What is pemmican?
Every time I speak to someone about Primal Gift, their first question is ‘What’s Pemmican?’. So, I thought my first blog here should answer that question and why I’m so passionate about making and sharing this obscure and forgotten food.
In short, it is dried meat from any animal or fish, which is powdered and mixed with the rendered fat of the same or another animal. Other dried foods like berries and nuts are added when seasonally available. The end product is a flavoursome meaty dough shaped into any shape you like and will last for years or even decades if stored in the right conditions.
Standing on the shoulders of a whole lot of ancestral wisdom I am simply repurposing this ancient food preservation method into something like a modern ‘snack bar’.
The word pemmican comes from the Cree word pimikan meaning ‘manufactured grease’. The Cree are a tribe from modern-day Canada that, along with many other North American peoples, used to obtain most of their food from bison and other large animals like elk and deer. Many of the tribes that occupied the grassy plains of Turtle Island (North America) would come together in the late autumn to hunt the bison in large numbers. This often took the form of a ‘Bison Jump’ where large groups were driven over cliffs although there is a record of fire being used as well. These people would then work together to harvest them en masse. They would produce enough pemmican to see them through the winter as well as using the hides for clothing and shelter. The bones were turned into tools and the sinew to cordage. I think it’s incredible how people could meet almost all their basic needs from the carcasses of these amazing animals. It was an important time for people to gather, celebrate, make art, and matchmake amongst other things since the tribes tended to be more dispersed during the rest of the year.
Unfortunately, the latter history of pemmican is somewhat darker. The huge herds of bison became a valuable commodity during the British and French Colonial period. Pemmican made on the plains fuelled the trappers that scoured the north in search of fur and pelts and formed a central part of their diet. As the population of bison diminished, subsistence became harder and harder for the native peoples of that land. Pemmican was the perfect way for people to store and transport bison meat and fat for trading.
I haven’t been able to find any information about pemmican outside of North America but I have no doubt that the hunter-gatherer populations of Europe would have made it (please get in touch if you find anything). We can only speculate about what their specific methods and recipes were. We can also experiment ourselves. I hope you are as excited as I am to try pemmican with blackberries, sea buckthorn or rosehips like our ancestors may have done.
So why have I chosen to make pemmican rather than, say jerky or something more well known?
In a word: Fat.
We may be living in the only time in human history when fat is considered anything other than sacred. When Weston A Price travelled around the world documenting traditional people and their diets, he found a rich variety. They thrived on all sorts of things, although, every single group he studied placed huge value on animal fat, whether that took the form of meat (particularly organ meats and bone marrow), seafood, or dairy. For some of these people, such as the bison hunting cultures of North America and the Inuit, animal flesh and fat made up the vast majority of their diet.
What happened to that ancestral wisdom about the nutritional value of fat and why are we now encouraged to eat less of it? These are some of the questions I’ll be musing over in future blogs. My personal view is that fat isn’t just healthy, but crucial to understanding human evolution and how we arrived where we are today as a species. The world might be a very different place if our early hominid ancestors hadn’t developed a taste for the rich omega 3s and 6s found in the bone marrow and brains of large animals. This is a story I will be telling at length in future blogs. I hope you’ll join me with a pemmican bar in hand!
References:
Carlson K, Bement L, 2012, Organisation of Bison Hunting at the Pleistocene/Holocene transition on the Plains of North America, Quaternary International 297 (2013) 93-99
Price W A, 1970 Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects
Quigg, J. M. (1997) ‘Bison Processing at the Rush Site, 41TG346, and Evidence for Pemmican Production in the Southern Plains’, Plains Anthropologist, 42(159), pp. 145–161. doi: 10.1080/2052546.1997.11931843.
Thompson J C, Carvalho S, Marean C W, Alemseged Z, 2019, ‘Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins’, Current Anthropology, Vol 60, No 1.
www.allaboutbison.com
www.britannica.com/topic/pemmican