The place names of the most southerly and northerly towns in Greenland are liberally sprinkled with ten-point letters—Qaqortoq in the south and Qaanaaq in the north. The anglicized word “kayak” comes from the Greenlandic word for it—qajaq.

By default, living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle means a nomadic lifestyle, moving, usually seasonally, to follow game and optimal hunting and fishing conditions. Up until a few genera­tions ago (before the use of fossil fuel), the Inuit would have had to carry everything they needed themselves—there is not much possibility of using a horse and cart in Greenland—with travel of any distance done by qajaq or umiaq (a larger boat that carried families and cargo). The real star was the qajaq. Without this uniquely designed craft, it would be hard to imagine life in Greenland back then. The qajaq enabled the Inuit to hunt effectively and to search out newer and better hunting grounds. So effective and efficient was the qajaq that its design and practical uses spread worldwide. It is easily the most widely recognized Greenlandic word.

The thought popped into my head: Would it be possible to qajaq from Qaqortoq to Qaanaaq (seven “Q’s”!)? At the time, I had only been kayaking (henceforth called qajaqing) for three years. I have no athletic or army background, and I’d never camped and qajaqed before. I’m very much an ordinary chap. Thankfully, my chef career at that time was taking me away from restaurant work—and the ridiculous work-life balancing act that restaurant jobs entail—into more manageable hours doing pop-ups, talks and demos. So, I talked myself into it, calculating that the distance of three thousand or so kilometers would translate into thirty kilometers of paddling each day for one hundred days (give or take).

A big part of dreaming up the idea of the qajaq expedition was imagining how early qa­jaqers would have survived in their environment with homemade qajaqs made of driftwood and sealed seal skins for the outer covering. I wanted to replicate how those early qajaqers would have lived during such a trip, and obviously, they would not have had canned rations or anything a modern adventurer would be eating. Thus, eat­ing from the environment was the way forward.

HIGH-TECH KITCHENS

I had always been troubled by how reliant a modern kitchen is on technology such as fridges, machines and computers; it felt vaguely unsus­tainable and wrong. However, as with many “Eureka!” moments, living life constantly gets in the way and these important thoughts get stuck on a dusty shelf in the back of your mind. It took a run-in with Environmental Health here in England—which forbade me from making traditional cured salamis and meats because it didn’t fit into their “safe practices” ethos—to make me start seriously and actively question­ing absolutely everything the “authorities” had always drummed into professional chefs and the general public. The questioning was not just in the realm of food, but across the entire spectrum (but that’s for another time).

The whole structure of a modern profes­sional kitchen revolves around the fridge. Constant temperature checks of food and short use-by dates are always over-cautious—insur­ance and litigation considerations being the main drivers of this approach. An obscene and embarrassing amount of food waste occurs (current estimates suggest that a third of food goes into landfills), which is not a sustainable, let alone ethical, way of operating.

How long have fridges been an essential part of our species’ existence? The answer is what we would expect—the tiniest speck in the timeline of our evolution. In Britain in 1963, for example, only 6 percent of households had a fridge. The U.S. reached this figure a decade or two earlier, but it turns out that well within liv­ing memory, fridges weren’t “a thing.” What did we do before their arrival? Nowadays, that is a question that would stump most people, because life without a fridge is almost unthinkable, but I’ll tell you the answer: we preserved. We fer­mented and dried food, we ate foods that now would be discarded and we ate natural foods that develop, through the action of bacteria, into an almost different product from the original—one that is amazingly healthy and full to bursting with awesome bacteria that assist digestion and support mental health, our immune system and virtually every aspect of our existence.

Take raw milk, a virtually unprocessed product that is packed with vitamins, nutrients and beneficial bacteria. We’ve evolved alongside it for thousands of years, so much so that its consumption has assimilated into our physiol­ogy. When fresh, it’s amazing and it doesn’t go off; it evolves into something else. In the past in England, everyone who wasn’t fortunate enough to live close to a dairy consumed clabbered milk. Clabber is essentially a live, totally natural yogurt with a mild taste, and it lasts for a long time. Pasteurized milk, on the other hand, is a dead product, which has had nearly every bit of goodness blasted out of it. When left out, since it has no indigenous population of good bacteria to protect it, it molds and potentially pathogenic bacteria can get to it. This is why pasteurized milk tastes so sour and awful when old. Try it yourself—leave an equal amount of raw milk and pasteurized milk out (with a net cover). After a few days, the raw milk will separate; after straining, you can drink the whey and eat the clabber like yogurt. Whether you put it in the fridge or leave it out, it will still taste deli­cious. The pasteurized milk, on the other hand, will develop a film of mold and taste disgusting.

