Nenets cooking recipes were included to the international arctic cookbook

Publishing of the book on food culture of indigenous peoples of the Arctic became the intermediate stage of the large project being fulfilled by the Association of World Reindeer Herders: “EALLU: Arctic Indigenous Youth, Climate Change and Food Culture”.

The book was presented within the Arctic Council Ministerial meeting in Fairbanks (Alaska). Young people from northern countries, representatives of all indigenous peoples of the Arctic participated in its creation. Traditional Nenets cooking recipes were also included to the edition. The authors of the project arrived for them to Yamal a year ago. That time the international youth seminar “Traditional knowledge and food culture of indigenous peoples of Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug: on the way to sustainable future” took place on the base of Yamal polar agro-economic technical school. In the result, a whole chapter was dedicated to Nenets cuisine. In details it tells about the phenomenon of eating raw food – meat and blood of reindeer and fish. Also it contains several cooking recipes: famous stroganina of muksun (sliced frozen whitefish) with salt and black pepper and also exotics – for example, “Nenets salad” consisting of reindeer meat, liver, bone marrow and lungs. According to the information given by the curator of the project, the chairman of the board of the Association of World Reindeer Herders Mikhail Pogodayev, the book was published in 200 copies specifically for the Arctic Council Ministerial meeting in Fairbanks and was distributed around 15 countries of the world. Its second edition is being prepared now in 1500 copies in English and the same number in Russian. The electronic version of the arctic cookbook in English is available on the website https://oaarchive.arctic-council.org/handle/11374/1926. Now this work is coming to the second stage. The authors would like to concentrate their attention on new opportunities and innovative approaches on providing of development of reindeer husbandry as a source of traditional, ecologically clean and healthy food, as Mikhail Pogodayev says. The talk is about creation of opportunities exactly for reindeer herders, in order they would be able to study entrepreneurship, to create new products and to develop their own business. Also collecting and documenting of materials on food culture of indigenous peoples will be continued.