With your take on pemmican perhaps not being suited long term, I'd like to know why –
Hmmmmm, really no magic here. I consider pemmican an emergency food, a compact food for travel, and a food that can be stored for use during lean times like winter. This is how it was used by the Cree Indians who invented the stuff. I don’t think it was ever meant as a sole source of nutrition, but then that is just my opinion.
Further, I like to include some organ meats in my diet. Whether this is strictly necessary I have no idea, but it works well for me. Others that have tried a ZC diet without organ meats seem to fail. Since I don’t know all the circumstances for individual cases the best I can do is speculate that organ meats provide some necessary elements to the diet that is missing if only muscle meats are eaten. That said, organ meats don’t work well in pemmican. They cause the pemmican to spoil rapidly which defeats the primary purpose of pemmican and that is long term storage.
There are some that have tried a pemmican-only diet long term and they claim success (Delfeugo on ZIOH comes to mind), but, then again, I don’t know the specific circumstances. One person that I do know about is Danny Roddy. He ate a pemmican-only diet for two years. At first things seemed to improve, but over the long term he got strange rashes on his legs and I believe some cravings. I’ve never gotten any symptoms of any kind eating mostly raw meat with organ meats included through the pet food in my mix. Is it the small amount of organ meats I eat that make everything work? I have no idea, but I’ll continue eating them. Why mess with success?
and what your take is on my meat prep. I'd appreciate it!
Your prep seems fine but is more work than I wish to do for daily meals. I want to spend as little time as possible messing with food. This is probably another reason I don’t eat much pemmican. Way too much prep time. Here’s what I do:
My prep is very simple. I order all my meat from Slankers Grass Fed Meats in Texas. I purchase their 2 lb packages of regular ground meat as well as their regular pet food. Once a year I get about 300 lbs of grass fed suet from a local source near San Fransisco. They don’t ship so I have to drive up there to get it. I render most of it so that it can be stored without refrigeration. I then use the fat to make pemmican (most of which I send out as samples) and also add to my meat mixture to raise the fat content to about 70-75 percent of calories.
Every 10-12 days I thaw 12 lbs of ground beef and 4 ½ lbs of pet food. I mix these together in a large stainless steel bowl along with about ½ lb of rendered fat. Once everything is mixed well I repackage the mix in 1 ½ packages using Ziploc sandwich bags. This makes 10 – 12 servings. I leave a couple out in the refrigerator and refreeze the rest. Each day I take a package from the refrigerator and set it on the counter to warm up for my daily meal, and take one package from the freezer and place it in the refrigerator to thaw for the next day.
My whole prep time is about 45 minutes once every 10 days to make the daily food packages. Everything else is just moving packages from the freezer to the refrigerator and from the refrigerator to the counter. Total prep time for each meal works out to about 5 minutes per day.
Hope this helps,
Lex