Despite what Big Food, Big Pharma and all the other “Bigs” would have us believe, people did incredibly well at surviving for thousands of years before modern industrial practices—food labeling, procedures promising to “kill 99.9 per­cent of all bacteria,” extreme sanitization, tem­perature checks, antibiotics, supplements and ultra-processed food—came along to rescue us.

FERMENTED OR ROTTEN?

You might think it would be fairly easy to distinguish between fermented and rotten food, but it really isn’t—at all. A large part of my re­search and experiments with food involve trying to find out not where that line lies but if there is a safe-to-eat line between fermented and rotten at all. Several times when I thought I was get­ting nearer to an answer, that line moved farther away. I also believe that the only way to truly get under the hood on this topic is to experience the foods first-hand—the visceral experience of smelling, feeling and tasting these foods in the presence of people who truly understand them is absolutely essential to getting a grasp on it.

But let’s start with a recognized definition of fermentation. Usually, it goes something like this: “the controlled and beneficial action of bacteria on foodstuffs to enhance flavor and extend shelf-life in a safe manner.”

“Enhance” is a very subjective word, however. To start with, the actual response of “disgust” and “pleasure” when it comes to food is very much a learned response. It’s not hardwired into us as a species at all. Look at the foods kids hate; most of those, over time, will turn into foods they really like. Kids usu­ally despise the stronger tasting stuff—blue cheese, anchovies, chili, seafood and anything fermented (except maybe chocolate, but that’s almost always loaded with more sugar than ac­tual cacao and doesn’t count)—whereas plenty of adults prize these foods.

Look, too, at cultural differences. A favorite pastime of many countries is to make fun of what people eat in other countries. Children of indigenous peoples often eat exactly what the parents eat (and before they get it, it’s often regurgitated after being chewed thoroughly); they don’t have a problem eating what we in the West would consider “extreme” foods. The actual taste and/or smell is totally subjective.

Salt is an important aspect of fermentation in all styles of well-known ferments. Lactic acid bacteria (probably the most common type of bacteria used in popular ferments) are halophilic—meaning they like a salty environ­ment—which gives them a massive advantage over other bacteria that may want to muscle in on the food. In Greenland, however, one of the things that immediately strikes you is the lack of trees. Why is that important in the context of salt and fermentation? The lack of trees makes wood very scarce, which means that fires and the fuel to keep them going are hard to come by—and thus, no heating of seawater to make salt to preserve food. Historically, there would have been driftwood from Newfoundland and Canada, but the supply would have been incon­sistent and fairly rare.

So, how did the Inuit preserve food? Despite Greenland being in the Arctic, the temperature isn’t always freezing cold, so freezing food to preserve it through super-low temperatures wasn’t a viable long-term option. The answer is that they just kept the food, often for months on end. Most people with a traditional Western mindset would not touch that food, as is evidenced by many polar archives. When presented with two-year-old caribou meat, for example, European explorers and whalers refused to eat it, swearing that it was the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen. Instead, they carried on eating their canned food (often contaminated by lead), slowly dying by the dozen as a result, while the Inuit tucked into their food with gusto, with zero ill effects and plenty of clear benefits. This type of food is something I’ve now eaten many times, with no bad results.

Is this food fermented? It is—but it’s way beyond any classical ferments such as sauerkraut or kimchi. One key difference is that with the classic ferments, the fermentation process is arrested by putting it in the fridge when it reaches the desired taste, whereas fermented seal just has to keep going. Moreover, there are no particularly special pro­cesses involved; the only rule seems to be keeping the fermenting food out of direct sunlight. Another key factor, which isn’t really a conscious consideration for indigenous people (because historically, there was no other option except to use what nature provided), is the use of natural materials—mostly skins or woven fibers. Indigenous people developed and used naturally occurring materials and processes to provide them with long-life food. It seems that nature provided all the right tools for humans to survive, even in extreme environments such as Greenland. Perhaps during the immense amount of time we’ve spent on the planet, we’ve simply evolved hand in hand with everything else, so that we’re all a small but significant cog in the gears of the world (see James Lovelock and Gaia).

