Pemmican is an ancient travel food of dried meat pounded with fat and some flavorings like honey or berries. It was a staple of American Indians and Arctic travel. As it has become a bit of a fad among “carnivore diet” enthusiasts, you can buy pemmican commercially, as an ultra-premium protein bar.

One of the odd things about it is that it doesn’t sound very good, but explorers could live off it for months or even years (as opposed to other foods, like K-rations, where soldiers became unable to eat it and would start throwing the rations out). Robert E. Peary wrote in 1917 that:

Too much cannot be said of the importance of pemmican to a polar expedition. It is an absolute sine qua non. Without it a sledge-party cannot compact its supplies within a limit of weight to make a serious polar journey successful…With pemmican, the most serious sledge-journey can be undertaken and carried to a successful issue in the absence of all other foods.

Of all foods that I am acquainted with, pemmican is the only one that, under appropriate conditions, a man can eat twice a day for 365 days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first. And it is the most satisfying food I know. I recall innumerable marches in bitter temperatures when men and dogs had been worked to the limit and I reached the place for camp feeling as if I could eat my weight of anything. When the pemmican ration was dealt out, and I saw my little half-pound lump, about as large as the bottom third of an ordinary drinking-glass, I have often felt a sullen rage that life should contain such situations. By the time I had finished the last morsel I would not have walked round the completed igloo for anything or everything that the St. Regis, the Blackstone, or the Palace Hotel could have put before me.

Even the Eskimo dogs were at times obliged to yield to the filling qualities of pemmican, and anything that will stay the appetite of a healthy Eskimo dog must possess some body. I recall an instance where my powerful king dog discovered a tin of pemmican that had had a hole punched in it in some way. The maddening smell of the luscious beef fat through the hole spurred him to drive his iron jaws through the tin until he had ripped it like a can-opener and reached the contents. Had the tin contained ordinary meat, the 12 pounds would have been merely an appetizer for him; but when I found him later, he had voluntarily quit, with only a portion of the pemmican eaten. And—though this may not be believed by others who have had experience with Eskimo dogs—he would eat nothing more that day.

I was also interested in it as a travel tool: pemmican is compact, long-term storable (years or decades), low-residue (ie. no need for bathrooms at awkward times), and presumably highly-satiating (due to being all fat+protein) without the jaggedness of the carb-heavy snacks/foods which are the default ‘snack’ everywhere & easiest to purchase in airports etc. So I looked into buying some.

Pemmican is horribly expensive, especially post-COVID19, as it is usually made of beef (where low-end beef is $5/pound in supermarkets), which is dried (half is water, doubling the per-pound cost), and made in small batches by a handful of specialists (so expensive production). The net result is that a single bar for a snack (barely approaching a meal) is easily >$10. (To compare it to another fatty treat, for the price of one pemmican bar, one could buy 2 gallons of ice cream!)

Still, I was curious, so on 2021-02-09, I ordered a box of the most commonly-mentioned-on-social-media one, Carnivore Bar (“Grass-Finished Box”, 12× [No longer available as of September 2024; they now sell only 6, 24, or 50-packs.], $150.2^$120.72₂₀₂₁); and when I ran out in 2023-04-24, a variety of bars from a small competitor, Aupa (variety case, 10×60g bars; $66.66).

The Carnivore Bar look pretty much exactly like what they are: ground up dried beef mixed with a lot of beef tallow (and salt), and a white sheen from the fat. When I tried the first one, I was unimpressed. It was edible, and quite easy to eat, and did feel satiating—but I was certainly not $12.44^$10₂₀₂₁-worth impressed. Similarly, for the next few, although I gradually began noticing that I was enjoying them more and more, and looking forward to the next one. These signs of habit-formation & addiction were a bit concerning, given how expensive pemmican is! (I can afford vices like good loose-leaf tea, but not spending >$37.33^$30₂₀₂₁/day on food, not without making a lot more money than I do as a writer.)

My interpretation is that Robert E. Peary is correct, and the apparent blandness & mediocrity of pemmican initially reflects that pemmican is an acquired taste—acquired because it takes multiple exposures to associate the reinforcement of the fat with perhaps either the taste receptors or the gut response to fat, similar to how rabbit starvation is hard to notice consciously & develops gradually. If I had been eating more, and more regularly, I think I would have felt the pemmican effects much more strongly. (So ironically, I think Eliezer Yudkowsky is right when he says from a basic biological perspective, humans ought to be able to get addicted to ‘bear meat and fat with honey’; he’s just wrong in claiming that humans don’t, due to ignorance of esoteric foodstuffs.)

When I looked into re-ordering, Carnivore Bar had raised their prices to something like $15/bar, and so I tried a smaller competitor, which had much lower prices.

The Aupa bars were… merely OK. The first ‘blueberry’ one was definitely quite different from how I remember the Carnivore Bar: it seemed to have much less tallow/fat (an odd ingredient to skimp on), so it was much more crumbly/gristly (a nuisance on airplanes), and they could’ve benefited from using more salt & better packaging. The second plain one was more satisfyingly like Carnivore Bar, so the batches/types seemed to differ substantially.

The addictive effect was not as strong, perhaps due to the lower fat. I have been gradually using them up during travel, and as of September 2024, I was down to 2, and used those up on my December SF trip. They have been as useful as I hoped: one bar drives away hunger for hours, while using little space/weight. (They are expensive, yes, but meat in airports or cities is even more expensive—even a decent hamburger or sandwich will often cost $15.)

As beef prices have kept going up, I expect I won’t be buying more pemmican; but maybe I’ll look into some cheaper form of protein bar—there ought to be plant or animal sources of protein/fat which won’t cost $15+ per bar or come loaded with so much sugar one might as well buy a candy bar instead.