Inuit Diet - Eating Habits and Food Preparation

Eating Habits and Food Preparation

Searles defines Inuit food as mostly "eaten frozen, raw, or boiled, with very little mixture of ingredients and with very few spices added." Inuit only eat two main meals a day, but it is common to eat many snacks every hour. Customs among the Inuit when eating and preparing food are very strict and may seem odd for people of different cultures.

One common way to eat the meat hunted is frozen. Many hunters will eat the food that they hunt on location where they found it. This keeps their blood flowing and their bodies warm. One peculiar custom of eating meat at the hunting site pertains to fish. In Overland to Starvation Cove: A History, Heinrich Klutschak explains the custom: "...no fish could be eaten in a cooked state on the spot where caught but could only be enjoyed raw; only when one is a day's march away from the fishing site is it permitted to cook the fish over the flame of a blubber lamp."

When eating a meal, Inuit place slabs of large meat, blubber, and other parts of the animal on a piece of metal, plastic, or cardboard on the floor. From here, anyone in the house is able to cut off a piece of meat. At these meals, no one is obliged to join in the meal; Inuit eat only when hungry. Sometimes, though, meals are announced to the whole camp. A woman does this by the shout of "Ujuk!" which means "cooked meat".

After a hunt, the eating habits differ from normal meals. When a seal is brought home, the hunters quickly gather around it to receive their pieces of meat first. This happens because the hunters are the coldest and hungriest among the camp and need the warm seal blood and meat to warm them. The seal is cut in a specific way directly after a hunt. Borré explains the cutting of the seal is this way "one of the hunters slits the abdomen laterally, exposing the internal organs. Hunters first eat pieces of liver or they use a tea cup to gather some blood to drink." At this time, hunters may also chop up pieces of fat and the brain to mix together and eat with meat.

Women and children are accustomed to eating different parts of the seal because they wait until the hunters are done eating. Intestines are the first thing to be chosen and then any leftover pieces of the liver are consumed. Finally, ribs and backbone are eaten and any remaining meat is distributed among the camp.