A Greenland explorer will eat only decaying seal for a month

A Greenland explorer will eat only decaying seal for a month Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now By Sujata Gupta May 15, 2026 at 9:00 am Share this: Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print This spring, British explorer and chef Mike Keen will spend roughly a month skiing across Greenland with a sled dog. Along the way, the duo will subsist entirely on slowly decomposing seal meat. Keen’s roughly 320-kilometer ski across the country’s icy north serves as a loose proxy for how past Inuit and other arctic peoples might have survived similar treks across barren landscapes. The journey is part renegade chef experiment – “Is there a line between … fermented or rotten?” wonders Keen, who lives in Suffolk – and part scientific endeavor. For the latter, he’s collecting fecal samples from himself and the dog throughout the journey. That way, researchers can see how shifting from a Western diet to a traditional Inuit diet alters the microbes in his gut, or gut microbiome. Western diets are high in processed foods and fresh fruits and vegetables that can’t grow in the frigid Arctic. By comparison, the traditional Inuit diet consists of 98 percent meat, says Inuit microbiologist Aviâja Lyberth Hauptmann of the University of Greenland in Nuuk. Today, high-meat diets have been linked with cancers, digestive disorders and heart disease. But before a few decades ago, when food imports from Denmark became commonplace, Inuit people ate mostly meat and almost no plants without such issues, Hauptmann says.  Hauptmann’s hypothesis is that the underappreciated practice of fermenting meat, often for months, enhanced the meats’ microbial diversity and, in turn, the gut health of people eating such foods. “There is a way to live healthily off an animal