The NWT is full of nutritious food, and much of it can be found far beyond the doors of the territory’s grocery stores.
“Traditional foods are the foods that have been eaten for millennia by the original peoples of the Northwest Territories, and that would be food from the land, the sky and the waters,” said Mabel Wong, a registered dietician who works as a territorial nutritionist with the NWT’s chief public health officer. “There are no foods from the land, sky and waters that should be avoided. All animals are healthy to eat, but traditional hunters, trappers, and harvesters know how to look for a healthy animal compared to an animal that is not healthy, and their wisdom is really, really valued when a person goes hunting.”
Wong has been doing her job in the North for just shy of 50 years.
In that time, she has become well acquainted with many traditional foods, such as the meat of moose and caribou, as well as the NWT’s many species of birds.
Ungulates like moose and caribou, he says, have a comparable level of protein to domesticated animals like cows and pigs, but often include far more iron. Iron, an
