Food Politics

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This post was mentioned on Twitter by nyusteinhardt: Join the home farming movement: Partner with Triscuits! http://ff.im/-huw86…

Gardens not Grass!
Farms not Lawns!

I’m new to farming but have some Arugula and Broccoli sprouting so far. mmm. Kale is next.

You’ve GOT to be kidding. Processed wheat and soybean oil are “healthy.” Yeah, our paleo ancestors went out of their way for that! This is ridiculous.

Your food should be mostly fatty meat and you need protein. We do not need carbohydrates at all, least of all wheat and soy, some of the most nefarious agents of disease. If you have to eat a few salad greens, so be it, but humans are NOT meant to process grains, particularly wheat.

The lack of body chemistry and nutrition knowledge is astounding.

Seeing as mortar and pestle dating to at least 20,000 years age (the Paleolithic period) have been confirmed, I would say that our hunter-gatherer ancestors did eat grains.

The abundance of wild wheat and barley at the time would indeed make it quite unnecessary for them to “go out of their way” for grains, as you mention.

Additionally, seeing as these grains were the basis for the establishment of agriculture, the best indication is that our ancestors had been eating them for a quite some time. It would be astounding for sure if Paleo homo sapien sapien began cultivating a food source with which they had no experience.

Perhaps, they were producing the wheat and barley for other purposes?

I would be interested to hear Katelyn’s thoughts.

-Mike
B.A. Anthropology

How peculiar. One would think Nabisco et al would be against the urban farming movement, since the ideal there is to move away from packaged foods altogether.

Plus, where I live, the soil is quite alkaline, so seed-embedded boxes are pretty useless to us in Colorado. They would pretty much just be colorful, dye-leaching mulch. Seems like they ought to mention that somewhere on the box.

@Katelyn

I also have a degree in Anthropology and would echo Mike’s comments. There is a common misperception about what early humans and hominids ate. The phrase “hunter-gatherer” should be the other way round–with the gathering being the predominant activity. Early on, meat was only scavenged and certainly not the major component of the diet. Even modern humans were not always successful hunters and the group heavily relied upon the gathering of roots, seeds, nuts, and berries. The seeds came mostly from primitive forms of modern grains.

Mike is correct in pointing out that the reason people started growing these grains is that they were already familiar with them.

The only lack of knowledge here, I’m sorry to say, is yours. While it is probably true that meat contributed to a burst of brain growth that helped make us fully human, it was not the primary food–and it was lean meat–not “fatty” (wild animals are not fat). The protein did the trick–and the marrow was where the fat came from.

This is not to say that people should eat gobs of carbs. Humans struggled to get enough calories from ANY source for most of our history. One other thing. Humans can adapt to almost any diet that provides basic components. Populations as diverse as the Inuit (who ate meat almost exclusively) to the Masai (who utilize animal products such as blood and milk) to Hindu Indians (who are vegetarians who eat lots of carbs), all thrived. The problem comes when you get too many calories from any source. Also, the diseases of old age were not seen as much as the lifespan was shorter (although there has always been a portion of the population that lives to be very old–just much smaller than it is today). So clogging the arteries wouldn’t have been such a problem for them, even if they had eaten lots of fat.

I don’t grow Triscuits, but I do make my own delicious crackers, which is very easy and fun to do.

I think this marketing trick is similar to the “community involvement” approach used successfully by Wal-Mart and Target as they moved into communities that tried to keep them out by charging that their presence would take money out of the community and ruin local small business.

This is called “reputation marketing” and has little to do with the product, but rather “builds the brand” and creates “trust”.

Hilariously enough, I also have a degree in anthropology. It’s funny because none of the previous commenters seem to have been taught about the varying theories. Yes, there is a theory that tubers fueled the growth of the homo sapien brain (this is mostly popularized by Wrangham), but there are several other competing theories. One is that savanna hunting was the fuel, the other is that gathering of shellfish/fish was the fuel. I would think that are least some of my fellow anthropology majors would mention that shellfish, fish, reptiles, and insects count as gathering. It’s a common misconception that women only gathered plants.

It’s also a common one that all wild game is lean…clearly none of you have ever hunted, as the fat content varies wildly between species and seasons. Also, didn’t y’all read Jared Diamond’s The Worst Mistake? The life expectancy was low on average, but individuals did survive to old age.

Either way, the gathering of small seeds does not fit with optimal foraging theory and the evidence of humans processing them is very scant and creatively interpreted compared to that for butchering and eating meat. I have personally harvested wild grains and they are highly seasonal and very few species fit into optimal foraging theory. Berries and roots are very much worth going after, but meat is simply the easiest source of calories in the wild for humans even taken into account the difficulties of butchering with stone age tools.

It’s a testament to the inadequacy of the undergraduate anthropology curriculum really…we need more field work for sure.