The rare times when people get sick are when they don’t follow these natural processes. Unfortunately, this is often the result of outsid­ers changing a process because it doesn’t fit within the parameters of their idea of how food should be made. A classic example is insisting on using man-made materials such as plastic, glass or rubber to wrap food because they’re “easier to clean” or “more sterile,” though they also tend to exclude the oxygen that seems to be a big factor in why these foods are safe to eat.

Where does this leave us in the quest to find the line between fermented and rotten? Climatic and environmental factors, coupled with location, time of year, weather patterns and more mundane issues such as ease of transport and availability of contain­ers and salt all have a strong influence on the outcome of any particular preserved food, be it sauerkraut or fermented seal. Even very differ­ent fermentation methods can produce results that are safe to eat.

In considering indigenous methods of preserving food, it’s worth noting that it is not just the Inuit who widely used a stripped-back method of preserving meat. There are hundreds of examples of indigenous peoples in the trop­ics using similar methods to preserve meat. As Western culture chips away at the ancient prac­tices of traditional hunter-gatherers, however, they are becoming fewer and farther between.

Numerous studies have shown that en­ergy—and the preservation of energy—is para­mount to hunter-gatherers, and that principle would seem to extend to this way of preserving meat as well. When presented with a fresh kill (say, an antelope), there are many instances where the hunter-gatherer will stash the meat underground or hang it up out of the way of other predators and let the bacteria do their thing— often for a week or more. Said meat will not be desirable at all to the average city dweller, but for the hunter-gatherer, the bacteria have been working at that meat, effectively predigesting it and making the nutrients more easily bioavail­able. What a great way of preserving energy! Not only do the bacteria get a meal, but the hunter gets a meal that is much more effective and doesn’t involve a huge expenditure of en­ergy to break the meat down to digest it.

Why is it that in Europe and America, we don’t use this ancient way of preserving meat? The answer is that we used to. It’s how we sur­vived and evolved, but in our constant quest to make life easier, we have changed our entire approach to food. On our journey of moving into agriculture and creating cities with sup­port networks, mass-produced food and con­venience, we have managed to forget our entire evolutionary journey with food.

AN UNRECOGNIZABLE MICROBIOME

In our modern world, food production has been so sanitized that bacteria are virtually wiped out and play no part. We have managed to alter the average person’s ability to process dif­fering degrees of bacterially altered food. Our bodies struggle to metabolize food subjected to so many processes and chemicals, which puts extra pressure on our immune system and compromises our health.

Our gut microbiome has been weakened to such an extent that it would be unrecognizable when compared to our forebears’ microbiome. This particular point is very important—over the course of several generations, the gut mi­crobiome has become seriously depleted in the majority of people. The relationship that humans have had with bacteria over hundreds of thousands of years has, in less than one hundred years, irrevocably changed. The scale of this change is hard to overemphasize. The food we eat today would be unrecognizable to our great-grandparents, let alone our ancestors from way back.

As humans, we cannot evolve quickly enough to adapt to this new human diet. It took over twelve thousand years of dairy consump­tion for us to adapt to that particular food, and large parts of the global population still can’t process it effectively. Imagine how that is now working out for us and our “new” foods, laden as they are with chemicals, sugar and numerous man-made additions. You don’t have to look any further than our overstretched and increasingly crisis-ridden health care systems. Global health has been declining rapidly for the last century, and even faster since World War Two. Obesity levels are catastrophically high, which is one of the first indicators that over the next several decades we are going to see an unprecedented health crisis.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

The more I looked into fermentation and ancestral ways of preserving food, the more “hooked” I became. As the pieces fell into place, my research took me away from Europe, first heading north to Scandinavia and then across the Atlantic. It seemed that the more extreme the environment, the more the methods of preserv­ing food became inventive and extreme.

My first stop was the Faroe Islands. The national dish, skerpikjøt, is lamb that has been fermented for six months or more—no salt or brine, just left out in ventilated sheds. It takes on an incredibly rich (and strong) flavor. Next up was Iceland and hakarl (fermented Greenlandic shark). With a super strong ammoniac smell and taste, it’s often taken with a shot of hard liquor (brennivín) to take the edge off. Keeping on the ammonia theme, Iceland also has a Christmas dish of fermented skate (translated as “rotten skate”).

