Rotten Meat & Fly Larvae: What You Aren't Told About Traditional Diets

Fermenting seals, botulism, ancestral foods and the use of decaying meat in prehistory

Somewhere around 1950, botulism cases in Alaska began to trend upwards. The disease doesn’t wait long, and after about 15 hours or so the sufferer begins to rapidly lose control of their muscles, spreading downwards in a classic wave of paralysis. Curiously for health officials these new cases of botulism were affecting mostly the Inuit and other indigenous groups such as the Aleuts. Why would this be so? The culprits were eventually identified - putrid seal flippers, a beaver tail left to rot in a bag and then eaten, fermented fish heads buried in the ground. Who would eat this stuff, and why? The next few decades would see modern science come up against traditional circumpolar food knowledge and start to make sense of the problem. As we’ll see, diets around the world are nothing like as standardised as we would think. Recent cross-disciplinary work in archaeology, anthropology, microbiology and food science has been uncovering unsettling facts about what our ancestors ate, and what other peoples around the world ate until very recently. Let’s dive into the world of maggots, wooly mammoth flesh and toxic reindeer meat.

Fermented meat: the basics

The last few decades have seen something of a commercial fermentation craze. Sourdough, kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut and kombucha are all commonplace products on supermarket shelves today. Fermentation as a process of course underpins a huge number of basic foods, especially bread, cheese and alcohol, as well as olives, yoghurt, miso, tempeh and many more. One food that doesn’t sound like it should be fermented though is meat. Despite the fact that cured meats like salami and chorizo are incredibly popular, the idea of meat being digested by bacteria and yeasts sounds like a recipe for food poisoning. The most common bacteria involved in fermentation produce lactic acid - Lactobacillus, Leuconostoc, Pediococcus and so on. The acidity generated by these microorganisms alters the pH and prevents more hostile bacteria from colonising and spoiling the food. It also accounts for why fermented foods are often more sharp, sour or acidic than normal foods. Yeasts consume sugars and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide as byproducts, which makes wine and beer possible, as well as the leavening of bread.

Aside from these basics fermentation is often a specific process for each food. The use of salt to create an environment unfit for most bacteria or controlling the temperature to prevent spoilage are other common techniques, but many times the bacteria already present or the chemical compounds in the food dictate the process, the length of time and the end result. Meats are more often that not left to dry, reducing the moisture to control bacterial growth. The ‘pre-digestion’ from the microorganisms helps break down the tough meat fibres and adds flavour, along with any introduced spices, sugar or salt. Some examples include boubnita, a Moroccan lamb sausage made in intestines; miriss, a Sudanese dish of fermented animal fat mixed with ash, and nem chua, pieces of raw Vietnamese flavoured pork.

Eating rotten food

If fermentation is something of a controlled process, then what about just straight up putrefaction? In our world of highly sanitised kitchen surfaces and public health controls its easy to forget that for the majority of human existence the barrier between ‘good’ and ‘spoiled’ meat was a lot more porous. Unpleasant smells, a slimy appearance, even the presence of maggots does not necessarily indicate that the meat or other food is poisonous. In fact there is a delicate balance between meat which is fermenting and meat which is becoming pathogenic. The breakdown of unsaturated fatty acids in particular produce compounds like aldehydes and ketones, leading to ‘rancidity’ and a build up of toxic byproducts in the meat. Colonisation by dangerous bacteria follows, and the meat shouldn’t be eaten. But if the conditions are right, what appears to be thoroughly disgusting can actually be highly nutritious.

Fermenting meat using lactic acid bacteria and other species leads to the pre-digestion of the protein strands, making it easier on the stomach and gut to absorb essential amino acids. Not only that, but many cuts and parts of the animal are extremely tough, and must be broken down either by lengthy simmering or through fermentation. Added to this is the fact that fermented foods are much richer in vitamin B complexes, and can better preserve vital sources of vitamin C, since the meat does not have to be cooked. Although muscle meat is devoid of many vitamins, eating the entire animal - eyeballs to tail - will provide vitamin C, as long as it isn’t destroyed through high temperatures.

