primitives discuss cavemen diets

[franksolich]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=236x73176

Okay, this is something I have to think about for a while.

Since my fellow alum Skins doesn't appear too enamoured of us, and the primitives are chomping at the bit to talk about us, one wonders if this is a way of getting around Skins's dictat.

elleng  (1000+ posts)        Fri Jan-01-10 11:30 PM
Original message
 
Paleolithic diet is so easy, cavemen actually did it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Warpy  (1000+ posts)        Sat Jan-02-10 12:22 AM
THE DEFROCKED WARPED PRIMITIVE
Response to Original message

1. We know they ate grains but they ate them whole, pounded into mush and cooked--or just pounded into mush and mixed with whatever else they had. Their flours were nut and acorn flours. They ate legumes, they just didn't grow them. They ate whatever they could find that wouldn't make them sick and some of the stuff that did, at least for medicinal purposes.

A lot of what they ate was nutritionally poor, meaning it was lots of fiber for little nutrition. They picked their chewing gum off the trees in the form of semi hardened sap (I did that when I was a kid, some of it wasn't bad).

The diet was amazingly varied, much more so than you're going to find at a Whole Paycheck or anyplace else, for that matter. When agriculture came about, foodstuffs started to be restricted to what grew best on one's plot of land. They even ate sugar, although it was in the form of honey.

A more grain based diet became the norm because grains supplied a lot of calories the leaves and roots turned up by daily foraging hadn't. They represented an improved diet, one that could be stored in winter.

I find this diet to be more a fad than anything else. I prefer the Pollan take: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Bitman further suggests limiting flesh foods to about half a pound per person per week, using it as flavoring instead of main event.

Just don't think you can forage a paleolithic diet at Whole Paycheck. You can't. You probably wouldn't like it if you could. There is a good reason we stopped eating a lot of the stuff they did, it didn't taste very good and didn't offer a lot in the way of nutrition.

Retrograde  (1000+ posts)      Sun Jan-03-10 01:42 AM
Response to Original message
 
2. paleolithic ice cream?

Made with coconuts? There are several foods mentioned in that article that humans have developed - spaghetti squash, modern non-bitter lettuce, modern apples as opposed to their crabapple-like ancestors - plus foods from all over the world which paleolithic humans wouldn't have had access to.

Now if the person profiled here starts eating the parts of animals most Americans turn their noses up at (like those high-cholesterol brains) and actually gathering wild plants I'll be impressed. Otherwise this is nothing but another eating fad wrapped in pseudo-scientific babble.

[BlueStateSaint]

I kinda like killing my own food.  Whitetail deer, especially, though a ruffed grouse or two will do just fine.

[Mr Mannn]

Cavemen ate a LOT of meat, but you wouldn't know that by the OP.
Primitives want to perpetuate the myth, that we come from a glorious vegan past. If only we could return to those wondrous glory days of yore.

[crockspot]

I'm pretty sure it was determined recently that the only way that early humans survived well enough to become modern humans was that they sat up late at night listening to the lion feasts, then went early in the morning to find the kill sites, pounded open the prey's thick hip and socket bones that the lions couldn't crack open, and sucked down the fatty marrow.

[DumbAss Tanker]

'Caveman' is pretty anachronistic for what they are talking about, the kind of diet they are discussing is a lot more recent than the Late Stone Age (Neolithic and Chalcolithic), grinding up acorns for flour is a lot later than people living in caves as their primary housing, they were in villages of hide tents and lodges using pretty sophisticated non-metallic tools by that point, not significantly different in technology from pre-Columbian Native Americans.

Real 'Cavemen' would be the Paleolithic - eating bugs, breaking open marrow bones and eating any scraps the predators left, any plants that didn't seem to kill the herbivores they hungrily watched, the occasional slow-moving or unlucky animal, and waiting for the seasonal floods to recede so as to get first crack at any stranded fish.

[BlueStateSaint]

Real 'Cavemen' would be the Paleolithic - eating bugs, breaking open marrow bones and eating any scraps the predators left, any plants that didn't seem to kill the herbivores they hungrily watched, the occasional slow-moving or unlucky animal, and waiting for the seasonal floods to recede so as to get first crack at any stranded fish.

You'd think that GEICO would pay them more, so they could afford fast food!

[miskie]

Cavemen ate a LOT of meat, but you wouldn't know that by the OP.
Primitives want to perpetuate the myth, that we come from a glorious vegan past. If only we could return to those wondrous glory days of yore.

I noticed that too - Cavedwellers were voracious meat eaters. Evolution suggests that man's intelligence is based on high protein diets, where excess protein not used to mainatin a healthy and strong body went into brain development. Most herbivores are fairly dumb beasts who exist almost on instinct alone. Its the carnivores and omnivores that are smart.

[The Village Idiot]

btw- does anyone know what type of food gives the best return per acre? Beans? Corn? Something I have been wondering.

[Mr Mannn]

btw- does anyone know what type of food gives the best return per acre? Beans? Corn? Something I have been wondering.

Not sure about plants, but the most meat per pound of feed comes from chickens. and that's not counting daily egg production.

[The Village Idiot]

Not sure about plants, but the most meat per pound of feed comes from chickens. and that's not counting daily egg production.

Thats good to know. Interesting to think about what someone might do with 5 or so acres. I would think you would want different kinds of fruit trees that ripen at different times of the year. Some chickens on the side is a good idea too.