Meat from Pangong Lake
This August, a friend of ours, Chamba Tsetan, organized a marathon and half marathon at Pangong Lake. He is from another part of Changtang, called Kargyam, where we visited for ten days for a winter youth camp in Jan 2016. Another friend from SECMOL, Lobzang Dadul, is from a village right near Pangong Lake, and I’ve been wanting to visit him there, so when I learned about the marathon I called him up, and he warmly invited me to stay there with his family on both sides of the run.
But this post is about meat. So let’s back up a little.
We arrived in Ladakh this time in Nov 2022, and in the winter we knew we wanted meat. The friend I mentioned, Dadul, is from Phobrang, a small village located above 14,000 feet, up a wide valley from the western shores of Pangong Lake. Before the last three generations his family and community were fully nomadic, cooking and living in woolen tents called rebo, traveling with their herds of yaks, sheep and goats. Traditionally, they have relied more on animals than on crops, and they still keep many more animals than our village in Sham.
I got in touch with Dadul, and he generously agreed to not only find us yak meat for sale in his village but also deliver it to us in Leh. It was December, and freezing cold in Phobrang night and day: an important yearly time to slaughter and feast and freeze-dry meat for the coming year. One day early in December, Dadul arrived to the city with 50 kilos of meat. And so, for the next two weeks at Becky’s house in Leh Valley, with the help of a neighbor’s electric freezer, we set about slicing and drying frozen yak meat.
Yak
There’s so much more I would love to learn about these amazing animals. I have heard that in summer the dimo (the females) virtually don’t sleep. They graze around the clock, turning mountain plants into milk for their young.
Our village in Sham used to keep yaks, until about 15 years ago. We just learned about it this spring. The yaks would graze for much of the year in the upper valleys, between 12 and 16 thousand feet. They would come down only in late winter when the snows built up. People would welcome them and feed them and give them shelter. Then for plowing time in April the Yaks would work. After that, they would return to the mountains before it got too warm.
The yaks wouldn’t drink out of a dirty pot. They wouldn’t drink downstream of another animal. They wouldn’t accept food from your hands unless the hands were clean.
All winter, spring, summer and fall we gladly ate yak meat and cooked with yak fat, these delicious and healthy foods.
The first time Caitlin and I were in Ladakh, I lost twenty pounds by the time we left. The farm work was hard, my gut and microbiome had real challenges, and also the diet is largely grains and greens. We get excellent gifts of milk and yogurt and butter from our fellow villagers’ cows, but I have learned that I also need meat.
I have always been quite thin, with a fast metabolism. So for me, I experienced a lot of weakness and anxiety that came with being sick, not digesting well, and losing weight over time. Part of that was trying to fill a void with more grains. What I needed was more fat and protein and the ability to digest them.
Having this plentiful source of delicious meat has helped to change my body’s relationship with this place. Another key factor is naturopathic doctors and plant medicines, both a consultation in the US and regular visits to the traditional Amchis here in Ladakh. This year I have maintained my weight, and instead of feeling nervous about the food I’m being offered, I know I have an abundant source of yak meat and yak fat at home. So I can gladly eat the breads and soups and vegetables I’m offered in the village while working, and then whenever I need to I can have a rich meal of meat and fat at our home. It’s been absolutely essential, and I’m so grateful for it.
People have found balance and been sustained by tending animals in this landscape for a very long time.
Many people in India say that there is a moral authority with regard to these things, that meat should authoritatively not be eaten, and especially not meat from bovine animals.
That’s not what I believe. And I want to live in a world where people of each culture feel confident and honored in the ways of their ancestors, as long as — in their own view — those ways are still good.
Ethics around food need to consider the whole web of relationships that connects people to other living beings and the land. If you look at the nomads of Changtang in terms of humane practices and ecological balance, they are exemplary. And if they keep things going that way, it will continue to help me and a lot of others.
I don’t think they need to worry too much about somebody’s ideas from far away.
Dadul and his Family
We have known Dadul since we first arrived in Ladakh in 2015 at SECMOL. This August, mutual friends of ours organized a marathon, so with barley harvest finished in our village, I joined Dadul and his family for a part of their barley harvest at Pangong.
