I’ve been reading Nourishing Traditions lately - a cookbook by Sally Fallon of the Weston Price foundation - and came across some info regarding smoked foods that was a real slap in the face. Apparently some chemical forms on smoked foods (cant remember exactly what - probably to do with creosote) that scientists give lab rats to intentionally induce cancer. She figures that indigenous cultures had some factor in their diets to couteract the carcinogenic effects of all the smokey meat they consumed. I’m thinking blueberries and oolichan grease where i live. I ate alot of smoked salmon this last winter - but from now on i’m gonna avoid smoking when possible - sun drying is probably the best way to go. There is enough poison in my blood already.
The thing is if smoked foods are so bad, why do they taste so damn good? mmmm smoked salmon. Yeah I think I would shorten my lifespan for it.
Hahaha! ;D Penny Scout I’m totally with you on this one!
Smoked salmon is obviously amazingly delicious - but a big part of my healing from this culture is trying to heal my body. We’ve all been polluted so badly by civilization, our lifespans will be shortened plenty as it is. I wont be able to abstain from smoked foods by any means, but finding out they are carcinogenic makes me less likely to preserve an entire deer carcass by smoking when other healthier means are available.
i’m not positive on this and am too lazy to try too look up references to back myself up, but my understanding is that “the natives” (it always feels weird to just lump a lot of different people into one group) didn’t smoke meat so much as use smoke while they dried meat. colonists and pioneers definitely smoked meat in smoke houses, but i think most of the american aboriginals just used smoke to drive away insects while they dried meat on racks in the sun.
I think you’re right that one cannot lump all of north americas indigenous humans into one group Rix. In warm dry regions, smoke was probably only used as a defense against insects - however where i live in the PNW temperate rainforest, it was used as a method of drying and curing when the weather was too damp to dry meat outside (most of the year) - resulting in smokier food. So it probably varies from region to region - the use of smoke in preservation that is. In some regions it is used more than others.
She figures that indigenous cultures had some factor in their diets to couteract the carcinogenic effects of all the smokey meat they consumed. I'm thinking blueberries and oolichan grease where i live.
I’m also guessing that maybe different woods give off different resins. Cedar for example, may not give off cancer causing smoke… I don’t know. I’m also betting that the rats who get cancer are also kept in cages and fed petrolium fertalized grain that had been smothered in pesticides, and drank floride/chlorine water.
A natural diet/environment would probably yeild different results since both increase your immune systems.
Usually hardwoods are used for smoking purposes. Cedar has antifungal properties that make it great for shingles (rot resistance) but the natives tell me bad for food. Typical woods used on the pacific northwest coast are/were alder, chokecherry, crabapple and maple. Never tried cedar or any other softwoods though - just been told not to (i cant argue with indigenous wisdom).
good point about different regions requiring different methods, miles. i think at least some of scout’s issues with his tipi have a lot to do with the fact that it’s not suited to that region. 
the more i think about it, the more i realized that in a primitive, fire-warmed environment, we’re going to be contending with smoke in a lot of ways outside of meat preservation, as well. we’ll be breathing it a lot. we’ll be wearing it on our tanned clothes that are smoked in processing and carry the smoke around from our daily lives. it will be in our hair (well, my beard, at least). if we dry our herbs in our rafters, they will be smoked as well.
i think you’re right, scout, that generally increased healthiness from not eating civ shit and having less sedentary lives will help your body deal with the more natural toxins like smoke. and i’m sure the commonality of detox procedures like fasting and sweating and drinking bilious liquids that purge your guts helped manage these toxins as well. and, like you mentioned, certain foods help us pass them through ourselves more safely.
also, what a lab rodent can handle doesn’t always equate to what a human can handle–even though we’ve been conditioned by “modern science” to think that it does. as steve brill notes on his sassafras page:
Note: You may have heard that sassafras has been banned by the Food and (FDA) because it causes cancer. Drug Administration. Huge quantities have given to rats over look periods of time give the rodents cancer because they change the molecule sassafrole into a cancer-causing one. Humans don’t do this, and no one has ever gotten sick from sassafras. Sassafras was banned because there are a lot of rats in the FDA!
wow, i guess the wildman didn’t proof that paragraph before he published it on his site. i think his sassafras page has changed from the reference to his Identifying and Harvesting book to his Stalking the Wild Dandelion w-i-p. i think in I&H, he also notes that even for the rats, the carcinogenic index for sassafrole doesn’t compare to that of beer.
but you get the gist: what affects a rat in massive quantities, doesn’t necessarily affect us in smaller quantities over an extended period of time.