Expert advises circumpolar Inuit to eat local

Inuit need to return to a diet that relies more on local foods than now — and then decide for themselves which foods they should eat.

“Make a qualified choice of food,” was the advice from Dr. Henning Sloth Petersen, a public health and contaminants specialist, when he spoke June 30 at the Inuit Circumpolar Council general assembly meeting in Nuuk.

“Do not let the health authorities tell you want to do,” Petersen said, although he cautioned that it’s better for children and people of childbearing age to avoid a diet heavy in marine mammals because it can affect health.

Food — local or imported — has changed more in the past 10 years than it did over 1,000 years, Petersen said, and now it carries the footprint of economic activity far to the south, with marine mammals carrying the largest load of potentially toxic contaminants.

But when you eat marine mammals, at the top of the food chain, you can absorb lots of contaminants, some of the 100,000 or more chemicals now present in the global environment, he said.

The harmful chemicals we know about, like persistent organic pollutants, just “top of the iceberg,” he said.

While Petersen’s advice is to be cautious about eating more sea mammals than less polluted local meats and fish, he also called on ICC members not to let outsiders take over the food market with imported food.

Most of Greenland’s food is imported, but the island could be food sufficient if people relied more on local meats like caribou instead of beef.

“We have the power to decide to increase the production of local food,” he said.

Food production is a basic cultural need, he emphasized. “A proud people makes its own food – that’s true sustainability.”

The added bonus of eating a diet with more local foods is it improves health — because it’s lower in salt and fat — and will cut the likelihood of some illnesses like diabetes.

Raising more local foods will also boost employment, Peterson noted — a point also picked up later by a speaker from Greenland’s hunting and fishing association who called for more support to traditional activities.

Eating more foods also helps to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, which are produced during the transport of imported food and in the beef industry, Peterson said.

To get his point across, the Greenlandic-speaking doctor, who first came to Greenland from Denmark years ago, told a story about “Mother Earth” and her “Prince Sustainable.”

Mother Earth lost her prince because of her lifestyle — and downed a cocktail full of harmful contaminants: “will she survive?”

Yes, but only when she begins to live well, the story goes.