On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Patricia E. Clark wrote:

> That anything can be overanalyzed to death.

Just doin' my job, ma'am.

> Since I have only looked at photos of these activities and interviewed
> the hikers who took them, and not talked to the peasants myself, I do
> not know how the potatoes are prepared, but I would guess that many of
> them do not get extensive cooking before being eaten.  And there are
> Amerind archeological remains in South America dating back at least
> 20,000 years.  So it seems plain that this staff of life is manageable
> with a sharp stick.  It may not be the best possible food, but it has
> kept an entire society of those "indios" alive for thousands of years.

Indeed.  Of course, without information about the health issues
of these people we cannot say much more.  But it's another
example of how what starts out as a simple principle becomes less
simple when one thinks about it carefully.

If lots of time for adaptation (at least hundreds of thousands of
years) is what makes a food fully edible, then all strictly New World
foods are ruled out.  If we use phylogenetic principles, then
what makes a food acceptable is that it belong to the same
phylogenetic category (but which level? genus? class? family?) as
foods eaten by our paleolithic ancestors for hundreds of
thousands of years.  But it's not apparent why we should use
phylogenetic principles in this way.  Trial and error is a good
approach, but it's not clear that we can discern in every case
whether a food is benefiting or harming us.  And yet trial and
error is probably precisely the method used by paleolithic
people.  The "sharp stick" rule is useful, but somewhat
arbitrary.  That is, if people knew how to hunt, dig, skin
animals and so on with a sharp stick, what else might they have
known how to do?

Todd Moody
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