The circumpolar diet: making it work in the Arctic

Life in the frozen north is extremely harsh, and the traditional cultures who settled and colonised places like Alaska, Greenland, Finland, northern Siberia and parts of the Russian Far East had to be extremely resourceful to make ends meet. One aspect of this lifestyle is a lack of firewood and fuel and the consequent dependence on raw, frozen and fermented foods. Sea mammals like seals and walrus are extremely rich in marine oils, such as blubber. Without easy access to carbohydrates, this fat is the major biocultural energy reserve. Raw blubber and skin cut in strips from whales can be eaten raw, frozen or pickled, preserving that all important vitamin C (Ikiilgyn in Chukchi, mutkuk in Inuit languages). The technique of Igunaq involves storing meat and fat from these marine mammals underground for a year or more, during which time it ferments and then freezes.

“Meat is frequently kept for a considerable length of time and sometimes until it becomes semiputrid. This meat was kept in small underground pits, which the frozen subsoil rendered cold, but not cold enough to prevent the bluish fungus growth which completely covered the carcasses of the animals and the walls of the storerooms”

Richard K Nelson, 1971

‘Fermented’ is what I call the meat which the Greenlanders store away until it is half putrified; indeed, sometimes it is almost rotten and stinking, for it is rarely so bad that they have to throw it away completely. In order to bring it into this condition they put the meat into blubber pits in summer and cover it with a little blubber; or they leave the blubber on the meat, whereby it quickly becomes tender. In winter, however, the process is not so simple, for then the meat will usually freeze and thus be prevented from putrefying; so they have deep storage pits in the ground, to the deep parts of which the frost cannot get so readily… A whole seal prepared in this fashion is to them the finest dish they can serve to outside visitors.

-Meddelelser om Grønland (1962), Erik Holtved

Alongside storage pits are the skins of animals themselves, which can be fashioned into bags and stuffed with meat and fat to ferment down over time. These seal or narwhal ‘pokes’ require careful use, sometimes left in the sun for a short while to raise the internal temperature before burying. Iginneq is the name for seal blubber that has fermented inside seal stomachs.

Iginneq, photo by Daniel Hauptmann

More unusually many northern latitude cultures go against the general rules of butchery and hygiene by leaving the stomach contents and the bowels intact within the animal, before depositing the whole creature to ferment underground. Evidently the bacterial contamination of the meat is intentional, and reports of the aftermath make for quite grim reading:

In the fall of the year they casually cache their caribou without removing the stomach. The semi-digested vegetable contents ferment and taint all the flesh, but the Copper Eskimo relishes both the smell and the flavour, though his more sophisticated brother in the west pronounces them disgusting. I have seen a man take a bone from rotten caribou-meat cached more than a year before, crack it and eat the marrow with evident relish, although it swarmed with maggots. As a rule such meat is fed to the dogs, but not infrequently the natives cook it for themselves, especially when fresh meat is not available.

- “The Life of the Copper Eskimos.” In Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1922) Diamond Jenness

A particularly strange version of this underground fermentation is the northern Russian dish of kopalhen. A well fed deer is captured and starved for several days, to cleanse the intestines, before being strangled and placed whole into a swamp. The animal then ferments from the inside out whilst underwater, and the resulting food is probably best seen as an emergency cache against starvation. There isn’t a lot written about it in English, but apparently the meat is so full of lethal byproducts that the local people (Khanty, Evenki etc) have to be conditioned from childhood to be able to stomach it and not die a horrible death from neurotoxin overload.

A final word must go out to those who have tried frozen wooly mammoth meat, of which there are a number. Explorers, scientists and local peoples have claimed to have tasted uncovered mammoth, and some have reported that the meat can be fed to sled dogs. The meat itself would likely liquify upon defrosting, but needs must in the wastes of the frozen north.

