Where better to start than a view of my feet? Well, a view of my shoes at least.
I am one of the very fortunate ones to have escaped the COVID madness of the UK and am spending 10 days in my beloved Iceland. I was swab tested at Keflavík airport on entry and am additionally safe in the knowledge that (from a sero-prevalence taken back home) I already have the COVID antibodies. I am therefore allowed to play in Iceland.
Remarkably, here in Iceland, life is pretty much near-normal. Strategically positioned bottles of hand sanitiser are the only giveaway that there could be a virus lurking in our midsts.
Although the whole of Iceland is rather special – this is my 28th visit – where my feet are right now is particularly special. The Icelandic island of Grímsey, three (typically very rough – see the photo) hours ferry journey north of the mainland, is one of those rare places left in Europe where you can retreat to be with Nature at its best and most remote. And it is my resting place for the next few days.
This small barely inhabited island has three claims to fame:
- it is the only part of Iceland within the Arctic Circle;
- it has its own mini “Giant’s Causeway”;
- each Summer, it is home to tens of thousands of puffins.
The last of these three is the main draw for me. But before I tell my story of those adorable puffins and how they raise a significant point about nutrition in the 21st century, let me just throw to you one of those “Did you know….?” type trivia facts: Did you know that the Arctic Circle moves? Yes, each year, the exact location of the line defining the Arctic Circle shifts a little bit north or a little bit south.
Each point on the Arctic Circle is the southern most location at which the centre of the midnight sun is still just visible at the horizon on the summer solstice. It moves each year because there is a slight ‘wobble’ on the axis around which the Earth rotates, this wobble caused by the pull of the moon and the tides.
On the island of Grímsey, they mark the location of the Arctic circle with a concrete sphere. The clever bit is the fact that it is a sphere – it can be rolled to the new location of the circle each year. The photo below demonstrates this: My truck is parked right next to a circular mark on the ground which is where the concrete sphere was two years ago. If you look carefully at the photograph you can see the sphere at its current 2020 location a little way in the distance.
Perhaps I should also mention Grímsey’s second claim to fame. The basaltic rock structure on the south of the island is identical in geology to the much more famous, and much more visited, Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. And yet each time I have walked on that volcanic pavement on Grímsey I have had it all to myself. Where and how better to connect with the Earth and the powerful forces of Nature that have created it?
And connecting with Nature is my point regarding the puffins.
This is my third time to Grímsey and the puffins never disappoint. The cosy spot where my feet are resting is on a cliff-top near the north of the island. Today I spent a couple of hours here just ‘being’ with these rather special little animals. There are around two dozen human inhabitants on Grímsey and as I occupied my perfect vantage point, all of these humans were about a mile south of me (the whole island is less than two miles in length). At that precise moment there was no human in Iceland further north than me: My feet were as north as it gets!
There is no question that puffins are adorable. Watching them, and staying relatively still for long enough, you get a real sense of puffins at their daily business. They are also insatiably curious. If I make small movement they all look; they don’t fly away, they just look. And I swear some of the bolder birds just love standing in front of the camera. The near perfect portraiture of some of my photographs is surely evidence of that.
Not long after I took the picture of my feet, I turned and looked to the south to see that no longer was I the only human this far north. For, sitting on the cliff just a little way behind me, was another solitary figure also quietly watching the birds. There was however a key difference between me and this other figure: Whereas I was clutching a camera and zoom lens, this other figure was clutching a net.
I was fascinated and so, from my perfect distance I watched. And I have to confess that the more I watched the more I admired the skill of this man and his net. With precise timing he would suddenly sweep the net into the air and (almost) without fail, catch a puffin within his net. His accuracy, skill and timing were mesmerising.
Let me cut to the chase here. Yes, he was catching these birds so that they may be eaten. The reactions that are almost certainly now brewing in you as you read this are really the main point of this postcard: Our relationship with food and how it is reared and sourced.
Later that evening I chatted to the net-wielding guy and his father, as we were all staying in the only guesthouse on the island. They talked about how their skills at catching puffins have been passed down the generations in their family. The son had learnt from his father who in turn had learnt from his father and so on through the generations. They enthusiastically conveyed to me their knowledge and passion for these animals. They clearly understood puffins like no one else.
But they also talked about the recent decline in the puffin population. How the large flocks were settling ever further north each year. Father and son were from the Vestmannaeyjar, an island chain of the south coast of Iceland. Up until a few years ago, they could have successfully hunted puffin at home but now, because of the puffin migration north, they too had to travel north to get good hunting. The puffin colony on the Vestmannaeyjar is dwindling but yet on Grímsey in the far north, they now have the largest summer population of puffins ever. For conservation reasons, whereas father and son used to be able to hunt for forty days each year, now they are restricted to just five. And they truly understand and respect that. Their hunting is truly sustainable.
