Local Food Challenge

For the month of August I intend to only consume food from local sources. In this post I will attempt to lay out what I intend to eat and not eat, my feasting/fasting protocol, my inspirations, plus some resources for anyone else interested in taking on this nutritional challenge.

The genesis and inspiration for this challenge was born from the Bristol Bay village of Igiugig. In 2017 the entire community ate only local food for six weeks. Although I grew up in Alaska eating a lot of wild-harvested food, this will be the first time I have attempted to eat that exclusively.

Over the last year and a half, I have fallen down a rabbit hole of nutrition science and anthropology. My original impetus was simple: weight loss. I soon discovered, however, that the dietary thread I was tugging on was more holistic. By learning to become a fat burner and “metabolically flexible,” I soon began to experience a cascade of positive health improvements.

For example: my 20-year-plus eczema rash disappeared, achy joints and soreness have been nearly eradicated; I most often sleep a full night for the first time in my adult life; my mood and temperament have improved; I no longer suffer from low blood sugar crashes or feelings of “hangryness;” I have become insulin sensitive; my cognition, focus and ability to be present and in the moment are acute; most of the small skin tags I had have disappeared; chronic inflammation is a thing of the past; and the list goes on.   

In order to feel so much better and healthier it might seem like I must have to consume a complicated diet, compounded with loads of supplements, perhaps even pharmaceuticals, with dogged persistence and loads of will power. Nothing could be further from the truth. My diet, fasting, exercise/recovery and hormetic stress practices are remarkably simple. This local food challenge will be a lucid progression of my current lifestyle.

There are many ways to approach the topic of Ketosis and even more ways to label it. I am a fan of calling the approach that I am pursuing an “ancestral diet.”

Because of climate change, roughly 2 million years ago, our hominid ancestors had to move out of the trees and onto the open prairies of eastern Africa. Brain size of these early humans (Homo habillis) was roughly 500cc. In this new and likely more intimidating environment, humans learned to scavenge and eventually hunt for their sustenance. It’s theorized that animal fat and protein propelled our evolution and brain size, which is now 1,400cc. (Homo sapiens brain size peaked at 1,500cc about 10,000 years ago and has been in decline since the advent of agriculture.)

From the book, Carnivore Code by MD. Paul Saladino.

There is no known, one size fits all, optimal human diet. Furthermore, there are as many opinions about proper diet as there are nutritionists, bloggers, bro-scientists, YouTubers, and dietitians. There are, however, some irrefutable physiological facts. Here are a few that I find fascinating and that I hitch the pony of my N-of-1 self-experimentation to: Ketosis is not so much a diet as it is a metabolic state. Either you are in it or you’re not. There is no such thing as an essential* carbohydrate. Fasting is as natural and as restorative to humankind as breathing. Wild-caught Alaskan fish and game is some of the most nutrient dense and healthy food in the world. Exercise is crucial for health and well-being; ancestral exercise is optimal -- as much aerobic as possible (able to get enough air while doing it that you can hold a conversation), periodically lift heavy things, and periodically employ high intensity intervals training sessions. Persistent and chronic stress will kill you prematurely; hormetic stress will make you live longer and more optimal. Rest and recovery are as important as regular exercise. Metabolic flexibility is as remarkable as it is liberating.

 It is fair to say that what works for me may not work for anyone else, but anyone who wishes to live a long, healthy life should consider ditching sugar, refined grains, hyper-processed “food” (everything from the middle isles of the store), and industrial seed oils. With that aside, the spectrum for discovering what dietary protocol works best for any individual is vast. 

One key principle for me is that the food I eat is satisfying, which is to say that it does not feel like a “diet” or that I am depriving myself in order to be healthier. Every bite of food that I consume these days is immensely gratifying. In the moment of consumption, I don’t care if the food I am ingesting is helping restore my hormones into balance, that I am replenishing my liver and muscle glycogen through gluconeogenesis, or that I am balancing my Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio. All I care about is that it’s delicious, and nothing is as tasty to my pallet as Alaskan fish and game.

Another important consideration for me is that the food that I eat is ecologically sustainable. Alaskans should take immense pride in the fact that we still have mostly intact ecosystems that support some of the world’s most nutritious fish, fowl and game. To eat only local food would be more challenging in other states or provinces that have traded their renewable resources for short-term profits. 

For my own N-of-1 sake, I am excited to see if there are any noticeable improvements in my health over the next month. I also want to deepen my intuition for how much food I actually need to put away every season, as well as connect with and learn from other people around Alaska and beyond who are undergoing the challenge to enrich our connection to the land, sea, and water that supports this nutrition and our well-being. 

