Ben Gerdeman

Pemmican was the first energy bar ever made, and nothing on the petrol station counter has come close to it since. What went into pemmican: - Dried meat, pounded to powder - Rendered fat, poured in hot - Held together by the fat, nothing else - About 3,000 calories a pound - Keeps for years without a fridge - Wrapped in the animal's own hide What goes into the one by the till: - Oats, puffed rice, soy protein isolate - Sunflower or rapeseed oil - Glued together with syrup, under 3 different names - About 1,800 calories a pound - Best before next spring - Wrapped in plastic that will outlive you It took 5 pounds of fresh meat to make 1 pound of the dried, and a whole bison to fill one bag. The drying took out the water, which is most of what an animal weighs, and the fat put back the part that does the work. In the Boer War the British Army issued it as the iron ration: 4 ounces of pemmican and 4 of chocolate in a tin, and a soldier could march for 36 hours on it before he started to drop. Peary took 30,000 pounds of it to the Pole and called it the most concentrated and satisfying of all meat foods. The word is Cree. Pimîhkân, from pimî, which means fat. The people who invented the energy bar named it after the energy.