The Faroe Islands and Iceland were first populated by Scandinavians (although in some places, the Irish were there first) from around 600 AD. The next landmass on my ferment­ing journey westward was Greenland. The Scandinavians did indeed get there around one thousand years ago, but they had been beaten to it by the Inuit. Traveling downward from both Canada and Siberia, several waves of Inuit had populated the coastal areas over several thousand years. The Greenlandic Norse only lasted about four hundred years before disappearing sometime in the fifteenth century, probably due to a combination of a mini ice age and the presence of more enticing prospects (timber and metals, to name but two) across the water in North America.

The Inuit toughed it out and not only survived, but thrived. Today, Greenland has around a 90 percent indigenous population base. Despite colonization by the Danish from 1721 on, Greenland largely has managed to hang on to its indigenous culture and food traditions, meaning that it is still possible to see its incredible food techniques and foods today. In most other areas of the world, these traditions have mostly disappeared. It is vitally important that this knowledge be kept and taught to younger generations, particularly given that Greenland’s traditions result in some of the most powerful and nutritious food it’s possible to eat.

KIVIAQ

The rather incredible food of kiviaq is, to me, the Holy Grail of food preservation. I constantly refer back to it when food (and/or life) seems to be getting complicated. Every April, little auk seabirds—black and white birds about the size of a partridge—gather by the millions on the sides of the mountains way up north in Greenland. They were my constant companions on the water as I qajaqed northward across the treacherous Melville Bay. Hunters catch them by swooping nets on long poles through the flying mass of birds. They are dispatched by pressing on their hearts to stop them.

To make kiviaq, the fully intact birds (feathers, guts, heads and legs still attached) are then packed tightly inside a seal—the seal’s insides having been removed to make way for anywhere between three and five hundred little auks. Some swear by adding extra chunks of seal fat in with the birds. The seal is then sewn up and placed underground or in a covered wooden box for several months. When unearthed and opened up, the birds look like wet, black rags. To eat kiviaq, you pick (or rather wipe away) the feathers and pull the flesh off with your fingers. You also bite the back of the skull off and suck the brains and eyes out. Depend­ing on the degree of fermentation, the meat varies from pulling off like a long and slow-cooked hunk of meat to being softer, like a paté that can be smeared off and eaten with a finger. Of course, the guts are fair game as well.

What does kiviaq taste like? For me, every fermented meat that I’ve eaten can be best likened to a super-strong blue cheese, one that takes a layer of skin off the roof of your mouth. The smell is stronger than the taste, but it’s not unpleasant and it gets better the more you eat. In Savissivik, the first settlement after Melville Bay, I downed three of the little fellas, which really set me up for the final three hundred fifty kilometers to Qaanaaq. I’ve never had any adverse side effects (which is most use­ful when you’re zipped up in a dry suit an hour or so away from land).

DIETARY CULTURE CLASH

Although Greenland is geographically large, it has a small population of around fifty-seven thousand. The entire population would comfortably fit into the sports stadium of most large cities. Of this total number, around eigh­teen thousand live in Nuuk, the capital, and the rest are spread mostly across the west coast, with only a few thousand on the east coast. There are no roads connecting the settlements, and the only way to visit is by boat, plane or helicopter. Because of this remoteness, the Greenlandic are great users of social media, and a much higher percentage of the population watches the nightly news than in most other countries. Thus, despite each settlement’s physical isolation, the people are more connected to each other than most people in the world’s cities.

As mentioned, Greenland has been con­trolled by Denmark for the last three hundred years, and this colonization threads compre­hensively throughout Greenlandic culture and lifestyles. There has been a historical narrative of denigrating the native diet—with the tra­ditional foods often described as “savage” or “primitive.” Wherever in the world a colonizing power attempts to convert the native population to its own particular brand of culture—whether religion, lifestyle, fashion or diet—the template is always the same.

In Greenland, the people survived and thrived for thousands of years on mostly sea mammal and fish, but now, Greenland is very much walking a line between two different cultures. It is only relatively recently that all the nutrient-poor, chemical and sugar-rich modern foods have flooded their diets and, predictably, this is having dire consequences on the col­lective health. You can see the clash between the two cultures reflected in the supermarkets. Every settlement has a supermarket packed with all the standard items you would find anywhere. In general, the amount of Greenlandic food in the supermarkets is minimal and very expen­sive. Among the aisles of imported bananas and vegetables, soda, candies and long-life milk— and tucked in between frozen ready meals and mass-produced, frozen chicken—you may find a small frozen section of Greenlandic fish and maybe some Greenlandic lamb. As just another example of a dysfunctional global food system, some of the fish is sent abroad to be processed and then returns, all nicely packaged and ready for sale at almost double the price of Danish chicken or pork.

