/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>5052645
Finn here. We actually have a relatively deep culture in regards of bear-eating. This stems of ritualistic bear worship, and most Finnic tribes regarded the bear as the brother of man. To eat bear was the same as to eat people, which would poison and defile your own meat in turn, causing weakness and insanity. Or so said the Karelian Finns, at least. To the rest of Finns, killing and consuming a bear was at the same time a feast and a funeral service, as it was our own brother being eaten. The feast focused on someone acting as shaman or wiseman placating the bear's spirit, and the participants together working to ensure the bear's reincarnation or journey back to the sky god by preserving its skull and other parts to be presented back to the forest. In a sense, the bear feast was a ritual comparable to the Christian eucharist, as the ones present partook of the bear's flesh and received part of his strength and wisdom.

Of course, another part of the feast was to eat well and get really stinkface drunk while having fun. When a bear was brought down and the opportunity of feast appeared, weddings were often quickly arranged to coincide for good fortune, as the "family of the bear" was at times also thought to be of marital relation to the family of man.