Pemmican: The Two Ingredient Ration That Beat Every Protein Bar On The Shelf

Two fur companies fought a nine year war over pemmican, and on a June evening in 1816 twenty-two men died at Seven Oaks in about a quarter of an hour, over a cartload of it that was already on its way somewhere else.

The food they were killing each other for has two ingredients. Dried meat and rendered fat, pounded together and pressed into a block. That is the entire recipe, and it fed the men who crossed a continent on foot and the men who hauled sledges to the South Pole.

The thing that replaced it has fourteen ingredients, a third of the energy by weight, and a line on the back telling you not to eat too many and not to give them to children.

What pemmican actually is

Take lean meat. Cut it thin, dry it hard, pound it to a powder. Render fat separately until it runs clear. Mix the two in roughly equal weights, press the result into a solid mass, let it set. Some versions carry dried berries. Most do not.

The word is Cree, built on the root for fat, which tells you where the emphasis sat for the people who invented it. Everybody who reinvents this food gets the same thing backwards: they treat the meat as the point and the fat as an addition. The dried meat is the carrier. The fat is the food.

There is nothing else in there. No water, which is what makes it keep. No sugar, no starch, no binder, no humectant, no emulsifier, nothing whose job is to hold a texture together on a shelf under a supermarket light for eleven months.

Fourteen ingredients, and one of them is water

The bar wins on one thing, and it wins on it completely: you can buy one in a petrol station at eleven at night, and it will taste the same as the last one. That convenience is worth real money and it is the reason the category exists. The back of the packet is a different conversation.

This is the ingredients list of one of Britain’s best selling protein bars, lifted off the manufacturer’s own page rather than paraphrased:

Protein Blend (Whey Protein Isolate (Milk), Calcium Caseinate (Milk)), Sweetener: Maltitol; Bovine Collagen Hydrolysate, Humectant: Glycerol; Water, Cocoa Butter, Whole Milk Powder, Bulking Agent: Polydextrose; Rapeseed Oil, Fat-reduced Cocoa Powder, Cocoa Mass, Emulsifier: Lecithins (Soy); Flavourings, Sea Salt.

Fourteen entries, and the first one is two things travelling under a single name. The second is a sweetener. The fourth is a humectant, in there to stop the bar drying out. The fifth is water, added on purpose to a product whose entire commercial premise is that you can carry it about.

Then the line printed under the nutrition table:

Excessive consumption may cause laxative effect. Not suitable for children under the age of 14.

Nobody at that company volunteered that. British labelling rules, inherited from the EU, require the laxative wording on anything where added polyols run above a tenth of the product, and it appears there because 17g of the 19g of carbohydrate in that bar are polyols. The warning is the law working exactly as intended. The composition that triggers it is the thing worth looking at, and it is the whole category rather than one brand.

A food that a fourteen year old is advised off, and that loosens the bowels in quantity, is sold as the portable fuel you take to the gym.

The number on the front of the packet

The bar sells itself on 22g of protein. That figure is true in the sense that a laboratory would measure it, and the way it gets measured has a hole in it that the industry has been driving lorries through for twenty years.

Protein on a food label is calculated from nitrogen. You burn the sample, measure the nitrogen coming off, multiply by a conversion factor, print the answer. The test has no way of knowing what the nitrogen was attached to. A protein your body can build muscle out of and a protein it can barely use score identically, because both of them contain nitrogen.

Third on that list, above the humectant and above the water, sits bovine collagen hydrolysate. British ingredients lists run in descending order of weight, so there is more collagen in that bar than there is water, and there is water in it.

Collagen contains no tryptophan whatsoever, and it is low in methionine, isoleucine and threonine. On the standard scoring systems for protein quality it comes out at zero, against 1.0 for the whey isolate sitting at the top of the same panel. It is also very low in leucine, the amino acid that actually switches muscle protein synthesis on. As a food it is a good soup. As the thing making up your protein number it is nitrogen with a job title.

None of that stops it counting toward the 22g on the front of the wrapper. It has nitrogen in it, so it counts.

The packet does not have to tell you how much of that 22g is collagen, and it does not. That is the point worth taking away. A bar carrying collagen as its third ingredient by weight is not handing you 22g of the protein you think you are buying, and nothing printed on it will let you work out how much of it is real.

Pemmican has no such problem, for the boring reason that meat is meat.

The two of them side by side

The bar is a confectionery bar with its protein number tuned up until it sells, and every other line on that panel is what the tuning cost. The sweetener, the humectant, the bulking agent and the emulsifier are all there for one purpose, which is to make protein powder behave like chocolate.

Pemmican never needed any of them, because nobody making it was trying to produce a pudding.

