Kiviaq (also written kiviak) is a food of the Inughuit, the Inuit of Avanersuaq in the far northwest of Greenland. Little auks,
small seabirds, are packed whole into a sealskin, sewn shut and left under a pile of stones for months while they ferment. It is eaten at
celebrations. It is also a food made without air, from whole animals, at Arctic temperatures, the conditions in which
Clostridium botulinum can make its toxin (WHO; FDA). In 2013 two people in Greenland died
of botulism after a meal of preserved birds, in what appears to be the first fatal outbreak reported there. There is no safe way to
make kiviaq at home, and this page gives no method.
Little Auks and the People Who Catch Them
The little auk (Alle alle; søkonge in Danish) is the most numerous seabird in the North Atlantic. Its most important
breeding area is the eastern shore of the North Water polynya, an area of sea that stays largely free of ice between northwest
Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island. An estimated thirty-three million pairs breed there. Archaeological remains in the colonies
show the birds have been harvested for millennia. Today hunters from Savissivik and Siorapaluk catch them with an ipoq, a net on a
circular frame at the end of a long rod, swept up as the birds fly low over the colony. From interviews with hunters, researchers
estimated the harvest in 2015 and 2016 at roughly 40,000 adult birds a year, against an official average of about 17,000, and put the
true figure somewhere between the two (Mosbech et al., 2018).
The same study describes the little auk as a “social engineer”: the hunt needs no costly equipment and isn’t limited by gender or age,
unlike the hunt for seals and whales, and the birds circulate through formal and informal networks across the district. In 2015 the
price agreed between the women’s and hunters’ associations was 1.3 US dollars for a fresh bird and 1.7 for a fermented one. Little auks
are also boiled whole, feathers on, in salted water at summer camps (amilik, “in the coat”), cooked in suaassat, the Greenlandic soup
thickened with rice, and dried as nikku (same source).
How Kiviaq Is Packed and Aged
Kiviaq is made in spring, from a freshly caught seal and freshly caught birds. The birds go into the seal pelt whole, feathers and
all, with a thick layer of blubber left on the skin, and the air is stamped out before the pelt is stitched shut. Families have their
favourite places for it, and many use the rock cache their parents and grandparents used. The place where it’s buried is said to shape
the taste, and methods differ from region to region (Mosbech et al., 2018).
A 2024 account from Siorapaluk, the northernmost settlement in Greenland, adds the scale. A hunter filled one skin with about 250 to
300 birds caught with a net. They were left to cool for about six hours first. The seal’s head, tail, legs and organs had been
removed so the skin formed a bag; more birds went in through the leg holes, which were then sewn up and smeared with blubber to keep
flies from laying eggs. The bag, heavy enough to need two adults to carry it, was buried under stones for a minimum of three to six
months. To eat kiviaq, the birds are taken out and their skin peeled off (Visit Greenland, 2024).
It is not everyday food. The Siorapaluk account calls it “a festive delicacy, typically shared during weddings, baptisms, and other
special celebratory occasions” (Visit Greenland, 2024), and families plan ahead to make enough for the events coming
up (Mosbech et al., 2018). A batch made in spring is ready months later, and it is often described as a winter food.
Siorapaluk, 2013: A Fatal Botulism Outbreak
In July 2013 a 71-year-old man in Siorapaluk died after eating eider ducks that he had prepared himself and buried, and which had
gone bad. His family thought he had died of old age, so the birds were served at his funeral. His 46-year-old daughter also died, and
five more people were flown to Queen Ingrid’s Hospital in Nuuk, three of them seriously ill (KNR, 2013;
Sermitsiaq, 2013). Greenland’s Chief Medical Officer said the police believed the outbreak came from eating
preserved little auks or eider (“syltede søkonger eller edderfugle”). The same statement said most botulism cases in Greenland had come
from preserving seal or birds this way, or from smoked fish and meat (Sermitsiaq, 2013). The head of Greenland’s
Veterinary and Food Authority called preserved little auks and buried eider an extreme way of preparing food that “requires enormous
traditional knowledge” to avoid going wrong (KNR, 2013).
