Although I went on several backpacking trips as a youth with pemmican (a bit different than what the folks here make, but close) as my primary food (basically pemmican and "gorp"), I don't really have that much interest in eating it as a middle-aged adult. However, reading the posts and documents about it recently, I am curious about a few things....

*Cooking. This question goes out to the raw-foodists out there. Isn't rendering fat (at the temperature's stated in the PDF guide I read the other day) cooking? How does one justify a claim to a "raw food" lifestyle and use pemmican? Wouldn't you just be better off scarfing down a big hunk of raw meat with the fat still intact? I know Jean-Claude (anyone hear from him recently?) used to tell us to just air dry the raw meat/fat and be done with it.

*Pemmican itself. It seems that pemmican consists of == taking the fat out of the meat, drying the meat, adding the fat back into the meat, and then throwing in a few berries (or not) for good measure. How does this differ from a good old-fashioned sausage? (Which, by the way, *should* include entrails and organ meats, presumably making it more nutritious).