Okay, we are talking about curing meat for survival preparations. Folks, how many times do I gotta repeat this: Pemmican is THE natural survival food. Let's take a look again at why this is.

Dried, smoked, cured meat. Okay the old fashioned method of curing meat was to air dry it or use a smoke house after brining the meat using a salt/sugar cure. Nowadays meat is cured using commercial curing compounds based on nitrites and nitrates, benzoates, erythorbates etc. Yeah, I know everyone is going to say "Gee all those preservatives, that can't be good for you". Well, how many hams, hot dogs, pepperoni pizzas, bologna sandwiches have we all eaten in our lives? I think the old fashioned salt cure was a lot worse on the body than this stuff is. Smoke cure, well, wood smoke has at least 11 known carcinogens in it. But it does make it taste better. The plains indians had a good idea of how to preserve a 6 month supply of bison by planking it in front of a big fire and letting it dry out, then packing it in clean skins coated with generous amounts of rendered fat (hmm, getting closer to the Pemmican concept). How they kept the meat from spoiling without a lot of chemicals, good storage techniques, or environmental controls must pretty much confound us modern day hunter gatherers.

So, what can we do with all that dried, smoked, salted meat? Well, we can break it down using grinders, molcahetes (mexican grinders by Manuel), or just beating the snot out of it with a couple of big stones. Once it is broken down sufficiently to be handled, we can mix it with some seeds, nuts, dried berries, dried fruits, dried vegetables, dried grains, and a little tallow. Wrap it with some saran wrap a few times, wrap it with aluminum foil a few times, and pack it away in the freezer, the refrigerator, the cupboard, a grub box, whatever your needs. When you are afoot somewhere, take a ball or two of this stuff with you. If your regular supplies should run out, or you find yourself in a "survival" situation, break out a ball and start eating. Want something warm instead, mix part of a ball with some boiling hot water for a few minutes and enjoy a hearty nourishing soup. I've had pemican balls packed thus unrefrigerated for nearly a year, and was just as good the day I used it as it was the day I made it. I've heard other folks who've used pemmican balls nearly two years old and incurred no problems. Yes, it is high in fat. Yes it has a certain amount of salt in it. Yes, you will need to consume water to digest it. Guess what, if I need to conserve water, I probably ain't gonna eat anything until I can find a decent supply.

So there, if you want to store meat for survival, do what the indians did. Either pack it in tallow, or turn it into pemmican. Forget the nutritional fo-pahs about consuming too much salt or fat, in a survival mode, you're likely to need more of both anyways, assuming you have a fresh water source to work with.

If it worked for native americans and fur trappers and explorers for hundreds of years, there must be a reason. It was the number one preferred survival food for them all that time. Of course the Army thought they could improve on this, thus the first "survival" rations our nation tried in the Civil War, mostly hard flat bread. Anyone else ever hear the reviews on how well that stuff was liked by the troops that ate it?

There are likely a lot of folks out there that haven't the pallette to handle pemmican. Our sedentary lifestyles have made us prone to avoiding such rich foods, which is a good thing, because most of us can't handle consuming 3,000 kcals per meal. But when you are humping hard just to get by, and everything you own is on your back and you've been hodding it around all day, your body will tell your tastebuds that it is just fine, trust me.