Jim Swayze wrote:

>Todd> "the most commonly used definition of 'paleo' on this list is
this:
>Edible by paleolithic people.  That means edible by people/hominids with
>minimal technology....If a food is edible in the raw state, it's paleo.
>Ray and Cordain claim that this excludes tubers.  They're just wrong.
>There are tubers that are edible raw."
>
>I like the concept of edible raw very much, but can see some room for
>argument that it wasn't necessary.  Leaving that discussion aside for
the
>moment, let me say this.  The definition of paleo edibility is
certainly an
>empty one unless it also includes the concepts of availabililty and
>preferability.

I agree, but that's why the picture gets blurry.  Our guesses about
availability are severely underdetermined by data.  And preferability
brings subjectivity into the model as well.

>Many food items we'd love to justify as paleo simply
>weren't available as food.  (Or if available, not recognizable as food).
>And even if paleo man could find proto-potatoes, for instance, and
>recognize them as something that could potentially satisfy some
nutritional
>need, short of starvation, he'd have to be pretty hard pressed to
choose to
>eat them.  I mean, which would you want: the meat and fat of freshly
killed
>buffalo, the sweet taste of ripened blackberries or bitter roots, the
skins
>of which probably caused you to barf all day long.

I think we can agree that white potatoes were simply not available,
because they were on the wrong continent.  So if we're serious about
availability as a criterion, we must reject white potatoes and tomatoes
and every other New World food.

But your question assumes that freshly killed buffalo was pretty much
always on hand and that, too, is a questionable assumption.  What do we
actually know about the daily yield of paleolithic hunters, in relation
to the needs of the clan?  The answer is: very little.  Your assumption
that these people wouldn't even recognize tubers and root vegetables as
food, and wouldn't know how to prepare them to make them more palatable
assumes that they were very stupid indeed, while at the same time we
think nothing of extolling their intelligence from tracking, killing,
butchering, and completely utilizing prey animals.

Jared Diamond, after living among hunter-gatherers in New Guinea,
concludes that even though their hunting technology is far superior to
what actual stone age people had, their hunting prowess is not that
great.  And as we look at other hunter-gatherer groups around the
world, what we find is that to the extent that plant foods are
available, the people eat them.  I'm not arguing for the "superiority"
of plant foods, whatever that would mean.  I'm just correcting the
tendency to attribute a high level of ingenuity and motivation to
paleolithic people for acquiring animal foods while attributing a low
level of both for acquiring plant foods.

Todd Moody
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