Dadul and his wife have been building a home, farming, tending an extensive herd of yaks, and raising a daughter. They have a large and robustly intertwined network of family and village support.
Dadul has also been working as director of the new High Altitude Herbal Garden in Phobrang.
Changtangi shepherds traditionally collected many kinds of herbs from the mountains, and could tell the uses and importance of each medicine. As times change, people spend less and less time with the plants. Young people these days may not even learn about them. The people of Phobrang have brought wild medicinal plants together and planted them with irrigation as a learning site for people from the community, especially the youth.
This seems particularly important to me because the right plants have helped me become much more healthy over the last few years.
Many of the beneficiaries of Go Green Go Organic are home villages of friends we know from SECMOL, and many of them are in Changtang (like Phobrang, Maan, Merak, and Chushul).
For me, meeting Dadul’s mother, his brothers and sisters, his wife and three-year-old daughter was delightful. During the days, I helped put together a greenhouse on the front of his new home, and helped with their barley harvest.
His brothers cut the barley from the ground with metal circular blades on weed-whackers — they are newly available in this area, loud, and quick.
Here are images of barley fields freshly cut, with still-green peas that wait longer for harvest.
Below, this image is looking west. It is cold in Phobrang, but they have long sun as well.
We took the grain on a pickup truck…
…and piled it all, seed-heads down, in a dry area his mother and sisters had swept.
After threshing separates the seeds from the straw, the seeds will be roasted and then some mixed with walnuts and sweet apricot nuts and eaten as a snack, called yos. Most will be ground into flour called sngampe, the most bedrock staple food of this region. Sngampe is often mixed with tea into an edible dough. Unroasted barley will be stored, then some of it boiled and fermented into chang, the local beer.
Rezang-La Marathon
This is the event that drew me up to Pangong Tso for the first time.
One evening with the full moon rising, along with over a hundred others, I ran along the banks of Pangong Tso. The purpose of the run was to get together and honor veterans who continue to protect the lands and Ladakhi villages around Pangong.
The moonlight reflecting in countless ripples on the lake was breathtaking.
The hundred and eight runners, most of them Ladakhi, many of them youth, were an inspiration to run with.
The elevation there at the lakeside is around 14,000 ft (4,225 m).
Leading up to the run, I had been harvesting in Tar until my knees ached. I managed to take several jaunts into the mountains above Tar in the weeks beforehand, walking upward to higher elevations and running back down.
I ran a half marathon at Pangong, 22 km, in 2 hours 11 minutes.
I was seriously fatigued afterward — it was a real challenge — and I met amazing people during the run and at the end.
The event was really well organized, providing transportation and dinner for 200 people and a warm-up tent at the end, as well as checkpoints every few kilometers with food and water and juice along the way.
Thanks to our friend Chamba Tsetan who organized the event with Adventure Sports Foundation of Ladakh. Thanks also to the villagers of Pangong and the courageous members of the Indian Army who continue to protect our friends and relatives.
Processing Yak Meat
Now it’s December again, and Dadul once again just brought us wholesome meat from Pangong.
Becky’s house is at about 10,600 feet, which is somewhere around 66% of the atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Temperatures these days are between around 15 and 35 F (-10 and 3 C) in the shade (much warmer in the sun).
The air is phenomenally dry, all the time.
We surmise that these three conditions turn the ambient environment here into something like a freeze drier.
We are following the lead of people in places like Pangong, who slaughter animals, then thinly slice and dry meat, at this time of year.
Here’s pictures of last year’s process.
After sawing the bones into pieces, Becky pressure cooks them with whole spices of garam masala: big black cardamom, small green cardamom, star anise, coriander seeds, peppercorn, indian bay leaf, and chunks of ginger. We also did a batch with a lot of rosemary. The fat takes on the delicious flavor of the meat, bones and spices. We clarify the tallow using heat and salt water and scraping the outside, and the result stores phenomenally well even in summer. We put it in soups and use it to fry veggies. It’s unbelievably good.
This process of freeze-drying yak meat is fascinating. It reminds me of slicing apples and stringing them to make dried apples in our greenhouse in Smallpoint. This way you can keep the meat for 6 months until early summer.