On Sat, 01 Jan 2000, you wrote:
> Hello,
>
> First, let me thank you all for your wonderful suggestions along the way in
> determinging the paleoness of a food or not.
>
> I am now obsessing on tomatos.  First, I thought they were fruits.  Now, I
> heard they are nightshades.

Sounds like some confusion on how plant foods are talked about and organized.
If something is a fruit, I'm referring to it's function.  The fruit is only
part of a plant, and many plants have fruit, even if they are from different
plant famlies.

  Tomatoes are fruits, and they are also nightshades.  Nightshade refers to a
botanical family.  Plants are grouped into families (as well as more general
catagories).  Knowledge of these groupings can tell you which plants are
related to each other, and how closely.  This information is often used by
those who suffer from food allergies, because occasionally, the protein which is
triggering the allergic reaction in a person is shared by other plants in the
same family.  That person then knows which plants to try carefully, or to
suspect, and which to not worry (as much) about.  Sometimes people can be
allergic to an entire family (presumably, they are allergic to a single, shared
protein).

 >
> Nightshades include all kinds of potatos except the yam (S. American--right,
> the light colored and tan one) and eggplant, and tomatos I guess.

Not precisely.  Nightshades include the potato, all varieties (russet, idaho,
whatever), as well as tomatoes, eggplant, and tobacco, but does not include any
other tuber (sweet potato, yam, malanga, cassava, taro, and many others are all
from various other plant famlies).  The confusion sometimes sets in because of
naming conventions.  In the US, we call sweet potatoes "yams".  There is also
another yam which is more popular in Latin America.  This other yam, usually
called a "true yam" in English, is totally unrelated to what we call a yam.  To
make matters more confusing, a sweet potato, whether it's called a yam or a
sweet potato, is not at all related to potatoes.

>
> Please, can someone tell me if there are more?
>
> Also, I dont understand.  You can eat eggplants or tomatos raw.  So that is
> not the point of their paleoness.  Is it when they came into being, only in
> neo times?

Whether or not tomatoes are paleo is in dispute.  It's not when the plants came
into being, but when human beings encountered them, that is important.  Since
tomatoes (and other nightshades as well) are "new world foods" (foods not
availiable in Africa, Europe, or Asia, until modern times) the thinking is that
human beings never encountered them during our long history on these
continents, and therefore, never adapted to them properly.

So, how are foods considered paleo?  Well, I've seen several ways of talking
about paleo.  It all depends on what you are considering paleo.

#1:  Can you eat the food in a raw, wild state?

  Some foods are considered unpaleo because you can't eat them raw.  The
thinking is, since humankind discovered fire as a tool for cooking fairly late,
and even then didn't cook veggies so much, that foods that require cooking to
be eaten are suspect.  Many plants contain poisons that are rendered impotent
by cooking, making edible what was once inedible.

#2:  Are they in a famliy that human beings have not encountered?

  Some foods are considered unpaleo because we never encountered them in wild
during our evolutionary history.  The idea is that the foods may contain some
element (protein, toxin, or whatever else) that we never encountered before, or
in significant amounts. Suddenly, they show up in our diet, and we are poorly
adapted to them.

#3:  Does the food take a substantial amount of processing, before it's edible
by a human being?

  An argument typically used against grains, which require some processing
before they can be eaten.

#4:  If it's an animal, did the animal live on a diet suited for it, based on
its evolutionary past?

  Feeding an animal a diet unsuited to its evolutionary past does just as
dramatic and unfortunate things to its body as it does to ours.  Eating the
animal means eating meat that is in an "unusual configuration", for example,
perhaps the meat is much fattier than what humans would have encountered in the
wild.

#5:  Is our whole diet in the composition that would have been normal for a
paleo human?

  Even if we eat nothing but paleo foods, it's possible to end up in a
non-paleo situation.  For example, we strongly suspect that paleo people ate
honey.  But honey was hard to find, a rare treat.  If we ate 2/3rds of our diet
as honey, we would almost certainly run into problems.

That's why the "naked with a stick" idea works so well.  If you have some
knowledge of what was there during paleo times, and imagine yourself as a
hunter-gatherer, it's not hard to figure out what to eat.

 Paleo dieting exists on something of a continuum.  On the one extreme, you
may insist that you will eat only what you have actually hunted or gathered
(like someone who lived more than 10,000 years ago).  On the other, perhaps you
are willing to eliminate only those foods which are most recently introduced in
our diet in the last 200 years, refusing to eat refined sugar, refined grains,
grains in large amounts, soybeans, and artificial anything.

Most of us sit somewhere between that.  I eat grocery meat, because I can't
afford organic meat.  I'm not a hunter.  The hunters I know don't live in the
same state and don't want to mail me anything.  So I don't have access to
hunted meat (but I will).  I cook my meat, I eat nuts, fruit, occasionally
seeds, eggs, fish, and some vegetables.  I don't eat tubers, grains, beans,
artificial anything, refined anything, or meals with more than 3 ingrediants
(mostly one ingrediant meals).

 >
> Thanks for any advice!
> Judith