I have never seen a people who so enjoy their own food as Inuit. If there is one thing that modern Inuit have completely in common with their ancient ancestors, it is the joy that overcomes them when they are presented with a feast of traditional foods, or “country food,” as people are calling it now.

While Inuit have always had guidelines for what portions go to which family members (on a fish, for example, the choice lower-middle part is the so-called “woman’s part”), there is no cap on the quantity that one can consume.

When a particular catch is brought home for dinner, it is generally quite a lot of food at a given time — a load of arm-length fish, a seal, a caribou, etc. Consequently, there is enough food for everyone to eat until sated.

The culture around eating reflects this expectation, so there is often no delicacy or restraint involved when Inuit eat traditional food. Old, young, male, female, it doesn’t matter — all descend upon the food with equal passion.

Southerners who are invited to such meals generally eat very differently from Inuit. Even if they enjoy Inuit food, they often have powerful cultural inhibitions against freely digging in and eating as much as they please — quite understandable, since most Occidental cultures have long been used to carefully portioning out their meals. Of old, consideration for others meant eating with restraint.

It is important to remember that, while technology can be a boon to a culture, it can also be a curse, setting new standards that the culture must meet in order to survive.

One such standard was set in the Europe of the late 900s (near the end of Europe’s “Dark Ages”). Around the time Eric the Red was unknowingly on his way to a place he would dub “Greenland,” Europe experienced one of its most important technological revolutions.

In the West Frankish realm (soon to become France), horseshoes, horse collars, and mouldboard plows suddenly came into use. Until this time, a primitive plow was arduously pulled through rough ground by an unshod horse with a strap across its windpipe.

With the sudden innovation of horseshoes, a horse could work longer hours over rough ground. A proper collar allowed it to pull a more efficient plough with its shoulders, rather than its throat. This new technology caused an agricultural explosion, allowing Europeans to farm expansively in areas that had hitherto been too rough to tackle. The result was a corresponding population explosion, so that new states were founded in even the farthest reaches of Europe.

The problem with this is that it set a new precedent. As centuries rolled by, ever expanding populations caused deforestation and the extinction of the larger animals. After a while, hunting was forbidden to all but the nobility, who, by the way, were eventually the only ones eating meat. All but the elite were subsisting on grains, and even then, off of the cheapest grains. The rich ate wheat — everyone else ate millet.

It was actually the colonial effort of later centuries that greatly improved the diet of the average southerner. Such colonists, wherever they went, found vast tracts of land that were perfect for cultivating herds. Being from highly competitive, overpopulated lands, they simply could not see how aboriginal peoples were putting their lands to any “use.”

So they set to using the colonized lands in the same way that they would have back home — for agriculture. This time, however, there was a lot of room and a lot of grass, perfect for sheep and cattle. As more time went by, the average southerner got used to a diet of meat again.

The times of plenty and scarcity in the South have nevertheless continued to fluctuate, of course, and southern culture is now entering another one of those times when the average person has to worry about protein.

The South has run out of room for its herds again, becoming increasingly dependent upon the pasta and bread products provided by grain harvests. Southern meat is increasingly expensive, and truly good meat (by Inuit standards) is increasingly unavailable.

Not coincidentally, we are seeing an upswing in the popularity of sauces and spice-mixes that are meant to improve, or at least conceal, the taste of less-than-choice meat. More and more, eating until sated is identified with gluttony.