Jim Swayze wrote: >Fact is, there appears to be a lot of wishful >thinking on this list! Eat what you want to, but don't try to then justify >it as paleo just because you want it or think you need it. Rant over. Whether you like it or not, the most commonly used definition of "paleo" on this list is this: Edible by paleolithic people. That means edible by people/hominids with minimal technology. So there's no escaping the controversy. To begin with, there's a controversy as to whether "minimal technology" included fire. Ray Audette's "naked with a sharp stick" criterion excludes fire, but this may be wrong. So we say that if a food is edible in the raw state, it's paleo. Ray and Cordain claim that this excludes tubers. They're just wrong. There are tubers that are edible raw. It doesn't exclude peanuts either, or immature legumes. These are all foods that very primitive people could have eaten. To make matters worse, Neanderthin includes some foods as "paleo" that actual paleolithic people couldn't have eaten, because those foods weren't where the paleolithic people were. This includes tomatoes and other strictly New World vegetables. Anyone who wants to truly avoid foods that paleolithic people could not have eaten should avoid all of these. Peanuts and tomatoes are both New World foods, and both are edible raw. There is no "paleo" justification for forbidding one and allowing the other. And if fire has been used since very early times, the entire justification for the "edible raw" rule is demolished. This has nothing to do with Ding Dongs or Twinkies or wishful thinking; it's about figuring out what "paleo" really means.