Dried halibut and whale jerky: how a traditional Inuit diet fuelled an epic kayak adventure
For a period of two months last year, a typical day for chef Mike Keen would see him skipping breakfast and lunch in favour of snacks such as dried capelin (a small bait fish), dried halibut, jerky-like dried whale and a local Greenlandic whale skin and blubber treat called mattak.
View image in fullscreen Mike Keen eats fermented seal blood in Sermilik fjord, east Greenland. Photograph: Mike Keen
In the evening he would dine on seal or whale stew, essentially just boiled meat in water, while camping on rocky islands. He might also add seabirds? eggs and perhaps fish, walrus, reindeer, fish roe and crowberries (similar to blackberries), if he found them. He swapped his usual coffee for water or tea made with foraged herbs.
All this while kayaking almost the distance of a marathon every day, through a particularly cold spring in Greenland.
So what was Keen up to? It started with a challenge raised over a beer with a Greenlandic chef: what if you kayaked from the country?s most southerly town to the most northerly? In Greenlandic, the phrase is a rapid fire of Qs: qajak (Greenlandic for kayak) from Qaqortoq in the south to Qaanaaq in the north. Keen had regularly worked in Greenland as a chef in luxury camps along its jagged fjords, and liked the sound of the 3,000km (1,850-mile) adventure.
?I thought: if I did 30km a day, that?s 100 days,? he says. ?It?s probably doable. And then I thought it might be interesting to include a scientific study.?
View image in fullscreen An aerial shot captures Keen kayaking past an iceberg near Alluitsup Paa, south Greenland. Photograph: Mike Keen
He decided to explore the effects of an Inuit diet on health and wellbeing, working with the department of twin research and genetic epidemiology at King?s College London.
?In Greenland and a few other pockets in the world, there are people connected to the environment, living in a hunter-gatherer community. They?re still living off the land and the environment. I wanted to try that.?
Keen kayaked the west coast of Greenland in 2023 following a strict ancestral Inuit diet, and then completed a second expedition in 2024, spending 60 days in eastern Greenland eating the same diet but without the exercise, to compare results. The trek was far from the usual luxurious foodie adventure that might normally tempt a chef.
View image in fullscreen View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: some of the dishes that sustained Keen on his trip ?walrus stew; seal skin stuffed with little auk sea birds to make kiviaq, a traditional Inuit food; iginneq, fermented seal blubber from south Greenland; kiviaq and a fermented eider duck egg. Photographs: Mike Keen
?Climate change has made the seasons in Greenland unpredictable,? he says. ?I went in spring, but temperatures were more like winter: -12C. Sometimes the sea was iced over and I would have to break the ice in front of the kayak, each kilometre taking an hour.?
Our food has changed so much and been modified so it doesn?t reflect what we were eating a few thousand years ago Mike Keen, chef
At one point he was stuck in a storm for three days and three nights and the wind picked up his kayak and threw it with such force at his tent that the main pole broke and cut his face. It brought home to Keen how close to the edge life in Greenland can be. When he finally made it to Nuuk, he got another shock.
?I thought I?d lose some weight because of the exercise,? he says. ?But when I got to Nuuk, about four weeks in, I was really shocked at how much I had lost.?
Keen had access to scales for the first time and found that his weight had dropped from about 90kg to 75kg. ?I thought: actually, that?s too fast. And if it keeps going at this rate, at some point I?m going to keel over in the kayak and drown.?
View image in fullscreen Scans measuring bone density were among the pre- and post-journey tests carried out on Keen. Photograph: Mike Keen
However, Keen?s weightloss levelled out and he completed his journey. In pre- and post-trip tests looking at everything from lung function to blood pressure and grip strength, the results were striking.
?We saw a dramatic improvement in virtually all his health parameters,? says Dr Tim Spector, professor of epidemiology at King?s College London. ?I wasn?t surprised they improved, but I was surprised at how dramatically they improved.?
In both trips, Keen lost a significant amount of weight ? 12.4kg on the first trip and 14.3kg on the second ? and his blood pressure reduced significantly, his grip strength improved, his lung function improved, and his body fat dropped from 26.8% to 17.4%.
?What?s interesting to see is that he was following the exact opposite of a zero fat diet, and it had this incredibly beneficial effect,? says Spector. ?His fat intake must have quadrupled, his protein intake probably doubled and he massively reduced carbohydrates. He was on something close to a ketogenic [low-carb, high-fat] diet, which most people can?t support long term.?
The experience has changed how Keen looks at food.
?There are only a few people who are still hunter-gatherers left in places like Greenland and the Amazon,? he says. ?They?re the only ones that still have that connection to the environment and landscape. It?s kicked me off on a journey to explore an ?eat your environment? mission.?
The mission involves looking critically at the global food system and seeking out ways to reconnect with the regions where people are still eating food untouched by it.
His next expedition will be taking place soon when he heads off to live with the Kichwa and Huaorani tribes along the banks of the Napo River in Ecuador to see how their hunter-gatherer diet will affect his body.
View image in fullscreen Keen lands in Sisimiut, west Greenland, six days into his epic trip. Photograph: Aqqalu Inuuteq Dahl
For those who don?t have Arctic food in the freezer, it?s still possible to connect with the spirit of his mission. Mike?s advice is to choose food that is as close as possible to its natural state.
?Most of our food has changed so much and been selectively modified so it doesn?t reflect what we were eating a few thousand years ago,? he says.
Back in Suffolk, however, he still has a taste for the Arctic.
?I barely eat carbs now and my freezer is full of Greenlandic food,? he says. ?It?s full of seal and mattak and I occasionally break out a couple of bags of ammassak (capelin) as well.?
