Hi all!
I'm a new poster, been lurking since inception...
All this talk about pemmican recipes inspires me to share my experience. My
wife and I have, for more than 8 years eaten high quality meats when
available. Our prefered method is to hang fatty chunks and let them age,
but more often we dry strips. We eat it raw when it has an attractive smell
and taste, and eat as much as we have a taste for. Unfortunately, we find
that if the meat is not wild or from strictly pastured animals it harbors a
large bacterial (and even maggot) population within a few days--and, of
course, such meat is not tasty. Further, we can find good meat so rarely
that when we do we often end up drying most of it.
But it is not pemmican. It is simply air-dried. We cut it into thin strips
and lay it out on a 1/4 inch wire mesh (cheaply available from most
hardware stores--it is not chicken wire, but firmer, often called wire
"cloth") in front of a table fan (or see below). In all but the most humid
environments it dries in a couple days (depending on how thickly it is
sliced) and can be stored in the fridge for many weeks, months even. My
favorite cut for taste and economy is brisket which is about the right
width for jerky and has a fine layer of fat if it isn't trimmed. This seems
a whole lot easier than messing with recipes to me. (Also, bone marrow from
pastured animals is a very high-quality fat which hasn't been mentioned on
this list--perhaps it could be used in pemmican recipes?)
We also lay out fish this way, as entire fillets, or cut into thin strips.
Wild salmon, mackerel, and sardines are our favorites, but red snapper,
halibut, yellowtail (a southern CA specialty) and swordfish are tasty at
times as well. Fish roe can be easily dried as well, and are a nutritional
powerhouse!
A clever non-electric contraption called the Food Pantry is great for
drying too. It is a pillar of six plastic mesh/trays which lay inside
netting on five sides (not the top). It even collapses easily for travel.
It can be obtained from Perfect Health Products (800) 444-4584 or Real
Goods (800) 762-7325 (Http//:www.well.com/www/realgood) and runs about
$60--or it did a couple years ago.
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A couple sources for animal foods: Mostly-pastured buffalo is widely
available in the Denver (I recently bought a brisket at $4.99/lb). Coleman
beef and lamb seem to have dropped in quality over the last years (more
marbling, probably due to more grain-fed, less pastured) but is also
available in the Denver area and elsewhere. Also an outfit called Polarica
near San Francisco (800) 426-3872 has game products for sale, a catalog
upon request, and will ship (very pricey though) their stuff. Also, there
is supposedly a very fine distributor of pastured meat in Santa Barbara,
CA. I will post details when I get them.
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Other bits:
I have on several occasions cracked macademia nuts with rocks.
Without agriculture, what? How about horticulture? It would leave few
archeological remains and probably predated grains and animal-husbandry, no?
About wine: perhaps fermented honey (called mead sometimes) was an early
beverage. Tropical honies are so thin and high-water-content that they can
ferment in the cells of the hive with no further processing.
1] And some questions: we regularly enjoy raw shellfish, depending on where
we are living and/or our budget. Do most of you paleo-dieters consider
shellfish (indeed, all seafood) taboo?
2] I understand all the arguments against dairy products and both my wife
and I have avoided them for many years. But recently we taste-tested raw
dairy products (milk, butter, cream, and kefer--we draw the line before
cheese ;)). My wife has really gotten into the kefer, and we both enjoy
butter once in a while. Neither has given us any trouble--quite the
contrary, we are quite convinced that they are beneficial to us (as are
other raw animal foods (RAF)). Could it be that as long as the dairy is raw
and has an attractive smell and taste that it could be a convenient
addition to a paleo-diet? Note that the kefer tastes like chalk to me, but
delicious to my wife. Perhaps our taste buds can give us another clue as
far as what we might eat on a paleo-diet. Since the current research tells
an ever-changing story, and there is great variation in individual
metabolisms and genetic-cultural histories, might there be a place for some
variety in the diet of a variety of peoples?
The search for the Perfect diet may be something like the search for True
human nature: there are probably as many human natures as there are human
beings, no? The agruments of the paleo-diet folks give a foundation (theme)
of proper human nutrition, but each of us will be a particular variation on
that theme--especially considering thousands of years we have been
denaturing our foods to varying degrees. While we proably aren't fully
adapted to dairy, or even cooking, _something_ has happened to our genetics
in the generations of cooked and farmed culture, no? The idea that we are
99% genetically similar to chimps (or whatever it is), and 99.99% similar
to our paleolithic progenetors might miss the point: Only 1% difference in
genetics makes for the vastly different species of humans and chimps. That
.01% or even .00001% difference between our DNA today and that of
Cro-magnons may account for relatively dramatic changes--changes surely not
fully evolved/incorporated, but enough so that each of might need to find
out what works for us, instead of finding the Perfect diet of one brand or
another...
Cheers,
Kirt
Kirt Nieft / Melisa Secola
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