Jaco van Rensburg

In the winter of 1857 a column of the United States Army ate 5 to 6lb of meat per man per day and wasted away on it. The army was stuck at Fort Bridger, in what is now Wyoming, with its supply trains burned and its animals dying. Captain Randolph Marcy was told to take about 65 men over the Rocky Mountains to New Mexico and come back with mules. It was late November. The guide was a mountain man called Jim Baker. The snow in the passes was chest deep. The men took turns breaking a trench through it so the animals could follow. The rations had been packed for a shorter trip, and they ran out with eighteen days still to go. So they did what anybody does in a blizzard with a string of pack animals. They ate the string. Horse first, then colt, then mule. Every one of those animals had been starving for weeks, and a starving animal burns its own fat to stay on its feet. What was left was red muscle on a frame. There was plenty of it. Marcy, a careful officer who wrote everything down, put it at 5 to 6lb a man, every day. A modern gym would call that an excellent week. Two and a half kilos of the leanest meat on earth, no carbs, and more protein than a bodybuilder would dare post. The men got thinner. They got weaker by the day. By the twelfth day on unlimited meat they could barely work, and Marcy recorded that the whole party was "continually craving for fat meat". The word he chose was fat. They were eating until they could hold no more, and what sixty-odd soldiers dreamed about with their stomachs full was the one thing a starved mule does not carry. Lean meat is building material. The liver can only clear so much of it in a day, and past that point it stops being food and becomes a disposal problem. A body hauling itself through snow needs something to burn, and those mules had already burned theirs. They reached the settlements in January. Marcy went on to be Inspector General of the Army, and in 1859 the War Department published his account in a handbook for wagon trains heading west, so that nobody else would have to learn it from the inside of a mule. The United States government put it in print 167 years ago: lean meat on its own will bring a soldier down inside a fortnight. The supermarket now charges extra for meat in exactly that condition.