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Date: | Wed, 25 May 2011 20:23:40 +1000 |
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Camping and wilderness survival experts:
This story is a puzzle and a question for those of you who know camping
and wilderness survival (without supplies!).
The main benefit of changes in diet has often been to find ways to
increase the intake of energy (calorie/kJ).
This has the benefit of stopping starvation, particularly during the
long cold winters at the end of the last Ice Age.
While all the other aspects of nutrition are fascinating, priority-one
is to get energy to prevent starvation. All other considerations are
secondary. That's how we got into this jam with the Neolithic diet. In
the West we have too much food, a novel phenomenon on the evolutionary
scale.
A story of an African jungle warfare camp sheds light on another aspect
of cooking increasing energy available.
On day one at the camp the new recruits observe a dead baboon swinging
from a post. The Sergeant says, "don't laugh, in 7 days you'll be eating
that". Aghast the recruits go and do warfare training. A week later, the
baboon is hauled down. "OK lads, if you are stranded and starving, you
might have the good fortune to come across a nice fresh carcass like this".
The baboon is cut up and cooked (not sure if boiled or roasted). The
recruits all eat it up. It does not taste good.
"Lads, you can eat the animal once, but you must NEVER try to reheat
some of it later on". Once is all you can eat it. Try it again, and you
might die".
Point being. A first hand story.
I can only guess the reasons if this is true:
- the animal is presumably dangerous to eat after 7 days due to bacteria
- cooking destroys the vegetative bacteria but not the spores. So you
can eat it once and hopefully get away with it.
- after cooking and cooling the spores can germinate and breed. These
type of germs being more dangerous.
Any truth?
If so, then it shows cooking of ANIMAL can yield a lot of bonus calories
by making inedible/ toxic carcass yield edible calories.
These calories can be obtained with minimal planning and energy input-
just stray on a dead animal.
As we all know the cooking of inedible plant foods led to the eating of
cereals and beans and potatoes, with massive increases in bonus
calories. Then farming increased it again. Farming being the wilful
destruction of the environment to replace it with preferred flora and
fauna (and thus ecologically carnivore farming and herbivore farming are
both equally bad)(too bad vegetarians, you are bad for the environment).
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