 Out of all the foods that have existed throughout human history, bone marrow is by far the most important thing we have ever eaten. Wild animals don't contain adequate fat stores outside of their marrow tissue. Wild game is very lean. And there was also a limited brain size of these animals, making the marrow tissue the only high source of caloric as well as micronutrient nutrition from any food source we had access to, plant and animal alike. Nutrients are stored in the fat in animals as well as ourselves, so when a physical being eats their natural diet, they store high amounts of vitamins, minerals, elements and fatty acids in their fat tissue specifically. In our time of caloric excess, all of this food, carbohydrates, refined food, we need to focus more on micronutrients. We need to focus more on these vitamins, these minerals, but our ancestors didn't have to worry about that. What they had to worry about was surviving. And the caloric density of marrow combined with its high fat and cholesterol content makes it very clear that these nutrients aren't as important as the calories in the context of the natural human diet. The human brain is very energy demanding and a diet of lean wild game meat would not be able to sustain its size, let alone a vegan or vegetarian diet. A main correlation to meat eating is increased body and brain size with a decrease in tooth and gut size. We observe this in all herbivorous animals, their stomach size in relation to their body size is much larger than that of a human, typically four to six times more. There is some archeological evidence suggesting that human hand dexterity developed because of the use of tools to hunt animals as well as break marrow bones. I'm assuming the scavenging of corpses and breaking of these marrow bones happened before we were actually hunting the animals and then as we developed this high caloric diet we started hunting ourselves as we became more intelligent. This creates an interesting scenario. The difference between grain fed and grass fed muscle meat is less obvious than the difference between grain fed and grass fed fat. The muscle meat the leaner tissue is much less affected by a negative or poor diet and in this case specifically bone marrow from a conventionally raised grain finished animal can be nearly inedible. The flavor is typically disgusting, it has a dry chalky texture, it's clearly from a sick animal and unfortunately most animal sources of fat need to be high quality in order to be healthy for your as well as taste okay. Keep in mind a restaurant can serve low quality bone marrow and low quality steak because it's heavily seasoned, the bone marrow might be spread on toast, the steak might be served with butter and accoutrements maybe even steak sauce and this kind of disguises the negative flavors that you would be noticing much more in a lighter cooked piece of meat or a raw unseasoned piece of meat. Think about it, toxins and negative substances are stored in our fat so when you have an animal that's of very poor quality is going to really taste like that in the fat tissue and not only does the fat taste inedible the texture and how it looks is so unusual it's not considered good for human consumption by most butchers that's why they throw it out and that's why a lot of people have hard time accessing it. Here is a book titled The Fat of the Land by Volyamer Stefansson. He was an arctic explorer who subsisted off of a meat based diet for most of his life and learned the food preference of First Nation Alaskans, the people that lived in the type of climate he was exploring. What most people know as the Inuits or Eskimos which is not proper terminology. In this book the focus is on the importance of the fatty tissue on animals as a source of calories and nourishment for these people. Marrow is one of the most prized foods that was spoken about in this book, The Fat of the Land. The interesting thing about Marrow and the real reason I am making this video is that it varies depending on the bone it comes from, even from the same animal. The upper parts of the arms and legs have a different texture and taste than the lower parts of the arms and legs. These preferences for preparation and foods apply to the dozens of animals that were hunted and accordingly the part of the animal the fat is from. Marrow was always preferred above all of the other fats. The further down on the body the Marrow was the more it was preferred. So the lower leg Marrow was preferred over the upper leg Marrow. The upper leg Marrow is described as more of a harder, more tallow like texture and as we mentioned it was typically boiled. The lower leg Marrow is softer, creamier but far less plentiful on the animal. It has a lower yield. And cooking the lower leg Marrow was actually considered ruining a delicacy by these people. Interestingly these hunters did actually like two foods more than Marrow or at least they were comparable boiled moose nose and the boiled liver of any fatty fish. We don't have those two foods and as I am not in Alaska I am not quite sure we will ever have those two foods. So today we are going to take a look at both the femur and lower leg Marrow bones and prepare them in a traditional way. Here we have the femur bones, the upper leg and here we have the tibia bones, the lower leg of the cow. We are actually going to take one of these and put it in a pot of simmering water and prepare it traditionally. I am not sure it is going to work because they boiled the bones when they were whole they weren't split like this and then they cracked them open and let the Marrow leak out. So I have a feeling if I put the Marrow in this pot of simmering water it is going to melt but we might as well try it. Worst case scenario we just won't have that one. So this is going to go. First thing you will notice is the yield of the Marrow. You know if we take this Marrow bone and we try to extract the Marrow with like a butter knife there is a lot of Marrow in here. There is a lot. It is a pretty high yielding bone in general. But this Marrow when we take it out it is pretty soft actually but it crumbles apart it has some firmness to it and this is the Marrow most people are known to consume. This is what we mostly have. Now the tibia much lower yield. It looks like there is a decent amount of Marrow in here but if you actually look up close a