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Food in Antarctica - page 2
Pemmican
There are many recipes for Pemmican, but basically it consists of a mixture of pounded dried beef with beef fat - other meats or mixtures of meats may be substituted for beef. Explorers of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration would take great care in where they bought their Pemmican from and the recipe that it was made to. Pemmican would provide nearly half of the total calories eaten out in "the field". Pemmican was basic nutritious food that also had the added advantage of remaining edible for years though it is not terribly appetizing. It was often made up into a thick meat soup when simmered with melted snow known as "Hoosh", this was eaten with butter-laden sledging biscuits. Today, pemmican is gaining something of a resurgence as it is prepared and eaten as a snack-food by body-builders and the like, although they often cheat by putting berries in with it. I found recipes on the net for all kinds of meat ingredients, kangaroo seems popular in Australia. The best I tasted was made of reindeer from the herd that are naturalized on South Georgia (released by whalers and sealers) - it was also about 8 years old at the time I ate it. As a savoury snack, I prefer pork scratchings.
Sledging BiscuitsAlong with Pemmican, sledging biscuits are a part of polar lore. They are approximately 2" x 3" (5 x 7.5 cm) and fairly thick for biscuits. They are hard and rather like the boring plain ones you get left in a mixed box of "biscuits for cheese" at Christmas. Along with pemmican sledging biscuits were - and still are - one of the mainstays of food for Antarctic field parties. So much so in fact that sledging biscuits from Scott's 1912 polar expedition and Shackleton's voyage to South Georgia on the James Caird have even come up at auction in the last few years with price tags of many $1,000's. Ordinary ones are cheaper however. Scurvy
Scurvy is a deficiency disease caused by lack of vitamin C (ascorbic acid). It was a common complaint on sailing ships before about 1900. Humans are one of the few animals (along with monkeys and guinea pigs) that are unable to make vitamin C from other components of the diet. We have to consume it ready made in our food. The body stores enough vitamin C for about three months. It is found in a whole range of foods, but especially fresh fruits and vegetables. Now as you have already learnt, fresh fruits and vegetables are not common in Antarctica even today. So for early explorers in particular, scurvy was a very real problem. Polar exploration (amongst other exploits) resulted in scurvy as much as anything because it had been relatively rare since 1803 when the Royal Navy introduced citrus fruits, lemons and limes to combat it. By the end of that century it was such a distant problem that those who suffered from it did not recognise the early stages that their grandfathers would have spotted straight away. Those going to the Arctic generally had an easier time of it as game is generally more common than in the Antarctic. Where explorers could eat fresh meat (raw) they could usually escape the effects of scurvy. Even though meat contains relatively little vitamin C it does contain enough. Another factor contributing to scurvy is that vitamin C in stored food breaks down over time and is also broken down by cooking. Some expeditions had considerable quantities of lemon juice (fresh lemon juice is a good source of the vitamin - not the best though) but still the members fell ill with scurvy as the vitamin C in the juice deteriorated until it was no longer effective.
Haemorrhages can occur any where in the body, but are most obvious in the skin where they cause widespread bruising. Bleeding from the gums and loosening of teeth is common. Bleeding into muscles and joints also occurs causing pain, tiredness and disorientation. If no vitamin C is available then eventually death is caused usually by bleeding into and around the brain.
In particularly unfortunate individuals;
The cure for scurvy is simply to administer large quantities of vitamin C, noticeable improvement occurs within 24 hours.
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Anyone who is in the slightest acquainted with stories of
polar exploration up to about 1950 will have heard of Pemmican. This is an early
form of a processed food first invented by the Hudson Bay Company and based on
traditional Native North American Indian recipes. It was planned
to be very compact, very nutritious and to remain edible for a long time.
Symptoms:
Insufficient vitamin C affects the body's production of collagen - a protein in
connective tissue that surrounds body structures and holds them together. When
someone has scurvy, collagen is still produced, but it is unstable and causes small
blood vessels to become weak and wounds to be poorly held together.
A particularly
gruesome symptom of scurvy is that old wounds re-open. Wounds are kept
closed by scar tissue with a high proportion of collagen, this collagen is
continually replaced in the healthy body. With scurvy, the replacement collagen
is defective and so wounds from decades beforehand can re-open and bleed once
again. Life at sea was a rough and dangerous existence so the men most likely to
get scurvy were also those who would most quickly suffer the most from it by old
wounds re-opening. On
one Arctic expedition in 1875 an Admiralty surgeon specified that no sailors
with "old wounds" would be accepted.
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