A 2015 case report in the journal Infectious Diseases, whose abstract gives no place or date but matches the outbreak’s two deaths
and three seriously ill survivors, reported five cases of foodborne botulism in Greenland, two of them fatal, “caused by ingestion of
traditionally preserved eider fowl”. Type E toxin was found in two survivors and the type E toxin gene in the third, and the paper calls
it “the first report of cases of fatal botulism in Greenland” (Hammer et al., 2015). So the birds in the 2013 outbreak
were eider, not the usual little auks. That doesn’t make auk kiviaq safe: Greenland’s authorities warned about both.
Wikipedia and many articles also say that the explorer Knud Rasmussen, who was born in Ilulissat to a Danish-Greenlandic family, fell
ill with food poisoning attributed to kiviaq on his last expedition in 1933 and died of pneumonia weeks later
(Wikipedia). Denmark’s national encyclopedia says only that illness cut that expedition short
(Lex); we found no medical record that names kiviaq as the cause.
Airless, Whole and Months Old: What Type E Needs
C. botulinum forms toxin only without oxygen. Its spores are common in soil, river water and sea water, and the toxin forms
most often in lightly preserved foods with low oxygen; it won’t form below pH 4.6. WHO lists fermented, salted and smoked fish among the
foods in which toxin has been found (WHO). Kiviaq has every feature that matters: whole birds, which like all meat are a
low-acid food, a skin sealed with the air pressed out, and months in a cache with no salt, acid or cooking in any account we found to
hold the bacterium back. A pH test can’t make it safe, since acid doesn’t break down toxin already made (WHO). Our
pH chart for fermented foods explains the 4.6 line and why vegetable ferments, which sour quickly, are a different case.
Alaska has a long, well-documented record of this kind of botulism. From 1947 to 2007, 317 Alaska Native people fell ill in 159
outbreaks of foodborne botulism, a hazard the authors tie to uncooked aquatic game foods, and 8.2% of them died; the rate was more than
800 times the overall US rate (Fagan et al., 2011). Investigators found that changes in how the foods were prepared
may have made them more favourable to C. botulinum (Shaffer et al., 1990), and in one survey a third of the
people who made fermented foods used plastic containers (Chiou et al., 2002). Greenland’s health and food authorities
made the same point in 2013: preparing seal or birds the old way “requires precise knowledge of the method”, and plastic bags or tubs
should not be used (Sermitsiaq, 2013).
There is no tested way to make kiviaq, and nothing a cook can do at home to check that a skin full of whole birds has stayed free of
toxin. Families who make it rely on generations of practice in one place, with fresh-caught birds and a familiar rock cache, and even
so the head of Greenland’s food authority said it “requires enormous traditional knowledge” not to go wrong
(KNR, 2013). Cold is no safeguard: non-proteolytic strains of C. botulinum, which are common in seafood, can
grow and make toxin at 3.3°C (38°F) and above (FDA). None of that can be copied from a web page, so kiviaq is a food
we describe, not one we give instructions for, like Egypt’s fesikh, which has a long botulism record of its own.
Boiling, Symptoms and When to Get Help
Heat destroys the toxin, though not the spores: WHO gives an internal temperature above 85°C (185°F) for 5 minutes or longer
(WHO), and in 2013 Greenland’s authorities said the toxin is normally destroyed by boiling for 10 minutes or long
frying (Sermitsiaq, 2013). That is general cooking advice, not a way to rescue a suspect food: nobody can check
that the middle of every bird got hot enough, and “you cannot see, smell, or taste the toxin that causes botulism”
(CDC). If a preserved meat or fish is in doubt, throw it out.
Symptoms usually start 12 to 36 hours after eating but can appear from 4 hours to 8 days. They begin with marked tiredness, weakness
and dizziness, then blurred or double vision, drooping eyelids, dry mouth and difficulty swallowing and speaking, moving on to weakness
that can stop breathing (WHO; CDC). Fast treatment with antitoxin and breathing support is what
saves lives (WHO), so anyone with these signs after eating kiviaq or any preserved meat or fish needs emergency care
straight away.
For fermented fish with a documented safety approach, see our guides to
burong isda, the Filipino fish-and-rice ferment and fermented fish sauce. Other northern fermented fish with their own safety cautions are bought, not
made at home: Iceland’s hákarl (fermented Greenland shark) and Norway’s rakfisk, which has a type E
record of its own.