Although exactly the same story is playing out in neighborhoods, towns and cities world­wide, it seems more of an affront in Greenland. You look out of the window and there is only sea, ice and rock. Clearly, there is no agriculture to speak of, and so the difference between the prevailing supermarket food and the environ­ment is stark. A trip to the supermarket is worrying—you see kids buying and drinking multiple sodas, aisles full of Haribo and other candies, and sweet pastries and doughnuts all laid out in attractive glass counters. Given the unchecked and frequently promoted message to “eat a more Danish diet,” you can only worry about what will unfold over the coming decades. Obesity and heart disease already are taking their toll as all these heavily marketed products edge out the traditional foods. Add to this the fact that because of their small population size and remoteness, most settlements cannot sup­port a permanent doctor or dentist. Sporadically, one will visit for a few days, but often the only recourse if you have a medical or dental issue is to travel to the closest big town or Nuuk, and travel is very expensive.

The general state of dental health is reason­ably easy to see—especially in a country where people smile a lot—and is a lot easier to gauge than trying to take the measure of the popula­tion’s health overall. I found that the general state of dental health was poor, and considerably so in the more remote settlements. This is 100 percent down to the diet. Sodas are amazingly prevalent, and it is not uncommon to see people drinking a Pepsi or Faxe Kondi (a Danish soft drink) at breakfast or before heading to school, and then several more during the day. Snacks and candies also are ubiquitous and constantly being dipped into. It’s pretty clear that sugar is having a big impact on dental health across the country. In the many tiny museums scattered throughout Greenland you can see photos from one hundred or so years ago showing, similar to what Dr. Weston Price discovered, that people eating their traditional diet seemed to have fantastic teeth.

This is obviously a global problem, slightly mitigated in richer countries where people have more access to dentists who can cover up all manner of dental issues, but fillings, crowns, false teeth and dentures only mask the prob­lem—just as expensive pharmaceuticals mask the issue of worsening global health by treating symptoms without addressing causes. The cause of most health and dental issues is a terrible diet laden with sugar and ultra-processed products that put stress on our physiology and microbiome.

AN EYE-OPENING EXPEDITION

I set off from Qaqortoq in April 2023, not really appreciating the scale of the task before me. Most nights (although “night” is a relative term given that between May and September the amount of darkness reduces to zero), I camped in the wild, only staying in settlements when I came across them. Eighty percent of Greenland is covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet, which means that virtually all the settlements are on the coast. This meant that I had easy access to hunters and fishermen who could readily supply me with seal, whale, walrus and fish. If I knew that I had a stretch of days with no likelihood of human interaction, I cooked up a stew of one or a combination of these, only adding water and salt, and bagged them for easy reheating.

The people of Greenland are incred­ibly generous; without their help, I would have found it hard, if not impossible, to complete my expedition. They have such a great connection to their food and envi­ronment that once an outsider expresses an interest, it sparks a fire of pride that is easy to get drawn into. That pride, long suppressed, is very well deserved. During my travels northward, I found that I could stay true to my intent to eat a completely Greenlandic diet by buying food from hunters and fishermen or, as often happened, people would just give me their traditional foods.

The evening before I set off from the south, the nightly news had fea­tured me on its program and, because I had a live tracker on my website, people often knew where and when I was arriving before I did. Every single settlement I arrived in along those thousands of kilometers had a welcome for me—often with kids waving Greenlandic flags, and without fail at least one local villager clutching a bag of food for me. After days alone in often difficult and very cold conditions, it wasn’t hard to bring me to tears as someone shook my hand and handed me a bag of seal or dried halibut. Time and again, I was invited into homes to sit with sev­eral generations as a board of mattak was brought out to share with me. Mattak is the skin and blubber of whale, served raw with salt, Aromat (a Danish food powder that tastes like a powerful blend of chicken stock, salt and MSG) and soy sauce. (Needless to say, I just opted for the salt.)