In order to keep this one month challenge reasonable, I plan to eat a very simple, high fat diet and I will likely only eat one big meal a day, or two at the most. It took some time and willpower, but I have kicked my sugar/carbohydrate addiction and have become a fat-burner/metabolically flexible. This metabolic state allows me to fast for 24 or more hours with ease and with plenty of stable energy. Anyone can become metabolically flexible. By all accounts, including my own, once this transition has occurred, it feels like you have a new super power. 

Our Alaskan wild salmon are the envy of the world; our moose and caribou outshine even the finest grass-fed/grass-finished pastured beef; our soil is rich and our water unspoiled. These are sacred. The local food challenge is a way to remember.  

In later updates and posts I will share my meal plans, my macronutrient ratios and more. 

*An essential nutrient is a nutrient required for normal body functioning that can not be synthesized by the body. Categories of essential nutrient include vitamins, dietary minerals, essential fatty acids and essential amino acids.

Harvest Season

Every year without fail my birthday comes at the end of July. Without a calendar I would still know when to celebrate my most recent trip around the sun because late July is when berries are finally ripe enough to pick, here in Alaska. 

As a boy growing up in interior some of my favorite memories are from this time of year. My mom and I would walk to the berry patches around our property in Slana - buckets in hand. My best intentions to put more in the pail than in my mouth seemed to always fall short. Seeing my mothers buckets filled with wild raspberries, low bush blueberries, cranberries and currents I knew that our winter larder was safe, regardless of my lack of contribution. 

Back at home berries were transformed into jam, jelly, pies, crisps and syrup. My brothers and I would elbow in on our mother, vying for who got to lick the spoon, try the first bite or be left with the scrapings of the bowl. When berry preserving was in full swing we'd remove our shirts and let the berries stain our mouths, foreheads, ears and bellies - inside and out. The berry debauchery concluded with a bath and often a frantic dash to the outhouse.  

I tuned 40 this late July and once again the berries are ripe. Im thankful for this seasonal infusion of plump, sugary berries and of the ritual my mother helped foster in me. My resolve to bring home more than I eat has improved some but I still have to remove my shirt and require a bath afterword. 

Food for winter cycling expeditions: DIY

In general food is important, but on extended wilderness trips the desire for it seems to occupy every minute of waking consciousness. It usually starts a few days into a trip, when your metabolism finally faces the reality of your energy demands. With physical activity taking up most of the day, ones stomach starts to feel like a furnace with no damper. Such an increase in caloric demand poses a challenge for the unsupported traveler, as this extra weight needs to be carried. So here we will answer one of our most frequently encountered questions:

‘What do you eat?’

The basic criteria for the food that we bring is that it is high in calories, compact, healthy, and easy to prepare. Common cultural assumptions of food fit for backcountry travel are, that it is inherently expensive, engineered with the latest technology, wrapped in special packaging, branded with an outdoor marketing strategy, or otherwise something that you would never eat on a regular day. Many instant meals designed for campers may be very lightweight, but they are often insufficient in calories and nutrients, especially considering how much they cost. From personal experience, they usually give me stomach upset, gas, and irregular bowels - not good while living in a small tent. Rarely in life will you ever appreciate food this much. Don’t ruin it by eating crap.

Ultimately our diets consist of very simple ingredients which I will share here, but we have also come up with a handful of special recipes and food preparations that have yielded great results. We begin preparing our trip food months before we embark. Our methods take extra care and time, but our food tastes great, fills us up, keeps us healthy, and our grocery bill doesn’t break the budget.

While on the trail, we cook hot breakfast and dinner along with a hot drink, often on a fire. This is also when we melt our drinking water. This year we are excited to be cooking on our Titanium Goat wood stove. During the day, stopping for lunch can be time consuming; using up precious daylight hours. Instead, we carry an arsenal of snackable foods and eat periodically when our body demands it. Feeling cold? Eat something. Tiered? East something. Mechanical difficulty? First, eat something. Cranky, discouraged, upset, or unsure about what to do? You got it. Food  is crucial to maintaining a level head as well as your physical condition. Having it on hand makes it easy to keep up with your body's demand and ultimately helps you retain heat, feel good and enjoy yourself.

Almost everything we bring can be found in a regular grocery store, but ideally you can find a lot of this stuff in bulk and save some money. After purchasing our food, we ration it out into vacuum packs or freezer zip-lock bags and ship it to post offices along our route.

Breakfast

For breakfast we almost always eat cream-of-wheat. Oats would substitute fine, we both just like cream-of-wheat more. Both the oats and the wheat mostly serve as a vessel for the higher calorie ingredients including butter or coconut oil, brown sugar, powdered milk, dried fruit, and nuts. We also drink tea or cowboy coffee. This year we will experiment with our coffee by grinding it extremely fine in an effort to imitate those instant espresso packs. Either way, just skip on the last gulp.

