Inside the Complicated Fight for the Right to Eat Seal Blubber

tlatollotl:

One afternoon in 2014, May Bernhardt, an 87-year-old Inupiat
Eskimo with stringy gray hair, toothlessly chewed a banana. The fruit was
perfectly ripe and a good source of fiber and potassium, but she hated it.

Bernhardt lives in a nursing home in the Alaskan Arctic, and
like the other Inupiat elders in the home, she was accustomed to being served
imported foods from faraway climes. But she and the others craved the
traditional Inupiat foods they grew up eating. Most of them were raised in the
bush of northwestern Alaska living a mostly subsistence lifestyle, eating
caribou, fish, wild tundra berries, and marine mammals like seals and whales.
Once they moved into the nursing home, a wooden building atop stilts drilled
into permafrost beneath the grassy tundra, they had to eat what the home
provided. And that meant bananas, green beans, potatoes, and pasta.

“You can’t get an old-timer Eskimo and just switch them over
to white [people’s] food. Such a big change don’t agree with ’em,” Bernhardt
complained. Richard, another elder sitting nearby, 66-years-old and gray at the
temples, concurred with the assessment.

The problem is they didn’t have much say in the matter.
Federal regulations determine which foods can be served in most nursing homes,
and traditional Inupiat foods, the most unique of all Native American cuisines,
sorely conflict with rules for nutrition and food safety. Since 2011, when the
elders moved into the nursing home in the town of Kotzebue—with a population of
3,000, it’s Alaska’s largest town above the Arctic Circle—a distant federal
bureaucracy thousands of miles away had come between them and the wild, meat-
and animal fat–based diet they had grown up on.

They complained. And the staff at the nursing home listened
and brought their concerns south—to dieticians in Anchorage, health care
providers, and Alaskan politicians. Soon, they had sparked a battle between
this far-flung nursing home and the federal government that would embroil this
tiny Arctic town in a tangled web of nutrition politics.

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Inside the Complicated Fight for the Right to Eat Seal Blubber