Fermented seabirds and western science

An Inuit food which has captured much attention online is made up of fermented seabird, stuffed inside a sealskin, called kiviaq. Typically found on Greenland, the practice is to capture little auks or guillemots and put as many as 600, dead, inside a poke. This is then sewn up and laid in a shallow pit covered in rocks, the surface of the skin slick with seal oil to prevent maggots finding their way inside. The end result is described as having a ‘cheesy’ or ‘licorice’ flavour, and fans like to bite the heads off the birds and guzzle the juices inside. Like with many similar practices, the skill involved in making a successful batch of kiviaq relies on experience and practical knowledge. The heat of the sun, the smell, the temperature of the ground and so on. It is precisely this loss of knowledge which has led to the tragedies of botulism deaths and poisoning mentioned at the beginning.

Modernity in the Arctic came in waves of course, but since the 1950’s one of the biggest changes has been the introduction of plastic. Plastic is a miracle material if you live in a resource starved environment, and almost immediately plastic bags, bins, containers, boxes and sheets began to be used to make traditional fermented foods. The bacterium Clostridium botulinum has the unfortunate ability to form spores, and survive in cold temperatures. Once a pile of seal flippers, for example, have been sat gently marinating in a plastic garbage bag at too high a temperature, the necessary acidity hasn’t been generated and the botulinum spores begin to multiply and spread.

Seal flippers being prepared for fermentation using a modern plastic bag. Image from NativeTech

A delicacy among the Yupik Inuit in Alaska has caused 13 people to fall ill with botulism, reports the Anchorage Daily News. While the fermented, or so-called “stinky,” foods are usually made from fish heads, eggs or seal and walrus flippers, the Yupik also ferment beaver.

A meal of fermented beaver tails and feet were apparently responsible for the recent botulism outbreak in the village of Manokotak. Some of those who ended up in hospital showed typical symptoms of botulism which include droopy eyelids, blurry vision, trouble swallowing, respiratory problems, double vision, slurred speech and muscle weakness.

The use of plastic containers is thought to be responsible for this outbreak. Plastic provides an airtight environment in which the botulism toxin can grow. The traditional Yupik way of making fermented beaver involved digging a hole in the ground, putting in the beaver feet and tails and stuffing the hole with moss and grass — hardly an airtight environment.

-Nunatsiaq News (2001)

It has taken many decades to fully understand the causes of botulism outbreaks in Alaska, and the Centre for Disease Control has written a number of reports warning that plastic containers create airtight conditions which help breed botulinum bacteria. The insistence by health authorities in some places that plastic be used, rather than the traditional skins or clay pits and baskets, has only exacerbated the problem.

Now, fermentation is usually carried out in either a barrel, a plastic or glass jar, or a plastic bag. These containers may increase the risk of botulinum toxin formation because most can be easily sealed, thereby increasing the likelihood of anaerobic conditions. Some foods are fermented in a seal skin or fish skin bag or “poke,” which is either buried or hung up. If salmon eggs are fermented in this manner, they can be left until they dry out somewhat and form a “cheese” that is firm on the outside and soft in the center. Toxin production is also temperature dependent, and is less likely to occur at the lower temperatures that were usually attained during traditional fermentation. Fermentation now may be done indoors, or in a container above ground and in the sun, which produces warmer temperatures that make fermentation more rapid and production of botulinum toxin more likely.

-Botulism in Alaska; a guide for physicians and health care providers (2005) Castrodale

Today the CDC actively promotes the use of traditional materials in place of plastic or glass.

The disgust barrier

Readers may have already shuddered or even gagged at the thought of rotten seal meat or maggot infested marrow, but it gets worse. In their 2022 article, Putrid Meat in the Tropics: It Wasn’t Just for Inuit, the researchers Speth and Morin try and break down the natural disgust barrier for other archaeologists who are studying hunter-gatherer diets. In this extended quote they aim to shock their audience into accepting that modern conventions of hygiene and expectations of sanitation have to be discarded when thinking about other modes of life:

In the Arctic, Indigenous foragers putrefied their meat and fish in below-ground pits, under piles of rocks, in marshes, ponds, caribou stomachs, or sewn seal skins. While indoors, family members worked in close quarters sitting on the ground or on hides taken from animals that had slept on the ground and may have deliberately wallowed in dirt to ward off flies and mosquitos. Like foragers worldwide, they squeezed excrement from the entrails of their kills and then, usually without washing them, stuffed the guts with meat, organs, and blood, fermented them, then froze them, and finally consumed the result (see the general discussion in Buck et al. 2016: 674). Women chewed on animal hides to stretch and soften them. They softened and tanned hides with concoctions of urine and fermented animal brains. Inuit bathed in urine from communal containers, as they had no other form of soap. Lice were plucked from the hair and bodies of family members and eaten (Anderson 1918: 64; Hearne 1795: 325–326; Portlock 1789: 286). Fermented stomach contents and chyme of caribou, ptarmigan, and other animals were delicacies. They ate maggots and warble fly larvae, commonly uncooked, while feces from various animals (e.g., ptarmigan, caribou) were occasionally eaten as is or mixed with other animal products. Inuit and other groups also sometimes ate natural clays, a practice called geophagy. Dog pups were sometimes fed mouth-to-mouth. Moss substituted for diapers. Babies crawled on dirt floors and animal skins. Serving dishes were often communal and scraped clean but seldom washed. Houses were filled with strips of meat, rendered oil, blubber, and skins in all stages of preparation and decomposition. Meat that was being dried was hung from tree branches or racks and was often swarming with flies, many managing to deposit their eggs in the flesh. Stefansson (1914: 226) observed an Inuit woman who had stepped in dog excrement scrape it off her boots with her ulu knife, casually wipe the blade with a rag, then use the same knife to cut meat and prepare a meal.

This list of horrors is but a prelude to the page after page after page of quotations taken from ethnographic works that describe life around the equator in Africa, South America, Oceania and more, to support their argument - that humans have always enjoyed eating rotten and putrid meat. Some of the anecdotes seem outrageous, bordering on the absurd to contemporary ears.

One day a carcase of a wild pig in a highly decomposed condition was picked up by one of the paddlers on the Ubangi. This was cut up and shared among the canoes and part of it fell to my crew. Next day a most unpleasant smell accompanied us all the forenoon and no one could detect the cause, in fact, none of the natives noticed it. At lunch time however, the polemen produced a basket full of rotten flesh which they had stored in the front part of the canoe and thus given me the full benefit of it. As they commenced eating it raw, it was rather too much and I promptly ordered them to the other end of the boat where I could neither see nor smell them.

-A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State (1905) Dorman M.R.P

Tales of foragers urinating onto piles of gathered nuts to help them ferment in earth pits, whole communities using the same latrine so they could harvest the inedible seeds of a particular cactus from their own feces, thickening soup with moose droppings… these sound sensationalist and almost defamatory. But we should try to look such realities in the face, to understand the profound differences between cultures and eras.

The true Palaeolithic diet?

One key signpost in human evolution is the supposed transition from scavenger to hunter. Doubtless there is a difference, but the evidence presented so far suggests that humans have retained the ‘sensory package’ of scavenging up to the present day. What one group finds odorously offensive (cheese, pickled eggs, fermented fish) another enjoys with relish. Clearly from the anthropological literature of the past few centuries we can also accept that people have the physical ability to tolerate rotten and putrid meat. We also learn that the most nutritious parts of the animal were the staple foods for hunter-gatherers around the world. Caribou paunch stuffed with half digested moss, blood, fat and entrails, then roasted over a fire. Blubber, pounded until soft, and dipped into fermented seal oil. Fish eggs left to mature until they look like and taste like cheese. Frozen pieces of reindeer meat eaten with marrow and kidney fat. Such recipes were likely the sort of fare our ancestors ate, especially during climatic downturns. Some evidence exists for fermentation methods: Neanderthals submerging meat in water for long periods of time, a Swedish Mesolithic pit filled with putrefying fish. But unsurprisingly most of the evidence for our ancestor’s diets has vanished. We are left with bones and ethnographies for the most part. While fitness gurus and dieters today argue about whether ketogenic or gluten-free represents the ideal prehistoric diet, you’d likely come much closer by eating a can of surströmming with some pickled cabbage.