From A Greenland explorer will eat only decaying seal for a month.
This spring, British explorer and chef Mike Keen will spend roughly a month skiing across Greenland with a sled dog. Along the way, the duo will subsist entirely on slowly decomposing seal meat.
Keen’s roughly 320-kilometer ski across the country’s icy north serves as a loose proxy for how past Inuit and other arctic peoples might have survived similar treks across barren landscapes.
The journey is part renegade chef experiment – “Is there a line between … fermented or rotten?” wonders Keen, who lives in Suffolk – and part scientific endeavor. For the latter, he’s collecting fecal samples from himself and the dog throughout the journey. That way, researchers can see how shifting from a Western diet to a traditional Inuit diet alters the microbes in his gut, or gut microbiome. [continue]