A Fatal Feast?

Some very odd foodstuffs can be found in Russia, particularly when you head as far north as the northern reaches of Siberia.  Perhaps the oddest one is called kopalkhen.  A fascinating article about this dish can be found on the Russia Beyond website, and may be read here.   Here's a summary of the article.

Kopalkhen is nothing more than pickled meat, but it's pickled by an unusual process.  Essentially, one takes a large animal--a deer, perhaps.  Inuit tribes use a similar process.  The animal is captured, starved for several days, then slaughtered by strangulation, so as not to break the animal's skin.  Then the carcass is submerged in a swamp and covered with sod, and the place is marked so that it can be found.  These buried meat caches are left for anyone to find, the custom being that one may permissibly dig up and eat a kopalkhen if one has no other food available, provided that they make and bury another kopalkhen to pass the favor on.  

The pickling, you see, is caused by decomposition.  And the decomposition process, when undertaken in this manner, enriches the carcass with all kinds of nutrients that enable someone traveling in the hostile Siberian climate to make it back home or another safe place.  But the process also loads the meat with toxins and microorganisms associated with rot that will kill or seriously endanger the life of the unwary foreigner who partakes of it. 

Yet the indigenous peoples of the area are not harmed by eating kopalkhen, not even the children.  To them, kopalkhen is a delicacy.  It's sliced into thin strips, rolled up and dipped into salt, and eaten.  Sometimes other items findable in the harsh Siberian landscape are eaten with kopalkhen to enhance the experience, such as "the raw lungs of a freshly slaughtered deer and a small amount of yunev, which is a sort of relish derived from the leaves of the locally-growing rhodiola plant."  

If there's a lesson here, it's this.  Studying old foodways is worthwhile because it reminds us of food preservation techniques that may still be viable, or at least helpful under certain conditions.  There are more of them than many modern Westerners realize--smoking; drying; fermenting; salting, pickling, dehydrating, and the list goes on.  Most work best on a limited variety of foods prepared in particular parts of the globe, but they work without the chemicals used in industrial preservation of food for transport.  These techniques are very much part of the history of food, and most of them are still in use today.  

EDIT:  (1/1/2022) Shortly after posting this article, I found another web article that talked about a similar process--but one that does not pose a potentially fatal hazard to non-indigenous folk.  That article can be found here.  It purports to be from the University of Michigan and dates to 1995.  It describes a process of sealing a carcass under the ice in a fresh water body in winter.  Supposedly, the cold leaves alive in the meat only lactobacilli, which deter toxic microorganisms from breeding in the meat.  The article reports on an informal experiment where a researcher got his own fresh meat specimens.  He put one into an icy pond and buried others in a bog, using stone implements for the butchering (the point of the experiment was to determine whether the technique could have been used by PaleoIndians during the era when mammoths still roamed the land).  He reported checking on the meat every two weeks, and said that the meat was fine so long as the pond remained frozen over.  "By June, the meat had developed a strong smell and sour taste, but still retained considerable nutritive value."  

Who's right?  Was the Russian article sensationalizing for publicity's sake?  Does the difference in continent matter?  Hard to say.  The article from UMich doesn't clearly indicate whether Professor Fisher tried eating any of the meat.  If I find out anything further about such practices, I'll report about it on this blog.