Why it worked

Fat carries more than twice the energy of protein or carbohydrate per gram. Build a food that is half fat by weight and you land near the theoretical ceiling for energy per pound carried, which is the only number that matters to the person doing the carrying.

Then the keeping. Pemmican survives without a fridge, without a preservative and without a sealed wrapper, because the two things that spoil food have been taken out of it before it starts. Almost no water, so bacteria have nothing to live in. No carbohydrate, so there is nothing to ferment. The rendered fat coats the dried meat and shuts the air out. Nothing clever about it. It is the principle behind a confit or the jelly in a pork pie, run all the way to its conclusion.

Which means this food solved the exact problem every energy bar company on earth claims to solve, using no technology beyond a fire and a stone, and solved it better.

It was strategic infrastructure, and there was a war about it

The North American fur trade did not run on beaver. It ran on the food that let men chase beaver for months at a stretch, hundreds of miles from anywhere that grew anything. That food was pemmican, made in bulk on the plains by the Métis, and the trade depended on it the way a modern army depends on diesel.

On 8 January 1814, Miles Macdonell, governor of Assiniboia, issued a proclamation banning the export of provisions from the territory for a year without his licence. He had a colony facing famine and he wanted the food kept where it was. Six months later he banned the running of buffalo with horses, which took the same swing at the same people twice.

What he had actually done was cut the supply line of the North West Company, whose brigades ate that pemmican and whose suppliers were the families now being told they could not sell it or hunt it properly. Cuthbert Grant and the Métis ignored the order and kept the pemmican moving. The Nor’Westers read the proclamation as a declaration of war, which in commercial terms is precisely what it was.

Two years of raids, seized forts and burnt posts later came Seven Oaks, and the twenty-two dead. The fighting between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company ran from 1812 to 1821 and sits in the histories as the Pemmican War.

It ended in March 1821, when the British government lost patience and ordered the two companies to merge. The North West Company went in exhausted and broke, and it was the Hudson’s Bay name that came out, which is the usual way these things finish. A war in the record named after a dried meat product, because both corporations understood that whoever controlled the pemmican controlled the continent, and the people who actually made it were ground between them for nine years.

Nobody is ever going to fight a war over a maltitol bar.

Then it went to the poles

The explorers picked it up from the fur trade and carried it to the other end of the earth.

Amundsen took pemmican on the Fram expedition and to the South Pole, using a version with oatmeal and peas worked into it. Scott’s parties carried it. Shackleton’s men were eating it on the ice floes after Endurance was crushed and there was very little else left to eat.

These were not sentimental choices made by men fond of tradition. They were made by men whose margin for error was counted in days of food, choosing by weight, and they kept choosing this.

So what happened to it

Nothing dramatic, which is the disappointing part. Refrigeration happened. Tinned food happened. Then a food industry worked out that a snack sells for more money if it tastes like a dessert.

The modern bar is the descendant of pemmican in the sense that it goes in the same pocket of the same rucksack and answers the same question. It answers it with fourteen ingredients instead of two, at a third of the energy density, having carefully added water back into a food that was invented by taking the water out.

Make it instead

The method has not changed in centuries and there is nothing in it you cannot do with a domestic oven on its lowest setting. Lean meat dried until it snaps rather than bends, beef fat rendered until it runs clear and pours, the two combined and pressed and left to set.

If you want the case for eating this way rather than the case against the bar, the explorers who worked it out first are covered elsewhere on this site.

Two ingredients built the fur trade, crossed Antarctica and started a war. The thing that replaced it comes with instructions not to eat too many.

Questions people actually ask

What is pemmican made of? Dried lean meat and rendered fat, in roughly equal weights, sometimes with dried berries. That is the entire ingredient list. The meat is dried hard and pounded to a powder, the fat is rendered separately until it runs clear, and the two are mixed and pressed into a block.

Is pemmican healthier than a protein bar? It is denser and cleaner. Around 600 calories per 100g against 350, roughly 50g of fat against 13, and effectively no carbohydrate against 32g of which most are sugar alcohols. It also carries no laxative warning, which the bar does by law.

How long does pemmican keep? Years, without refrigeration, which is the whole reason it exists. The specific figures that circulate online, fifty years, a hundred years, come from blogs quoting other blogs and nobody has tested them. What is provable is the mechanism: almost no water and no carbohydrate means nothing for bacteria to grow in and nothing to ferment, and the fur trade moved the stuff across a continent through whole seasons without a fridge.

Why is it so fatty? Because that is the point of it. The fat is where the energy is, and a food designed to be carried is judged on energy per pound. Lean dried meat on its own is a known problem rather than a virtue.

Can I buy it instead of making it? You can, and most of what gets sold as pemmican has sugar, sweeteners or preservatives in it, at which point you have bought a jerky bar with a historical name on the wrapper. Read the panel. If it has more than three things in it, it is not this.