While there are lots of ingredients that could be added, it's important to remember that the more items you add to your pemmican, the shorter the shelf life.

(If you don't want to make your own, here's some pemmican you can buy that is already made and ready for your bug out bag.)

What is pemmican?

Often referred to as the ultimate survival food, pemmican is a combination of meat, fat, and berries that can be stored for extended periods of time.

The basic ingredients for pemmican are dried meat and rendered fat, or tallow. I also found additional ingredients that some people added, and they were separated into two groups – wet and dry. Wet consisted mainly of things like honey, peanut butter, or maple syrup. I'm assuming the honey and maple syrup are considered because, in their natural unprocessed state, they last pretty much forever.

The dry ingredients that I found included dried raisins, dried blueberries, seeds, nuts, dried cherries, and dried cranberries. Of those, the most common addition was dried blueberries so I went with that. And then, of course, the dry lean meat.

According to Britannica Online, in an article written by John E. Foster and Daniel Bairdack, Pemmican was originally made using Bison, moose, caribou, deer – whatever they had, and though the name "pemmican" was from the Cree (Pemikan), some say this power food was obtained from the Chipewyans in the Athabasca region by a British explorer named Peter Pond. Whatever the true case, I'm convinced the creation and utilization of pemmican were first done by the Indians of North America.

Here's what you need to make pemmican.

In my world though, I usually only have cows for red meat, so that meant a trip to the grocery/butcher. Which was alright because I don't usually keep blueberries in the house either. Bison is very lean though, as is moose, so I had to find the leanest beef I could. That's typically an Eye of Round/Silverside roast or steak. (It looks like a large tenderloin in shape but it's bigger and tougher.) And it's typically pretty rough on the pocketbook. With a small amount of lean beef and some blueberries, I set about to make the pemmican.