The trip was an eye-opener on many levels. Before starting, I had visions of setting up my tent on a mossy mountainside, the qajaq pulled up above the high tide line, as I prepared a de­licious native meal. However, the weather had other ideas. It was incredibly cold, and much more so than the season should have been. When it should have felt like spring, it was more like winter. When temperatures go down to -12C (10F), any water you have freezes solid. After a day’s hard qajaqing, you also start to get cold quickly as soon as you stop; getting changed into dry clothes is a priority to stave off hypothermia.

Making camp with the ice shelf at the high-tide mark means having to slip and slide while trying to drag your sixty-kilo-plus (one hundred thirty-two pound) qajaq up and over to a safe position. Next, you empty the qajaq and set up your tent to get out of the biting wind. Abso­lutely the last thing you feel like doing is spending any time on a meal, a fact that totally ties in with traditional Greenlandic food. There is no tradition of slow cooking, let alone elaborate meals. Seal and whale are cooked briefly and then eaten plainly. It is only since the Danish arrived that rice or potatoes and onions have been added to the popular dish of suaasat (a seal stew).

I knew that dried fish and meat were a mainstay of Greenlandic food, but the reason for these foods’ importance hadn’t really oc­curred to me until I got battered for three days and nights in a storm north of Maniitsoq. The weather can get so bad and the storms last for so long that it’s not possible to get out to hunt or fish. In those moments, you need to fall back on a staple such as dried food—kept for exactly that reason. There are incidents of small settle­ments dying of starvation, either because of insufficient stores or extended periods of terrible weather or a combination of both. Interestingly, the winter and summer dried products are quite different from each other, with the winter dried products being much slower to produce and (to me, anyway) the better for it.

In the West’s sanitized and cushioned world of convenience, inclement weather has no im­pact on our ability to obtain food (with perhaps the biggest challenge being having to don a raincoat on the way to the store). Historically, however, if you were immersed in and depen­dent on the weather, having a store of dried food would have represented the difference between life and death. Of course, this would have ap­plied not just to Greenland but to our entire evolutionary history.

BEFORE AND AFTER

As soon as I’d committed myself to the epic journey, a lot of planning ensued, mostly involving trying to get free equipment from sponsors. There were also all of the other lo­gistical considerations—transport of gear to Greenland, flights, insurance, tech (satphone), emergency kit and so on. The prospect of spend­ing ten hours each day qajaqing alone made me want to try and shoehorn other projects into the adventure, such as collecting seal poo for mi­croplastic analysis. In addition, my inquisitive side prompted me to approach several organiza­tions to see whether there was any interest in before-and-after medical tests for the purposes of comparison. Surely there would be some interesting findings? After all, the ancestral Inuit diet—pretty much a keto diet very high in fat, with a considerable raw and fermented element but no vegetables or fruit and minimal fiber—doesn’t fit into the modern dietary nar­rative whatsoever.

In England, I like to think that I eat a good, balanced diet, perhaps with a lower amount of ultra-processed food than the average person but with “normal” levels of carbs, fats and pro­teins. I’ve never smoked and rarely drink, have no known medical issues and have an average weight and exercise regime, so my thinking was that I would be a pretty good test subject. The main issue turned out to be that I was only one person. Normally, a usable study would include a number of test subjects and a control group as well—impossible in this case. However, Kings College London agreed to test me, and the day before heading out, administered blood tests, a bone density scan, a grip test and other tests, all of which were replicated on my return ninety-five days later. (The test results are available on my website, eatyourenvironment.com.)

As soon as I arrived in Greenland, I im­mediately went from my fairly typical English diet straight into a 100 percent locally sourced Greenlandic diet. Before donning a dry suit, a few days of transition were absolutely essen­tial to allow my gut to acclimatize to the new diet. I also linked up with the amazing Aviaja Hauptmann at the University of Greenland to test my microbiome, which involved taking stool samples two or three times each week.

During the journey, there weren’t many opportunities to weigh myself, but four weeks in, I had gone from a starting weight of ninety kilos (one hundred ninety-eight pounds) down to seventy-four kilos (one hundred sixty-three pounds), a drop of sixteen kilos (thirty-five pounds). I was worried that having depleted my fat energy reserves, I would “crash” at some point. However, I found that I had very high energy levels, and even after ten hours of qajaqing in freezing cold, wet conditions, I had plenty left in the tank. Consequently, I didn’t change my diet or level of physical activity, and as I continued to knock out thirty kilometers per day, my weight remained the same for the duration. My take on this was that my body was finding its balance with the environment in which I was totally immersed—living outdoors twenty-four hours a day and eating food directly in my hunting radius.

