If It Crawls, It's Canned: Eating In The Alaskan Wilderness

Via The Lonely Libertarian 

 

Nobody throws away a mason jar on Prince of Wales Island. On this rugged mass of mountain, forest, river and sea in southeast Alaska, most of the several thousand year-round residents subsist at least partially off the generous fat of the land. And much of the bounty is pressure cooked, preserved and stored away for the future.

"If it stops crawling long enough, we'll put it in a jar," says Jon Rowan, a schoolteacher in the town of Klawock, on the island's west side.

Rowan hunts, harvests and cans nearly every sort of creature that lives in the diverse, rain-drenched ecosystem of the region. His cellar is crammed with hundreds of jars of salmon, halibut, rockfish, lingcod, deer and even seal, which Rowan can legally shoot because he — like many of the island's several thousand people — has Native American roots.

Seal blubber, Rowan says, is cooked for hours before going into the jar. It may be used for cooking or simply melted over rice — "kind of like how you use soy sauce at a Chinese restaurant," Rowan says. The meat of local seals is also canned.

"It tastes like really rich duck," Rowan says.

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