· By Ethan Whitfield
Ten Real-Food Snacks for the Carnivore Diet
Eating carnivore is simple at home. You cook meat. The hard part is everywhere else: the airport, the truck, the two hours between the gym and dinner.
I have spent a lot of days far from a kitchen. Here is what travels well.
What makes a good one
- Animal-based, with as little else as possible
- No seed oils or protein isolates
- Keeps without a cooler, or at least survives a few hours without one
- You look forward to eating it
The list
- Pemmican. Dried meat and rendered fat. It is the original travel food, and the fat is what sets it apart from everything else here. More on ours below.
- Jerky. Read the label. The ingredient list should be meat, salt, and spices. A lot of jerky is loaded with sugar and soy sauce.
- Biltong. Air-dried and usually cured with vinegar and salt, with no sugar. Softer than jerky and fattier, which I count as a plus.
- Cold steak. Buy the bigger ribeye and save a third. Sliced thin, in a bag, at the top of a hike. I have done it more times than I can count.
- Wild game. Venison or elk backstrap, cooked and sliced the same way. Lean, clean, and as close to the source as it gets.
- Sardines. Protein, omega-3s, and calcium in a tin that fits in a pocket. Look for ones packed in water or olive oil.
- Canned tuna or salmon. Same idea, bigger portion. A pinch of salt is all it needs.
- Hard-boiled eggs. Cheap, complete protein. They need a cooler for anything past a few hours.
- Pork rinds. Skin, fat, and salt. Check that they are fried in their own fat and nothing else.
- Bone broth. Not a snack you chew, but a thermos of it on a cold morning does a lot.
Where BIVI fits, honestly
BIVI is a beef pemmican bar, so you would expect me to put all six flavors at the top of this list. I am not going to.
Five of our flavors are sweetened with honey and dates. They are real food, and I eat them all the time, but they are not carnivore.
Primal is the one built for this. It is grass-fed beef and grass-fed beef tallow with 0g sugar, 3g of carbs, and 30g of protein. It does include small amounts of a few plant ingredients, such as cocoa butter, amaranth flour, and pepper. If you eat strict carnivore with zero plants, you should know that before you buy. If you are a little flexible, Primal is about as close as a shelf-stable bar gets.
Every ingredient is on the label and on our Ingredients and Nutrition page. Primal is here.
Eat real. Carry less. Go farther.