This spring, British explorer and chef Mike Keen will spend roughly a month skiing across Greenland with a sled dog. Along the way, the duo will subsist entirely on slowly decomposing seal meat. Keen’s roughly 320-kilometer ski across the country’s icy north serves as a loose proxy for how past Inuit and other arctic peoples might have survived similar treks across barren landscapes. The journey is part renegade chef experiment – “Is there a line between … fermented or rotten?” wonders Keen, who lives in Suffolk – and part scientific endeavor. For the latter, he’s collecting fecal samples from himself and the dog throughout the journey. That way, researchers can see how shifting from a Western diet to a traditional Inuit diet alters the microbes in his gut, or gut microbiome. Western diets are high in processed foods and fresh fruits and vegetables that can’t grow in the frigid Arctic.…