Traditional Iñupiat food preparation — eating raw or minimally processed fresh meat and blubber — preserved the vitamin C content that prevented scurvy.

When European explorers cooked their meat, as European culinary tradition dictated, they destroyed the vitamin C in it.

The preservation methods they used — salted, dried, or heavily cooked meat — provided protein and calories but not vitamin C.

Their own food preparation killed them.

Iñupiat communities, without knowing anything about vitamins or molecular biology, had arrived at the correct answer through thousands of years of observing what diet kept people healthy and what diet made them sick.

Ada Blackjack’s survival reflected this knowledge, at least partially.