Lunch

Our daytime food includes dried salmon, dried fruit, nuts, trail mix, cheese, our homemade bars or store bought bars. I don’t have a preferred store bought bar, though Luna bars are one of my favorites. I like Cliff bars, but they are the consistency of a brick when frozen, so I stopped bringing them in the winter. Snickers bars have a lot of calories, but I don’t go with them exclusively because the sugar overdose is more than I can handle. We usually bring some kind of candy, and always chocolate, but overdoing the sugar has brought me to the verge of system failure on more than one trip. As with regular life, I recommend moderation.

Dried salmon is our best food. It is loaded with fat, protein and nutrients, is easy to eat anytime but can also be cooked with a meal. We catch it and process it ourselves. It has been a staple food for native people across the northern half of the continent for thousands of years, and has a proven credibility. Last July we caught our red (sockeye) salmon from the Kenai River with a dipnet. This is a wild salmon run and the fish are large and delicious. We fillet the fish and pack it in vacuum-sealed bags, and freeze it for storage. During the months before a trip we thaw and dry strips, in batches. Something that we want to experiment with is pemmican, which is a fat and nutrient dense food historically used in polar expeditions and is made from dried meat, melted fat, and dried fruit.  

We dry most of our own fruit, usually pears, apples and bananas. It’s a great way to utilize over-ripe or mealy fruit that would otherwise be thrown out. We buy cranberries, cherries and dates, and get shipments of tropical treats from Bjorn’s family’s farm in Kona. Fruit isn’t super packed with calories, but bringing fruit is important to me because it keeps things working, if you know what I mean.

Dinner

We believe in cooking delicious dinners and mix up the ingredients every night, to keep it interesting. For the base we usually cook polenta, orzo, pasta-tini, quinoa, or spaghetti. These cook fast, expand greatly, and again, serve as a vessel for all the other goods. For flavor and salts we use bouillon cubes, powdered milk, nutritional yeast, powdered sauces and gravies of various sorts. Generous amounts of cheese (sharp cheddar and gorgonzola are our favorites), butter, and/or coconut oil are key for providing the fat that your body needs. We also add veggies that we dry ourselves and may put in any combination of tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, broccoli, kale, onions, or cabbage. Dried salmon can be added as well and re-constitutes nicely. A very helpful trick we have learned is to bring instant mashed potatoes and add them at the end to make your meal the right consistency. Most backcountry travelers have experienced soupy dinners; this is an easy way to avoid that problem. For drinks, a cup of hot chocolate is a nice end of the day treat, herbal tea, or miso soup with a pad of butter is also delicious.

For cookware we share a titanium pot and each have a titanium mug, a spoon or spork, and a 64 oz. thermos. I carry a fixed handle Buck knife that I love and use for many things, including food. Bjorn brings a leatherman, again for many uses, but the pliers are great for handling the hot pot and it has a knife. On many trips we also bring a steel bowl that fits inside the pot, but this winter we are forgoing it to save weight and space. We either pass the pot back and forth, or dole food into a mug.

Especial emphasis on hydration is required for winter travelers. You need to drink a lot of water to stay warm, prevent frostbite, and keep from getting cramps. We bring Emergen-C and drink it during the day, in attempt to maintain proper electrolyte balance. Remember, you’re asking a lot of you body, so give it what it needs. Drinking water seems simple enough, but the time and fuel required to melt water makes it tempting to go with less and the cold temperatures don’t make it particularly enjoyable. But the truth is that your metabolism requires water to function and keep you warm. So drink up. The best metric to understand if you are properly hydrated is the color of your urine. If it’s clear, you are hydrated. If it’s dark yellow, you need to drink more.

One trick we employ is to start the day with a full 64oz thermos of boiling or near boiling water. When we stop to drink, we add snow to our mug and melt it with the hot water. This is an easy way to stretch a smaller volume of water. It is also preferred to drink water as close to body temperature as possible, when it is cold, and boiling water mixed with snow is an easy way to achieve the desired temperature.

I encourage anyone who reads this to experiment with your own strategy. Everyone’s body is unique and trying things out is the best way to come up with a diet that works for you. I have personally learned that a lot of fat is really good for me, but that I need to get it from multiple sources (not just butter), that I have a threshold for sugar that should not be crossed, and that balancing my diet with fruit and veggies improves my performance.  I would have never learned these things without trial, and yeah, a little discomfort. Hopefully this advice will streamline your experience.

Kim & Bjørn