michael raiti wrote:

>Do you know of any paleo authors who share your view
>on oats and distinguishes between the different
>grains?
>
>

No, I can't think of any.  The usual rule is "no grains," and I do agree
that a grain-based diet is deeply problematic.  But, as Thomas
Bridgeland pointed out, some grains, when ripe, are indeed edible raw,
and I don't doubt that paleolithic hunter-gatherers took advantage of
all such food sources, even though only available for a short time each
year.  Oats are very hardy and grow wild in many places.  They are not
difficult to harvest.  Weston Price described people on isolated
Scottish islands who ate little besides fish and oats, and he admired
their health.

The term "food processing" may sometimes connote technology used to make
mass-produced "foods" such as pasta, but more generally I think the term
can refer to any technology that enhances the edibility of foods.  The
use of a blade to strip meat from a carcass is a form of food
processing, as is the use of a rock to crack open bones to get at
marrow.  Some starchy roots and tubers may be too tough to eat with the
small teeth in mouths adapted for speech, but their edibility is
increased if they are pre-chewed by being pounded with rocks.

My view is that hominids relied on food processing technologies for
survival, beginning with their exodus from the tropical forests.  This
reliance is one of our uniquely human adaptations.  Other food
processing technologies include soaking and cooking.  Both were around
long before the neolithic or mesolithic periods; both are paleo.  The
*latest* estimates for the use of fire for cooking place it at about
300,000 to 400,000 years ago, which is well within the paleolithic
period, and prior to the emergence of anatomically modern humans.
Wrangham and others argue that cooking goes back a million or so years,
but that is still in dispute.  But given that anatomically modern humans
showed up about 250,000 years ago, the obvious conclusion is that
paleolithic humans *always cooked*, and their hominid predecessors
cooked for at least 50,000-150,000 years before them.  To insist that
the only paleo foods are those that are edible raw makes no
anthropological sense, unless you're aiming for an "early hominid"
diet.  There may be sound medical reasons for some people to do just
that, but it's a mistaken basis for a general paleolithic diet, in my view.

The cultivation of grains, of all things, in the neolithic period makes
no sense if people weren't already eating them.  But the destructive
thing that happened is that agriculture made huge quantities of grains
available, and these were used as a replacement for the meats that had
always been the staple of the human and hominid diets.  The paleo food
pyramid was turned upside-down and it took a toll on health even as it
increased population.  In evolutionary terms, the number of gene-bearers
easily trumps their health, if they can just live long enough to make
babies, so agriculture was a big winner in that respect.

But I digress.  What was I supposed to be talking about?  Oh...oats.
Well, I take the view that pre-agricultural humans did whatever they
could to exploit high-density food sources (i.e., calorically dense
foods).  This is because I find the Wheeler-Aiello "expensive tissue
hypothesis" entirely plausible.  The top of the line of high-density
foods is fatty meat, but tubers, nuts, fruits, and yes, oats would make
sense as adjunct foods.  So I increasingly take the view that a paleo
diet means using foods available to paleolithic food processing methods,
in proportions that made sense in that context.


Todd Moody
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