Lynnet Bannion wrote:

> In reality, it would be difficult if not impossible to eat
> exactly as paleolithic people ate. 

You and Dori both make this point. But if you were to have read my second
paragraph then you would have seen that I had already acknowledged it to an
important extent.

Of course we cannot even in theory eat exactly as our ancestors did. This is
not so only because of modern food processing (which can be avoided). It is
so also because plants and animals have evolved slightly since paleo times. 

We can however make it a rule to eat only foods that are exactly paleo or,
at the very least, close cousins of those eaten by our paleo ancestors.
Foods that don't meet this criteria are not paleo. Cocoa, as far as I can
tell, is not paleo by this standard.

Alcohol in small amounts is on the other hand paleo. It was present, in
small amounts, in foods that date even further back than those that we would
normally consider to have been staples in the paleo diet.

-gts