gale wrote:
> The question, it seems to me, is not did we eat these things, but rather
> are these things good for us?  Are they healthy given what we know
> (unfortunately what the broader society ignores or doesn't know) that a
> grain-based, sugar-based diet is not good for us (and particularly
> destructive to some of us like me) and that a diet based on healthy
> animal-based protein, fruits and vegetables is good for us.
> I love this debate.  I love learning about tubers.  I love eating (some)
> tubers - give me yellow beets and turnips everyday and I'm happy.  But to
> think that paleo us did not eat certain items that would have been present
> in their environment is a difficult concept for me to swallow (yeah, a bad
> pun - I know).
> gale

I agree with the idea that paleolithic hunter-gatherers, like
hunter-gatherers in general, were opportunistic in what they ate. Tubers,
rhizomes, and various root vegetables are plentiful in many environments;
they are not terribly difficult to harvest, with the aid of a digging
stick.  Some are edible raw; many are not.  But cooking was part of
paleolithic life for a long time. Grains are a different story. It takes a
lot of labor to harvest them, and still more to make them edible--some
grains more than other.  For these reasons, I'd tend to see them as
"famine food," as Geoffrey Purcell sees tubers.  A possible exception
would be oats.  They grow just about everywhere, are edible raw, but
incredibly chewy.  They can be made more palatable simply by soaking, a
readily available paleo technology.  Weston Price documented the robust
health of the Scots in the Outer Hebrides, living on little else but oats
and fish, and maybe some goat milk and goat meat. Not a paleo diet, but
apparently a healthy one.

When you say that the important question is not what is paleo, but what is
good for us, I'm inclined to agree, but it touches on a core issue that
could be called epistemological.  Many would say that the best--possibly
the only--way we can know what is good for us is to figure out what
paleolithic people actually ate.  That is, they would say that actual
paleolithic practice trumps scientific investigation.  Personally, I think
that this is a reasonable starting point, but it is defeasible.  That is,
we may discover that some actual paleolithic diets are suboptimal.  That's
not an argument against paleodiet, just a cautionary note.

Todd Moody