Keen’s fermenting – British explorer Mike Keen plans a month-long ski across northern Greenland with his sled dog, eating only slowly decomposing seal meat. The venture doubles as a gut-microbiome study with Inuit microbiologist Aviâja Lyberth Hauptmann, who will analyze stool sa
When Mike Keen and his sled dog set out across Greenland this spring, the stakes are oddly intimate: Keen will try to live off meat that’s still breaking down.
For roughly a month. the British explorer will ski about 320 kilometers through the icy north. subsisting entirely on slowly decomposing seal.. The plan sounds like survival fiction, but Keen frames it as both a dare and a science test.. His goal is to probe the boundary between fermented and rotten—“Is there a line between … fermented or rotten?”—while collecting biological samples that could show how a traditional Inuit diet reshapes the gut microbiome.
The expedition is built around a partnership with Inuit microbiologist Aviâja Lyberth Hauptmann of the University of Greenland in Nuuk.. She says the traditional Inuit diet is overwhelmingly meat-based—“98 percent meat”—in a region where Western-style diets are dominated by processed foods and fresh fruits and vegetables that can’t grow in the Arctic.. Hauptmann links the dietary shift that followed food imports from Denmark to a rise in cancers. digestive disorders. and heart disease. arguing that the older eating pattern included a key but underappreciated tool: fermentation.
“There is a way to live healthily off an animal-sourced diet,” Hauptmann says. “We are missing an understanding of what that looks like.”
At the center of her hypothesis is practice that Inuit communities have long used—fermenting meats, sometimes for months.. Those fermented foods are collectively called igunaq.. One Inuit delicacy, kiviak, involves stuffing small birds inside seal hides and burying them under rocks for months.. The distinction between fermentation and spoilage matters because microbes are doing the work in both cases; the difference is whether the breakdown is controlled enough to avoid dangerous pathogens.
That assumption—that the line between “fermented and rotten is clear”—is exactly what the expedition is designed to test in a real-world. body-level way.. The fermentation process is described as gradual and controlled. while rotting is treated as a runaway microbial situation that becomes too risky to eat.
But if that danger is real, Keen’s plan leaves very little to chance.
After deboning seals procured for him by area hunters, he will wrap the seal meat back in their skins, then place those bundles atop an insulated blanket to keep the temperature just above freezing. “If it [ferments] too fast … you’ve got the risk of botulism,” Keen says.
This caution is rooted in a broader concern from researchers: as Indigenous dietary practices shift or disappear. so do older safety routines.. Archaeologist John Speth reported in 2022 in PaleoAnthropology that people worldwide have long eaten fermented meats “often to the edge of safety. ” and he suggested that Indigenous communities may have fine-tuned methods over centuries or millennia to prevent frequent illness.
Speth has also raised the possibility that changing fermentation techniques helped create new problems.. He points to botulism cases appearing in Alaskan health records several decades ago—he says it coincided with a shift from fermenting meats below ground to fermenting them above ground in containers.
Keen’s current trek, though, is not only about keeping pathogens at bay. It is built to track what microbes are actually doing.
After every bowel movement during the Greenland crossing, Keen will collect stool samples from himself and the dog.. He will also slice off a small sliver of seal meat.. All of those samples will be sent to Hauptmann. who will compare microbial DNA as the seal decomposes across the journey—against the changing microbes in both the human and canine gut.
“What types of microbes develop [on the seal meat] through the fermentation process that Mike then eats through the journey?” Hauptmann asks.
The choice to focus on an outsider—and an animal companion—has prompted skepticism from at least one expert.. Patrick Mullie. a nutritionist and epidemiologist with the Belgian Defence in Brussels. cautions that drawing conclusions from a single case study is limited.. Concentrating on Greenlanders’ gut microbiomes “would be much more interesting than [findings from] an Englishman and a dog,” he says.
Hauptmann’s response is that an outsider still reveals something important.. She argues that Indigenous people have evolved alongside their environments. citing research in 2015 in Science on genetic adaptations that help Greenland Inuit populations cope with a fat-heavy diet.. Yet genetic change takes generations.. The question, she says, is how ancestors adapted quickly when moving across new environments.
Her working idea is that microbes may fill the gap.
In Qajaq Man, Keen’s documentary about a prior Greenland expedition where he ate exclusively meat and no fruit or vegetables, he describes experiencing diarrhea followed by about six days without a bowel movement. Hauptmann suggests microbial shifts could explain the roller coaster.
“There was a significant change in strains of microbes that like to eat plants and fibers,” she says. “Those disappeared out of his gut microbiome, and then he got microbes that are much more adapted to eating high-fat, high-protein diets.”
Hauptmann says her findings are forthcoming in Frontiers in Microbiomes.
For Keen, the scientific payoff is tightly tied to a social one.. His earlier trek drew strong local attention: the documentary shows residents of remote towns cheering along the waterfront to welcome him or farewell him.. Hauptmann says that popularity matters because her message is not just about feasibility, but about dignity and health.
In Greenland. she argues. people have become increasingly reliant on imported foods. and that shift has been mirrored by health problems that were once mostly seen in Western populations.. She also says health officials often vilify Inuit diets by blending them into a simplistic plant-versus-health worldview.
“We … have a right to our own diet.”
So the coming month’s journey—skiing across Greenland with a dog. eating seal that’s breaking down. and treating fermentation like a measurable variable rather than folklore—will produce a rare kind of evidence: not just whether a diet can be survived. but which microbes rise and fall as the meat changes and the gut responds.
Greenland Mike Keen gut microbiome fermentation Inuit diet igunaq seal meat kiviak botulism Aviâja Lyberth Hauptmann sled dog Qajaq Man