Bruce Kleisner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

"Is a juicer any worse than a microwave?"

I think some of the real purists don't use the micro either. Have you asked them?

"What about dried fruit, nut butters, vinegar, sea salt, fermented/pickled foods, maple syrup, and other gray areas? They say to avoid alcohol, including wine and champagne, but we can easily produce those by letting juice ferment. We don't need technology to make wine or champagne or vinegar or sea salt, do we?"

And so we're back to the question of containers again!!
Some kinds of fruit will dry in the sun in a day, nut butter can actually be produced by just grinding two stones together (with nuts inbetween, preferably), but the champagne-making process is time-consuming and very complicated. Even "plain" winemaking is wont to render bad results without good containers (hasn't anybody out there tried to make wine - and failed?). When you fail you don't normally end up with vinegar - at best you end up with something resembling bad wine, at worst with rotten juice. Pickles also call for good containers. Plainly said: all efficient fermenting requires both containers and settlement. Ditto boiling syrup. Ditto large-scale production of salt. And this is the paleo (= hunter-gatherer) list, not some grain-free neolithic (= settlers) one!

"Some people go to an extreme of saying we shouldn't prepare
food in a way that requires advanced planning or technology.
They pretend that primitive people never went to the bother
of preparing a feast."

Who does? Although a paleo-feast would be on fresh produce, this isn't a raw-food list either. Let me return the question to you: why the obsession with fermentation and sprouting? Go find some vegan friends! The best and easiest way to prepare food was to steam it in a pit. Check the anthropological data!
Erik F.


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