A BALANCED DIET by RALPH BICE

From April 7, 1976

Not long ago I read an article written by a dietician about what people should eat in order to keep healthy. No doubt the lady had done a lot of research and had many books to guide her. What we are supposed to eat now is so different from what many of us had to eat years ago and we were glad to have it. Many a pioneer survived on turnips – breakfast, lunch and supper. Until the garden could produce.

Many years ago my brother and a friend spent the winter in northern Quebec. A fly-in trip to a fur rich country. There were many Indians and they had several pleasant visits. These families existed almost entirely on meat, mostly rabbit. They took flour and lard into the woods in the fall but then depended on travelling fur buyers to keep their supplies up. These Indians knew a trick. They ate the intestines of the rabbits and the heart, liver and gizzard of all the grouse they shot. They never saw a vegetable or any fruit all winter. But all survived and seldom was there any sickness.

Just after World War 1 my eldest brother and I spent two winters in northern Algoma trapping. We had to carry supplies quite a distance. The main item was flour with baking powder and yeast cake. Dried beans, oatmeal, corn syrup, maybe some jam, brown sugar, dried apples and prunes. Meat we expected to get in the woods. Now those supplies did not make for a very varied diet but I do not recall being sick. We had partridge, fish if we took the time to fish, and moose meat and like most trappers then we ate a lot of beaver. Dried apples were a staple and most pies in lumber camps were of dried apples. Only thing, as apple sauce they gave the eater, if he consumed too much, a very bad case of heartburn.

Prunes were very good. They too were very prominent in lumber camp meals. We ate a lot of them. One spring when we came home it was a month before I could whistle for my mouth had gotten round from spiting out prune pits. But green vegetables and fresh fruit we did not see.

I once had a trapper companion with whom I had a few very pleasant excursions into the woods. Funny the things you could do when younger. We carried as much as we could, walked all day, and just slept where we happened to be when it got time to stop. No blankets or sleeping bags; we just curled up around the fire and slept. One night it looked like it would rain so we stretched a 4×6 tarp and slept under it. It did rain. Each blamed the other but somehow-or-other the pack sack with the supplies was left open and all our food except perhaps two pounds of cooked meat was spoiled. I think we missed the tea the most. But we were just setting traps and it would take a full day to return to camp.

We had a light rifle and hoped to see partridge. We picked up a lot of beechnuts as this was one of the good years and filled our pockets. We worked that day and the next but had to bed down several hours from camp. We hurried the next morning and soon had a good meal. It seems harder to think about than to actually experience.

The late R.A. Man and I spent one winter on the Fire River living in a tent just like the Indians with only a fire outside. We found some very good fur country but our supplies got low and this meant a trip back to our main camp. Bob found a tent left by timber cruisers and there were some supplies – oatmeal, a bit of bacon fat, some tea and perhaps five pounds of flour. So, we decided to stay a few more days. Breakfast was oatmeal porridge with a little bacon fat, no sugar. Lunch was a hind leg of beaver, boiled and at times frozen. But we did have tea. For supper we had beans, more beaver and a piece of bannock about equal to two slices of bread and tea. These meals do not sound very exciting but they were food and enabled us to complete looking over the area. And as with the other times supplies were short or non existent, not as hard to go through as talk about.

So now when I read a book about diets or listen to experts talk about what we must have to eat to keep healthy my thoughts turn back to those times when we had to make do with what we had and a lot of those old trappers are still pretty sound in wind and limb.