IanG wrote:
[snip]
> Did you know, it is supposedly true
> that if you eat rabbit and only rabbit, you'll die of malnutrition.
Yep. Known popularly as "rabbit starvation," it was a serious problem
for the first European explorers/mappers (such as David Thompson) who
were mapping Western Canada and the Northwestern U.S. back in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It's the result of far too
little dietary fat in wild rabbits. Without a reasonable supply of such
fat, certain metabolic operations go haywire, you get a hugely swollen
stomach, and eventually you sicken and die.
The explorers knew the effects and how to prevent them, but of course
they had no idea why it happened. Sometimes, though, wild rabbit was
the *only* thing available. In some of their diaries, they noted the
lack of availability of fatter animals with rising concern, as well as
their relief when they bagged something that had some fat on it.
Pemmican was a popular survival food for many of these guys, to
supplement their diets with a store of fat and protein they could carry
with them. There's at least one story of David Thompson, where
voyageurs from the Northwest Company who were accompanying him had
managed to gorge themselves on pemmican for several days at the rate of
4.67 *pounds* per guide per day, as well as other food stores they had
with them. Thompson, reporting this in his diary, was obviously pissed
off. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation on the calorie
intake of the voyageurs at this time -- assuming Thompson's reporting to
be anywhere near accurate, they were each consuming about *20,000*
calories/day.
Garth
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