little bit this is actually one of those bones where the yield is very low. There is actually very little to no Marrow in this bone. If we scrape this bone there is like nothing in it. See how low the yield is. Most of them aren't like this. That is literally all that is in there. This one looks like it has a bit more. This one has a little bit. When we go in this one this one has a decent amount of Marrow. We scoop this out but look at the difference in yield. Upper leg Marrow is probably four to five times as much Marrow as the lower leg. There might be slight variance here but for the most part I am sure that is consistently like this. But as we talked about earlier this is a bit softer, a bit creamier. Especially towards the lower part of the leg. This whole piece of Marrow, yeah it is from the lower leg Marrow bone but as you go down on the leg it gets even softer and even creamier. A good way to tell between grass and a grain fed Marrow is not just the taste. It generally has a pinker color to it. You know a pinker yellowish hue which is what we see here in this Marrow. So you could use these Marrow bones for stock or roast them, whatever. There is not a lot of meat on them so we can't really use these for much. Maybe give them to your dog. Bone Marrow is by far my favorite source of fat. If you have a really high quality grass fed beef fat, I mean that is amazing but Bone Marrow is consistently better. And the thing about Bone Marrow is that I have always loved consuming it raw. I don't usually cook it, maybe I'll sear it on the outside. But almost every time I've eaten it, it has been in a raw to very lightly cooked state. So we're going to taste both of these. And you know when we cut into the tallow, the texture is like cold butter. Has a very unique smell to it. Doesn't really smell like beef. Doesn't really smell like butter. And raw foods in general are much milder than their cooked counterpart. So some people get kind of grossed out at the thought of eating raw food but reality is raw food is actually less flavorful and it has a nicer texture than cooked food. The best way to describe this is like really rich beef butter. Again, the flavor is very unique. You can't really explain the flavor to people. You have to try it yourself. This is so good. It's crazy how good this is. Raw, no salt. Still very tasty. You know nature tells us a lot of things. The fact that I'm able to take this bone and eat the Marrow raw and it's a delicious high caloric source of nutrition is a testament to what diet we're supposed to be following. So now we're going to have some of the Lower Leg Marrow. Oh wow. Huge difference. Huge difference. The texture is the main difference here. It's very, very creamy. Very soft. Has an even nuttier, deeper flavor. Both of these are delicious. The Lower Leg Marrow, I would say is better on its own. I've had this before and I think that the Upper Leg Marrow is something I would pair with a steak or some muscle meat as a source of fat and you know, especially considering the yield of the Lower Leg Marrow bones, it wouldn't be something you could really eat entirely as your sole source of fat. The nutrition of Bone Marrow is higher than other fat. The nutrient profile is similar. You know it has fat soluble vitamins, minerals, elements, some fatty acids, but the nutrients are more concentrated in the Marrow. This is because that even when an animal is very lean and it's essentially starving to death, it will still have fat in its Marrow stores and the body will keep its nutrients, its calories in the Bone Marrow essentially until you starve to death. So Bone Marrow is kind of like the last reservoir of nutrients in an animal. So when you're hunting an animal, even if it's a drought, there's starvation about, it's still an excellent source of nutrition and correspondingly, you know, when nutrition is plentiful, it is where most nutrients are stored. So let's take out this Boiling Marrow Bone. It didn't actually melt as much as I thought it would. Much less appealing from a color standpoint as you can see we have this gray Marrow. So this is actually how those First Nation Alaskans prepared almost everything they were eating. They would boil it and then they would let it cool and then eat it. Just about, I would say like 80-90% of the food was prepared this way. The rest of it was eaten raw or fermented. I don't really have the patience to let this cool today. And it's not really cooked all the way through because we didn't boil it enough. So we're just going to take a piece from the outside. When this is boiled, the texture resembles the lower leg Bone Marrow very similarly. Has a much more potent smell to it. Whenever you cook a food, it magnifies the flavor several times. That's really, that's way better. I've eaten a lot of Bone Marrow and I can't say I've ever boiled the Marrow, but I got to start looking into indigenous cooking methods more because that is far better than any roasted Marrow I've ever had. So although boiling doesn't sound too appealing from a culinary standpoint, it's really delicious. It has the texture of the lower leg Marrow, but it's way more flavorful than both the upper leg and the lower leg because it's cooked. And I think that is the best way I've ever tried so far to enjoy Bone Marrow. So if you, ladies and gentlemen, would like to get your hands on some Bone Marrow, we are selling both upper leg and lower leg Bone Marrows on Frankie'sFreeRangeMeat.com. Frankie's Free Range Meat is bringing you high quality nutrient-dense animal foods at an affordable price. We searched far and wide to find these quality Marrow Bones for you. These Marrow Bones I tried today are the Marrow Bones we are selling on Frankie'sFreeRangeMeat. You can also find these at a local farm or even a Whole Foods. Can be very expensive and difficult to get your hands on this Bone Marrow. We are trying to make it affordable as well as have a high level of attention to detail, you know, separating the upper leg and lower leg Marrow Bones. So thank you guys for joining me today. If you could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon and share it if you can. Let me know what videos you guys would like to see in the future down in the comments below. Always open to suggestions, love making you guys happy. So thanks again for joining me today guys and enjoy the rest of your week.