ANCHORAGE, Alaska —
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On a balmy day last August, Sen. Mark Begich
(D-Alaska) stood at a makeshift kitchen in the Alaska
Native Medical Center and gleefully watched a chef
whisk a bowl of reindeer fat. ¶ “I’d rather have this than
Jell-O!” the first-term lawmaker gushed, watching his
instructor beat away at the bowl of rapidly congealing
triglycerides. “It’d make a great dip.”
Begich was filming a PSA on
nutritious ways to prepare indigenous Alaskan dishes, and his enthusiasm contrasted sharply with
the sanitized meeting room where
the video was being shot, not to
mention the gutted and cleaned
remains of a creature best known
as Santa’s chauffeur.
Grinding Rudolph into snack
food might upset Americans in the
lower 48. But in Alaska, where native peoples comprise a whopping
20 percent of the state’s population, the optics are fabulous
— particularly for Begich, who
doesn’t exactly fit the mold of rugged Alaskan outdoorsman.
Friends describe the 51-year-old
lawmaker as a “city kid,” who’s
more at home wearing pleated
pants and reading economic briefs
than decked out in Thinsulate
scaling a glacier. By most accounts,
his ideal lunch involves a soggy,
Saran-wrapped cheese sandwich,
a folder of documents to review
and a car ferrying him to his next
constituent meeting.
Yet here was this champion of
the Kraft Single, extolling the gastronomic virtues of reindeer flesh.
Just as politicians in the heartland are all too eager to nosh on
fried butter at state fairs, Alaska’s
lawmakers never miss an opportunity to honor local customs.
And with Begich’s first reelection
campaign looming, there aren’t
enough hours in the day or cuddly
arctic animals to pulverize.
“This counts as your aerobics for
the day!” declared Begich, really
putting his back into the operation.
The PSA served another pur-
Previous
page: Sen.
Mark Begich
speaks during
a hearing
titled “One
Year Later:
Examining
the Ongoing
Recovery
from
Hurricane
Sandy,”
on Nov. 6,
2013, on
Capitol Hill.