How It Started

I was sitting alone on the edge of a glacier in Patagonia, looking out at mountain peaks and an alpine lake, when the idea showed up.

I had been walking for days. More than 60 miles of hard weather and rough trail, most of it by myself. I should have been wrecked. Instead I felt fed, clear, and grateful to be there. The reason was in my pack.

Why I was out there

I spent 22 years in the Army, in the Rangers and Special Forces. After I retired I built a business, sold it, and ran clinical operations at care facilities during the pandemic. On paper things were going fine. I still felt like something had gone quiet.

So I planned a Misogi. It is a Japanese tradition of self-purification and renewal: you pick something hard enough that you are not sure you can finish it, and you go do it. I picked a solo trek through one of the toughest circuits in Patagonia.

The food problem

I planned to go solo and carry everything in and out on my back. When I laid out the food for the trip, the problem was obvious. I would need to carry more than my pack could hold.

I had lived on MREs for years and had no interest in going back. The dehydrated meals on the market were bulky, and they did not carry enough calories for 15 miles a day with a pack. I wanted real food that was dense, light, and would keep without a cooler.

Then I remembered a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Their journals describe a feast with the Teton Sioux in September 1804, where the hosts served pemmican: dried buffalo meat, pounded fine and mixed with fat. Native nations had been making it long before that night. It is Indigenous food technology, and one of the smartest foods ever made: dense, light, and built to travel.

I had just harvested an elk and had plenty of wild meat ready to go, so I made my own. The first batch was bad. I kept at it, adjusting the ratios and working in berries and honey, until I had something I wanted to eat every day. Then I made enough for the whole trek and packed it carefully so it would clear customs.

What the trek taught me

It worked. I crossed glaciers and walked through weather that had no interest in my plans, and I never ran out of fuel. About three quarters of the way through, I noticed I had not bonked once. I had energy to spare, and I was surprised at how good I felt.

Somewhere on that trail a simple idea settled in and has not left: nature already gives us what we need, as food or as medicine. We do not have to rebuild it in a lab.

When I got home, friends and family tried what was left. They asked for more. Then they asked where they could buy it.

What it became

My dog Kai and I moved to Austin, Texas, and I got to work. BIVI is what that batch became: a beef pemmican bar we make ourselves, in house, in a commercial kitchen in Austin. No co-packer. Grass-fed beef, tallow, and ingredients you can read, held to my standards.

Real food works. I learned that the long way, on foot. You can just try a bar.