Smoked Arctic Char a la Methyl Bromide

Over the past few years of international travel, I’ve picked up some pretty valuable foodie lessons. Ones that, I can honestly say, saved me from certain intestinal discomfort. Tips like: shy away from street food. Don’t eat raw fruits and veggies if a local has already cut the skin. Stay away from pork. And always remember that in the emerging world, everything is free range. Including the people.While working in the Arctic, that list of dos and don’ts grew to include one more: how the food is cooked.I’d taken a short gig teaching helicopter survival courses to a group of Canadian scientists way up in the Canadian Arctic. And I mean way up.

The village had about 7,500 people, most of them Inuit. The Inuit culture is an amazing thing to witness. Resilient people living in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Summer highs can hit the 70s. Winter lows drop to minus 50. Winter months are mostly dark, or close to it. Summer can give you 23 hours of daylight.I landed in early July and was greeted by a local in a big pickup. He’d come not only to collect me, but to pick up farm animals and supplies that had flown in on the same plane. After we grabbed our things, he gave me a short village tour and dropped me at the hotel.The hotel was clean, but it felt a lot like a mobile home. Thin walls. Narrow hallways. Simple furnishings. Cheap construction. The trailer feeling got worse once I realized the whole building sat on stilts and rocked a little when you walked. Permafrost. You can’t pour a foundation the way we do farther south.After that first night — or night of daylight, really — I woke up around 3 a.m. to whimpering animals under my room. My first thought was a polar bear sow and cubs rooting around. I’d been warned about a bear that used the hotel grounds as a shortcut to the landfill, which, of course, sat above ground. Getting eaten by a bear on night one would have put a pretty quick end to the trip, so I stayed in bed. Turns out it was a litter of stray huskies. Stray dogs were everywhere in the village. The local government has since dealt with that. Between the dogs, the bear threat, and blinding daylight leaking through every crack in the curtains, I got almost no sleep.

The next morning I made my way down the long, dark hallways to the restaurant. I sat down, ordered an espresso, and listened to my French-Canadian waiter run through the menu. It sounded like any other North American breakfast spot, except for one item: Eggs Benedict with char.Full disclosure: I had pictured raw whale or maybe baby seal that had been bludgeoned to death, and I was pretty excited at the idea of eating something that would have been taboo back home.Then the food arrived. A perfectly poached egg. Toasted English muffin. A thick slab of smoked Arctic char, a cold-water fish in the salmon family. My goodness. It was glorious. I ordered it every morning for the rest of the week.Friday afternoon the class wrapped and I had an early flight, so I ran down and asked if they could make me one last plate of what had become my favorite meal of the day. Crushed. They were out of smoked Arctic char. Out? How does that even happen? For a second I pictured moving the family up there so I could become the village char smoker. It was that good.The next morning I headed to the airport with my usual driver. On the way I told him how disappointed I was that the hotel had run out, and what we might have done about it. First-world problems. Ted said the only guy who smoked char for sale had died unexpectedly the week before. The village was really saddened by the loss.Then a thought hit me like a hammer. We were in the Arctic. Nearest tree was maybe a thousand miles away. How did he smoke fish?His answer belonged in a horror movie.“He burns the pallets that come in on the sea shipments.”Punched in the gut. A little internet searching will tell you plenty about seafaring pallets treated with methyl bromide. None of it is good. It’s a powerful fumigant. Great at killing pests. Also terrible for the ozone layer, highly toxic to humans, and corrosive to skin and eyes.Yummy.I never would have thought of it. But there it was. Sometimes it’s not just what you eat. It’s how it was prepared. As a send-off before heading home, we spent an evening fishing for char. I got to eat fresh fish, straight from the water, that I caught and cooked myself.If you ever get the chance to travel to Nunavut, take it. Beautiful place. Warm, wonderful people. You might just want to steer clear of the smoked stuff.