A SECOND TEST

Fast forwarding to seven months after the end of the qajaqing trip, I got an offer to work in East Greenland for sixty days, cooking at a remote hotel. It being Greenland (plus a part of Greenland I had not yet been to), I jumped at the chance. Foremost in my mind was that I could do exactly the same dietary experiment on myself, but this time without the physical element. How amazing to compare the two projects! I won­dered what it would show, thinking that surely qajaqing thousands of kilometers would make a massive difference to the medical results. This time, I switched medical test providers, getting even more extensive before-and-after testing that included a genetic test and testing for heavy metals. Sea mammals apparently are high in those pollutants, so I thought it would be interesting to see whether that translated to an increase in my metal levels. (Again, the test results are up on my website.)

Rather amazingly, I lost the same amount of weight! In the seven months between the two trips, I had gone back to my “English” weight of ninety kilos, but over the five weeks in East Greenland, I again lost sixteen kilos and remained at seventy-four kilos for the remainder of my time there. I find this incredible because it indicates that the exercise element had had no impact on my weight loss. I think that when you are 100 percent absorbed in your environment, your body will rebalance and level out to find its optimal harmony. This fits with my long experience of working out and exercise; I have always been pretty active but have never noticed any weight loss when I’ve been exercising. This also agrees with a lot of research concluding that diet is by far the main driver for weight loss.

Interestingly, I had virtually no elevated heavy metal levels (they increased by less than 1 percent). Most of my markers showed even more improvement the second time around than after the first journey. I will be using the same testing parameters and companies to measure my future dietary adventures, which will give me a good baseline from which to test.

As ever with these things, you have to be careful with the questions you ask. The answers may raise more questions than you are prepared for, and those answers may also come with many caveats. As a layman, I find that my mind tends to switch off when presented with test results because I don’t fully understand what they mean; I’m learning, but the results generally get the nutritional therapists more excited. I tend to listen more to what my body is telling me, which I think is a very good lesson. After all, it is what we have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.

What did my body tell me? Eating zero processed food—and no food that had come from farther than ten kilometers from where I was—made me feel incredible. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to physically and mentally tackle this challenge without some serious low points and po­tential injuries, but at no point did any of this happen.

AN EXPEDITION RESUMED

My qajaqing adventure was brought to an early end. I’d reached Upernavik, about twenty-two hundred kilometers into the planned thirty-two-hundred-kilometer journey and just south of the trickiest part of the trip—the crossing of Melville Bay and the far north, where the sea ice starts becoming an issue. There is only a narrow time window when it’s possible to cross.

My contacts in the north and the satellite imagery showed far heavier-than-normal sea ice over about a fifteen-hundred-kilometer stretch, which would have meant qajaqing pretty far out to sea to skirt the impassable ice. The ice was too unstable to travel over, so in the absence of a ground support team, I had to make the call to cut the trip short. I couldn’t afford to wait for the ice channels to open up sufficiently. Although upset at having to cut the expedition short, the fact that it was due to unseason­able ice levels as opposed to personal reasons (physical or mental) made it more bearable.

I soon forgot all the worst bits and resolved to return the following year to finish the last thousand kilometers, which I successfully com­pleted in August 2024. This time, I did no testing but continued eating only ancestral Inuit food, mostly because of the incredible energy levels it provides. However, I also now find that the food is delicious and goes beyond mere satiation, connecting me to the environment.

LESSONS LEARNED

It is impossible to cover every aspect of this complex and vast subject, but I think I have picked out the most relevant points. This journey completely altered my stance on food and diet, which is something that I never dreamed would happen after so many years in the food industry. If there is one concise snapshot that I can pull out and highlight, it will always come back to kiviaq and those wet-rag little auks fermenting inside a seal in northern Greenland. Kiviaq spits in the face of modern food with the full weight of hundreds of thousands of years of successful human evolution behind it. In this evolutionary adventure, it would be most accurate to portray us not as masters of nature but as happy and humble participants in an incredibly intricate system. It’s a lesson we would do well to re­member.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2024

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