Jim Swayze wrote: >Todd> "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....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." > >I like the concept of edible raw very much, but can see some room for >argument that it wasn't necessary. Leaving that discussion aside for the >moment, let me say this. The definition of paleo edibility is certainly an >empty one unless it also includes the concepts of availabililty and >preferability. I agree, but that's why the picture gets blurry. Our guesses about availability are severely underdetermined by data. And preferability brings subjectivity into the model as well. >Many food items we'd love to justify as paleo simply >weren't available as food. (Or if available, not recognizable as food). >And even if paleo man could find proto-potatoes, for instance, and >recognize them as something that could potentially satisfy some nutritional >need, short of starvation, he'd have to be pretty hard pressed to choose to >eat them. I mean, which would you want: the meat and fat of freshly killed >buffalo, the sweet taste of ripened blackberries or bitter roots, the skins >of which probably caused you to barf all day long. I think we can agree that white potatoes were simply not available, because they were on the wrong continent. So if we're serious about availability as a criterion, we must reject white potatoes and tomatoes and every other New World food. But your question assumes that freshly killed buffalo was pretty much always on hand and that, too, is a questionable assumption. What do we actually know about the daily yield of paleolithic hunters, in relation to the needs of the clan? The answer is: very little. Your assumption that these people wouldn't even recognize tubers and root vegetables as food, and wouldn't know how to prepare them to make them more palatable assumes that they were very stupid indeed, while at the same time we think nothing of extolling their intelligence from tracking, killing, butchering, and completely utilizing prey animals. Jared Diamond, after living among hunter-gatherers in New Guinea, concludes that even though their hunting technology is far superior to what actual stone age people had, their hunting prowess is not that great. And as we look at other hunter-gatherer groups around the world, what we find is that to the extent that plant foods are available, the people eat them. I'm not arguing for the "superiority" of plant foods, whatever that would mean. I'm just correcting the tendency to attribute a high level of ingenuity and motivation to paleolithic people for acquiring animal foods while attributing a low level of both for acquiring plant foods. Todd Moody [log in to unmask]