On Fri, 11 Sep 1998, James Crocker wrote:

> I am also wondering how people feel about the relationship between
> "getting things in the wild with just a stick", and how some foods are
> classified.  For example, rice and buckwheat are not official grains,
> rather a grass and fruit, technically.  But you still can't consume them
> with just a stick, you need some technology, like cooking.

The "naked with a sharp stick" rule is really an operational
principle for identifying those foods that entered the human food
supply early enough for us to be thoroughly adapted to them.
Anything that you *couldn't* get and eat this way must have
entered the food supply fairly late, and so there has been less
time to adapt to it.

The other idea, however is that this rule is supposed to coincide
more or less with pre-agricultural diet.  But here we have
considerable slack.  I posted an article not long ago describing
the discovery of stone tools for "processing" plant foods.  These
tools were believed to be about 800,000 years old.  The evidence
is that these people also built boats and conducted organized
expeditions.  It would be reasonable to believe that they also
had fire.  If this is correct, then humans may have been eating
foods that are only edible when cooked for nearly a million
years.  An example would be rice, or wild rice.

In _Stalking the Wild Asparagus_ Euell Gibbons describes how he
was taught to harvest wild rice, as the Native Americans did it.
Simply float your canoe under the reeds and whack them with a
stick.  The rice falls into the canoe.  It then has to be rubbed
between the hands to remove the husks.  Then, of course, it must
be cooked.  Wild rice is different from regular rice, of course,
but it is an example of a "non-paleo" food that may have been
gathered and eaten by humans for a *very* long time.

I've mentioned before that some legumes can be made edible simply
by lengthy soaking (e.g., lentils).  While this is not something
that other primates would bother to do, it is something easily
within reach of paleolithic technology.  I need hardly add that
bean *sprouts* require no technology beyond soaking.

> I am just searching for clarification between "getting it
> with a stick", and using other technologies, ranging from simple to
> complex food gathering, preparing, and storing methods.  Where do we draw
> the line, technology wise?

We can't answer that question without knowing accurate dates for
the appearance of the various technologies and, more important,
without some idea of how much time is "enough."  Human beings
have been in the Americas for 50,000 years, as it now seems.
That means that all New World foods, whether or not they are
edible raw, entered the human food supply 50,000 years ago at
most.  For those not of Native American lineage, the date must be
placed much later, at the time of Columbus.  That is, for most of
those 50,000 years the Native Americans had no contact with the
rest of humanity, so any adaptations they might have acquired for
the new foods would not have been put into the gene pool until
the Spanish invasion or later.  That's divergent evolution.  This
implies that these foods, such as tomatoes, must be considered as
risky as any other non-paleo foods from the Old World.

Contemporary "Stone Age" cultures use technologies far beyond the
sharp stick level, and it is very difficult to know just how long
they have been using them.

Todd Moody
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