Munching on Mattak

I know, you have all missed seeing my lovely face and glowing teeth. So I thought I would appease the masses (and practice some humility) by posting a picture. No, those black spots (which only accentuate the ivory white of my beautiful teeth anyway) are not rotting cavities, though with the amount of sugar I have been consuming, that's not an entirely unlikley proposal. The black is mattak, a favorite edible (questionably, in my opinion) of most any Greenlandic child. What is this lovely mattak?, you may be wondering. Mattak is the raw outer layer of fat and inner layer of skin on a whale - this particular dental disaster is narwhal stuck between my teeth.
How did I get narwhal stuck between my teeth? Funny story (and only funny because it ended happily, when I found the floss). About a month ago, a bit bored with life in Ilulissat and anxious to experience a less urban part of Greenland before I departed for warmer places, I pursued a trip to Uummannaq. Only an hour's
plane/helicopter ride, Uummannaq is one bay, one peninsula, one glacial ford or 28 days (on the icecap) by dogsled north of Ilulissat, the town where I was living. And somehow those geographical distances have crafted a town that to me felt very different from the bustle and drive of a rapidly developing Ilulissat. In fact, as I sat in the airport at the ned of my seven day trip, awaiting my flight home again, I was a bit regretful, wishing I could stay in this stunningly beautiful and fairly laid back seaside, mountainside town. As the helicopter landed, I thought: 'Hmm, I didn't think the shore here was quite so rocky, and how odd that it says Uummannaq on the airport sign (seriously, Kendell?) and how did the baggage collector from the
Uummannaq airport get to this airport so quickly?'. Right. It actually took a full 5 minutes, disebarking form teh helicopter and walking into an airport that looked exactly like the one we had just left (a single room with 4 tables and 2 chairs) for me to realize that indeed, it was the airport we had just left. I grabbed my bag and a ticket for the next scheduled flight (3 days later) and headed back
into town.
I stopped first at the Uummannaq Children's Home, a remarkable foster home whose children experience everything form European vacations to music therapy to springtime dogsledding with local hunters (http://www.bhjumq.com/UK/index.htm). I had been staying across the road at the new 'Uummannaq Polar Institute' (UPI), which is run by Ann Andreasen, the director of the Children's Home, and her husband Ole Jorgen, 'Greenland's greatest living native explorer' (http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=22). Ann, a Faroe Islander who moved to Uummannaq decades ago, and Ole Jorgen, a Nuumiaq (from Nuuk, capital of Greenland) live in a beautiful blue house that is packed with local art, narwhal tusks, music, always guests, always tea, always cholate and always tales of Artic adventure. Actually, my main purpose in coming to Uummannaq was to present Ann and Ole Jorgen with the project I was developing in Ilulissat, to help archive the work of all the foreign researchers and reporters who are constantly flowing through town. UPI, Ann and Ole Jorgen's brainchild, serves as a residence and homebase for researchers in Uummannaq who in return for this incredible hospitality try to include the children across the way in their research. Many give presentations or take a few lucky students out to study sites. I made pizza. And on the particular evening when that stunning photo was taken, I was actually going to the Children's home to make chocolate chip cookies.
But if you're from Greenland, chocolate chip cookies have NOTHING on mattak. So I deserted that plan and took a slice, hoping my gag reflex wouldn't, well, flex. Actually, narwhal mattak is not so bad - I'd had beluga a few times already. It is sprinkled with Aromat, a salty soup spice, and eaten in one-inch-square gridded chunks. You chew it for a while, but you can't actually masticate all of the fat (that's why it's gridded - the knife chews for you) so at some point, you just give up and swallow those bits whole. And then politley decline seconds, which no one minds because it means more for them.



The mattak was a pretty rare treat of traditional fare for the kids and anyone else in town who was lucky enough to procure a fresh piece of the afternoon's hunt. The narwhals had only just made it as far south as Uummannaq, fleeing the ice, and Uummannaq's hunters had killed 10 of their 79/year narwhal quota. Determined to see the flaying of one of these whales, I climbed from the shore across the hulls of three boats, docked and empty for teh night. Four hunters had pulled their kill up onto a thick, flat iceberg and had begun the process of peeling away its skin and blubber, extracting organs, dividing ribs and finally, chopping off the tusk that would fetch about $100/lb of weight.






(Jens Ole, on the right, is from the Children's Home. He and the hunter on the left killed this narwhal)

Completely engrossed, I was gripping the boat railing with my sealskin mittens when the captain turned on the light in the cabin. He waved, I waved, and we went back to what we were doing until he came out and invite me in. We stood at the window and I asked dozens of questions to this English-speaking fisherman and
hunter. He had not got a narwhal today, but was hoping for one within the week that the hunt would last. When interviewing anotehr hunter earlier that week, I had been told that climate change was not the problem or concern at all - quotas were the problem. According to him, the government was restricting his livelihood and making it impossible for him to live off of his traditional work. He now worked part-time as
a hunter and part-time at the Children's Home, which is, admittedly, a pretty good deal and a fantastic opportunity for the kids.
Karl, whose boat I had commandeered for spectating, dsagreed that quotas were a problem. He liked that the quotas guaranteed the sustainability of traditional resources and food, so that future generations could still feast on mattak. Such feasts, of mattak and smoked halibut, narwhal meat, reindeer stew, seal soup and all the other traditional foods, were rare and precious. In many of my interviews and conversations, I would ask people what Greenlanders were most concerned about, if not climate change (and ALWAYS it was not climate change). Access to traditional food was the most common answer. For one, it is too expensive - tourists eat more traditional food than locals do because people simply can't afford it. For another, people don't have the time anymore to do (or in the case of younger people, to learn) things like smoking their own fish.
Why are we so attached to food, taste? Why is it such an integral part of a culture, a community? I wondered these things as I flossed my teeth and wished, just a little bit, that I could have made the cookies instead.