Food is never far from my mind, especially when traveling in the winter. Eric and I have been consuming about 5,000 calories of food each day. This is twice the amount of food that the average person eats. The extra food is necessary to help keep us warm and give us the energy necessary to ski and snowshoe all day long.

Today I thought about what we should have for dinner all day long. Burritos, spaghetti, curried veggies and rice, the list goes on and on. The thought of eating the same thing day-in and day-out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner sends chills through my spine, but that is exactly what the Voyageurs did!

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Caribou Moss is a member of the Lichen family and is the major winter food for Caribou. It grows throughout the Boreal Forest , especially in Jack Pine and Black Spruce forests. If roasted and boiled into a soupy paste, it is edible. Voyageurs and native travelers have been known to subsist on little more than Caribou moss during times when food is scarce. I sure hope that doesn't happen to us!

The common voyageur's daily ration consisted of a quart of dried corn or peas and an ounce or two of grease, pork, or bacon. Not too much to eat if you ask me. This is why voyageurs are sometimes referred to as pork eaters, or in French, mangeur de lard.

Of course eating the same meal for weeks on end became a bit boring for the voyageur. In the summer when the voyageurs were paddling all day long and portaging through the woods. This often gave the men the ability to find food as they traveled. Raspberries, blueberries, small animals, birds' eggs, turtles, muskrats, rabbits, honey were all easily found as they marched. It has been said that a beaver's tail was considered the finest of delicacies.

In the winter, food was harder to come by, but when ever possible the voyageurs would supplement their normal rations with food gathered as they traveled.

Voyageurs also ate pemmican. Pemmican is like beef-jerky, made from pressed buffalo meat. Hot grease was added to the meat that kept it from spoiling or rotting. Though, meat and grease were not always the only things added to make pemmican. The scientist Kennicott wrote, "I am authorized to state that hair, sticks, bark, spruce leaves, stones, sand, etc., enter into its (pemmican) composition, often quite largely." It is said that when pemmican was properly made, it could remain safe to eat for more than one season. Pemmican was eaten alone or made into a dish called Rubbaboo. Rubbaboo was pemmican and flour soup, and was enjoyed by all voyageurs in the Interior of Canada.