The Wild History of Beef Jerky: From Pemmican to Space

Beef jerky feels modern — vacuum-sealed, protein-packed, sitting by the till at every petrol station from Berlin to Barcelona. But the snack in your hand is one of the oldest survival foods humans ever invented. Long before refrigerators, freezers or plastic packaging, people worked out that drying meat could keep it edible for months. That simple trick fed empires, crossed oceans, won frontiers and eventually went to space. Here's the wild history of beef jerky.

Before Refrigeration, There Was Drying

The idea is ancient. The Egyptians dried meat and fish in the sun. Roman legions marched on dried rations. But the word "jerky" itself comes from the Andes. The Quechua people of South America made ch'arki — strips of llama and alpaca meat salted and dried in the thin, cold mountain air. When Spanish colonisers arrived in the 1500s, they borrowed the word as charqui, and English speakers eventually mangled it into "jerky."

Further north, Indigenous peoples across the Americas were drying bison, deer and elk over low fires and in the sun. The Cree took it a step further with pemmican: dried meat pounded to a powder, mixed with rendered fat and sometimes dried berries, then pressed into dense cakes. Pound for pound it was one of the most energy-dense, long-lasting foods on the continent — and it would go on to fuel explorers and fur traders for centuries.

How Jerky Won the West

Fast-forward to 19th-century North America. Pioneers pushing west, gold-rush prospectors and cattle-driving cowboys all faced the same problem: how do you carry enough food across a continent with no shops and no fridges? The answer rode in their saddlebags. Dried beef was light, tough, wouldn't spoil in the summer heat, and delivered a serious hit of protein at the end of a long day in the dust.

This is the era that gave jerky its rugged, all-American image — the campfire, the trail, the cowboy tearing a strip with his teeth. It's a bit of a myth that cowboys invented it (they learned the technique from Indigenous peoples and Spanish charqui-makers), but they certainly cemented jerky as the icon of frontier grit it still is today.

From Saddlebags to Spacecraft

Dried meat never really left. It marched with soldiers through both World Wars as compact, non-perishable rations. Then it did something no cowboy could have imagined: it left the planet. Because jerky is lightweight, shelf-stable and packed with protein, it was a natural fit for space travel. Astronauts on NASA's Gemini and Apollo missions carried dried beef, and jerky has since flown on the Space Shuttle and out to the International Space Station. Not bad for a snack invented to survive a mountain winter.

The 20th century also turned jerky from a homemade survival food into a global industry. Better curing, smoking and vacuum packaging meant it could be made consistently, sold anywhere, and kept for months without a campfire in sight.

Jerky Today: Same Idea, Better Flavour

The fundamentals haven't changed in a thousand years: take lean meat, season it, dry it, enjoy. What's changed is the craft. Modern producers have turned a survival food into a genuine flavour experience — from the classic sweet-savoury American style of Jack Link's Original to the tangy, British-style cure of Wild West Original, right up to whole-muscle dried steaks like The Meat Makers Dried Marble Beef Steak that would look right at home next to their ancient ancestors.

So next time you tear into a strip, remember you're taking part in a tradition older than most nations. Explore the full beef jerky range at Jerky Store and taste a few thousand years of good ideas — no saddlebag required.