Yak Steak

My clients- a group of 11 spanish guests eat Yak Steaks for every dinner & lunch during the 17 Day's Trek to Gokyo- Cho La Pass- Everest Base Camp last year in october. I advised them not to eat the meat-foods because it is forbidden to kill any animals in the Everest National Park Area. But my guest/spanish peoples told me that they want to eat Yak Steak because they need more power & energy.

It would be good to know about does the food- Yak Steaks give more power/energy?

The short answer for the United States is 'no'. Yak steaks will not provide more power and energy. In fact, it's a good way to quickly starve. Unless you do your hunting at the zoo, yaks are few, our steaks go 'moooooo'. (beef)

Now, beef jerky is another story.

No, meat is meat. In terms of power and energy they'd probably better off with good complex carbohydrates instead of a huge pile of meat.

Of course that will be difficult to explain to them if they are your clients.

Yak steak will not give them more power or energy, unless everything else they eat is very poor in protein. But it is hard to change how people think about food. They learn it very young and they reinforce it daily. Nothing you say is likely to change their minds.

Perhaps we are being too critical. There is probably not a person here who has ever eaten a Yak Steak.

I'm putting it on my list of things to try though!

Aimless, I'm re-reading all my old mountain man books. One common point is, these old guys of the 1820's-30's ate mostly meat.... buffalo, elk, deer, etc. and never sufferd scurvey, and other diseases of civilization. Mayber there is something to yak meat. I just don't run across many yaks (or bufflers or elks).

The mountain men ate mostly meat because that was mostly what there was to eat. Flour or cornmeal were luxuries. When other stuff could be found, they ate that, too.

There's not a lot of forage in western forests. Berries, camas root, wild onions. The native Americans probably taught them most of what there was to gather. Mountain men often spent let's say "quality time" with native american women, who would have been experts on that.

In regard to scurvy, you can get at least a minimal amount of vitamin C from foraging, provided you aren't on board a ship in mid-ocean.

Meat is meat. It ain't much different. No, I've not actually had yak meat. I have had muskox.. pretty close

Meat centric cultures (like inuit) don't get scurvey because they don't have the western habit of eating nothing but muscle tissue, the eat innards too. lots of varied stuff in there.

And the old guys that ate mostly meat didn't eat *all* meat. you hear a lot of talk of pemmican and the like (which is a lot of berries with meat). etc - there were foraged wild edibles in there too - and a good solid rosehip of a nice wild rose up here is supposed to have as much vitamin C as an orange. spruce tea, etc. all these are vitamin sources.

I don't think there'd be any magic to yak meat any more than eating a moose, buffalo, elk, muskox, or beef steak...

I agree to a point that meat is meat although I think there's an argument that moose, buffalo, elk, and muskox are better food than beef steak. Especially if we're talking feed lot beef. As I heard one nutritionist say, if you're gonna eat an animal eat something that runs.

It would be interesting to know where your clients got the Yak Steak idea from. Yaks are not exactly a southern European staple. As you know they found in the Himalayan region, Mongolia, and Tibet.

Do a Yahoo search for Yak steaks and several sites pop up selling Yak meat online. One is a ranch in Colorado that has Yak recipes on their site.

http://www.theyakranch.com/

My guess is it probably tastes like bison, but I have no idea.