They showed me their day’s catch. We talked about the meat and how it is best prepared and served. And later that evening I also ate some of their day’s catch.
“How could you eat such a beautiful bird?” I can hear some of you ask.
Let me explain.
In the twenty first century, we have a broken food system. To be able to offer the 99p fast-food burger or the £1.99 supermarket lasagne, we have to raise mass herds of food animals in concrete enclosures and feed them on mass-grown beans, grains and cereals. This creates huge problems for the animals, us and the environment. Ruminants should be raised and fed on grass – that is what they are evolved to do. Feeding them on beans, grains and cereals makes them obese and unhealthy (just as feeding humans on beans, grains and cereals makes us obese and unhealthy). The nutrient profile of the meat from these poorly fed ruminants is inevitably altered and diminished. If we rear the animals on concrete, their urine and excrement then become biohazards that need to be diluted, processed and disposed of all detrimental to the environment. Pasture-raised animals by contrast return their wastes to the soil and the compression of their hooves enrich and sustain it making a positive contribution to the environment and the well-being of the planet.
Rather than tackling this problem at its source – put ruminants back on grass, feed them properly and take away the 99p burger – we instead create the dysfunctional view where eating meat is seen as unhealthy and damaging to the environment. We are shamed into eating less meat and told to turn to plant-based foods for our nutrition.
And let’s be clear, shifting to a plant-based diet solves nothing for us or the environment. Mass scale mono-crop agriculture is depleting soil resources necessitating less-than-environmentally-friendly GMO and agri-chemical businesses to sustain it. Many small animals and insects are killed and their natural environments destroyed for the sake of large scale crop production. For those humans who consume these mass-produced mono-crops, the plant material has a poor micronutrient profile compared to animal products, even from those animals raised on the wrong foods but especially compared to those fed on their ancestral diet. Many of the micro-nutrients, found in plant food are in the wrong biochemical form to be readily utilised by humans. We also now know that many plant foods contain chemical defence weaponry (plants don’t naturally like to be eaten!) that disrupt our own metabolism and those of the bacteria in our guts when we eat them. Farting and bloating are after all the hallmarks of plant based foods!
So how do we change things to get it right? We need to eat food that has been grown and raised in the most natural way possible.
And this is where the puffin comes in. Thinking of it as a food source, and the puffin has indeed been a natural food source for island communities in the northern part of Europe for centuries, you cannot get more ‘free-range’ or ‘organic’ than that. It is an animal that has eaten what its natural diet dictates and has lived how its genes determine. There is nothing artificial within its flesh. It is not a polluter of the environment. Consequently, the puffin breast I ate that night was probably the most nutritious food I had eaten for a while. It also probably had the smallest carbon footprint – the restaurant where I ate it was only a short walk from where it was caught.
And so this demonstrates one of the modern myths of meat eating. It is not meat eating per se that is harming us and damaging the planet, it is how we are raising and rearing our meat. And in fairness, it is far from the majority of our meat. It is only the meat that is in the 99p burger and the £1.99 lasagne that is typically at fault. If we did not drive the demand for these products we would not create the market for poor quality meat. Don’t demonise all meat because a small sector of the meat economy is broken and dysfunctional.
OK so we can’t all eat puffin and nor should we. Here in the UK we can though access some similar ‘natural’ meats: Wild venison, rabbit and pheasant hunted in season are tapping into animals that have eaten and lived as their ancestry determines. Lamb is pretty close too – it is hard to feed sheep on anything other than grass and pretty much all our British lamb is allowed to roam free on natural grassland. Fortunately in the UK too the vast majority of our beef cattle are raised in pasture (and pasture land that is mostly not suitable for crop agriculture despite the protestations of some vocal plant-based advocates). But beware the cheap imports – if there is beef in your 99p burger it has almost certainly come from somewhere where shortcuts have been taken in the animal welfare and its diet. You are what eat has eaten!
Be a canny meat shopper, but still be a meat shopper. Meat is the most nutrient dense food on the planet – source it well and it will feed you well.
Loving meat is a good and easy thing in Iceland as Icelanders also love their meat. Their lamb and beef are some of the sweetest you will ever taste due to the rich volcanic mineral content of the grass they eat from the spectacular scenery in which they graze. Icelandic duck, goose and reindeer are also ancestral delicacies not to be missed – all of it about as organic and free-range as it gets. I am rather partial to their fermented shark too, but that is another story!