EAT BEFORE READING

Blog number 512*******  01 May 2011


This that I am leading up to has to take a little side trip before landing.

Years ago I read a book written by a Dane that lived in Greenland with the Inuits back in the late twenties and early thirties.  He told of a special dish an accomplished hunter sometimes brought out for special occasions. The dish consisted of small birds stuffed into a sealskin and buried for no less than a year.

When he described the taste of this treat, the scrumptious way you peeled the fat off the skin by running it through your closed teeth, the taste of the blood clot formed when the bird was killed by pressing on its chest to burst the heart, you got the idea that this was akin to our surf-and-turf ^ or pigs-on-horseback*, put together by a world class chef. Made me want to try it.

So I'm watching a NATGEO program on the telly and this polar bear and its cub are stranded on an island barren of food due to melting ice flows. They eat grass and kelp and finally they find an old rotten whale carcass at the bottom of the ocean just off the shore. The mother dives down and brings back a piece of this carcass. Watching them eat this rotten meat is kind of disgusting because it is slimy, rotten-looking.

Then on the same program I see Eskimos digging up this sealskin treat I mentioned in the first two paragraphs. The voiceover said they always eat this treat outside because of the smell, and the stench has to hurt your eyes and skin or it isn't any good. And they start tearing off hunks, and it looks exactly like the rotten meat the polar bear and her cub were eating. Now comes the part for which all of the above was written.

A piece of this rotten meat is given to this baby - probably under two years old, and he relishes it!

I have had babies and I can tell you that their favorite foods are very bland. So what's going on here? Evolutionary gene pools? How did a baby come to love rotten raw meat?

Wasn't that fun, reading that?

As an aside, the Dane who wrote the book I found out just a few months ago, died from poisoning by eating that special dish.

^ lobster and steak


* Oysters wrapped in bacon, preferably grilled. Unbelievably delicious!