232 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



trading posts or on ships, but even they go back to exclusive boiling 

 and roasting of native meats and fish if they start housekeeping for 

 themselves. 



It is seldom among the Alaska and Mackenzie River Eskimos 

 that caribou hams are eaten when there is enough of other meat. 

 The hams, some of the entrails, the lungs and liver, the outside meat 

 from the neck and brisket, and the tenderloin are the food of the 

 dogs. There are partial exceptions to this rule, for several rea- 

 sons. When fuel is scarce, as it occasionally is in Coronation 

 Gulf, boned hams are cooked, as they require less fuel per pound, 

 being cut in small pieces for boiling. The summer of 1916, for 

 instance, we were compelled to eat ham meat for lack of fuel. 

 Also when you are drying meat it is often convenient to dry hams, 

 which are more easily sliced thin; as dry meat, they will be eaten 

 later. Still, the Slaveys and other Indians usually prefer drying 

 boned rib meat, and these are the favorite food of the Hudson's Bay 

 Company's men and other northern fur traders, who buy them from 

 the Indians. 



Such are, roughly, the tastes and preferences in lean or mod- 

 erately fat meat that are common among the native northern meat- 

 eaters and that are acquired by whites soon after they quit using 

 salt and other seasoning.* 



The tastes of meat-eaters as to the various fats of caribou and 

 similar animals are perhaps more interesting than other sections of 

 the same subject, for the reason that people of European culture 

 have during the last three centuries allowed sugar to usurp almost 

 wholly the field of gustatory delights where fats were once supreme, 

 while yet the phrase "to live on the fat of the land" had a keen 

 appeal to the senses. 31 



I judge from the experience of myself and others that no one 

 while living on the typical modern diet, largely made up of pro- 

 tein, sugar and starch, is capable of delighting in the fine shades 

 of flavor between different kinds of fat. But this power comes very 

 soon irrespective of climate to whoever lives on unseasoned animal 

 foods exclusively. Then, whatever the race or bringing-up, there 

 seems little variety in tastes as to fats. I imagine this would be so 

 were the animals eaten cattle or sheep or fowl. I know with caribou 

 that negroes. South Sea Islanders, Indians, Eskimos and Europeans 



* For a more detailed discussion of Eskimo tastes in food, see the section 

 on "Food" in "Anthropological Papers of the Stefansson-Anderson Expedi- 

 tion," New York, 1914. 



II 



