Barrow, Alaska... Unusual Foods

This is me inside the jawbone of a Bowhead Whale. Whales provide a lot of meat for the people in Barrow. Quite frequently, we saw cubic-foot blocks of whale meat in people's yards waiting for future use. I had the opportunity to try whale meat on a number of occasions. First, Muktuk.

This was good entry-level whale-eating. The skin (black) was chewy and sort of fishy. The blubber (pinkish) was very fatty. After chewing on it for some time, it got smaller, but never disappeared. You just had to swallow it whole. A few of us dared to go beyond muktuk and delved into the world of mikguq (below).

Not knowing what it was, I described it in my journal as "stringy meat, which was a bit like slimy beef jerky that had an organ meat flavor to it (a bit like liver)." Later, I found out from a local exactly what mikguq is, "Mikguq is the whale meat itself in blood and seal oil and fermented in a bucket outside for every bit of a month and its rotten and it smells absolutely horrible." It's probably good that I didn't know exactly what I was eating. I can attest to the smell. After several hours, even after washing my hands, they still smelled like whale. Mikguk is probably not something I will eat in the near future.

Food is rather expensive in Barrow as it has to be flown in. In most parts of the country, I don't think an assortment of a dozen donuts for $14.99 would be considered "This week's savings!"