> -- This means the typical 21st century american is
>technically "unemployed" for about one half of his or her lifetime, if not
>more.

And hunter gatherers are unemployed all their life . The notion of work is
an artificial one that stem from the idea that we have to coerce ourselves
to obtain what we need. That is an idea  very foreign to  huntergatherers,
it is well known to many expeditions in hunters gatherers country how
unreliable they can be when they are hired to guide or carry stuff. When it
is not rewarding in accordance with their sense of values they just quit.

>In other words there has been a huge increase in "free time".

There is no free time either in those cultures, there is time to hunt ,there
is time to gather, to cook , to sit ,to dance , to make crafts or whatever.
All those activities are done because rewarding per se .

>  I think it is also
>wrong that people here write of modern agriculture and modern food
>distribution methods as if these things were some kind of evil conspiracy of
>an oppressive upper class.

I don't see modern agriculture or food distribution methods as Evil
comspiracy because a comspiracy is an intelligent planned cooperative work
to get what all the parties involved want .

it is not evil or wrong .it is just fondamentally useless.

 I see that system of thing as a crazy train who lost its driver going down
the mountain toward the cliff . Every wagon pushing the other one toward
that dead end. The fact is that the trend of that system is to produce less
and less nutritious foods and more and more depleted soils. It is everything
but intelligent and is certainly not fulfilling its function:  providing
nourishment to peoples.

There is nothing wrong in that train , just that the peoples who believe in
it will not go where they want to go.
I am a kind of person who prefer to walk there it is safer.

 For sure everybody is involved in it , customers productors, transformers ,
transporters , brokers and retailers. Everybody get something out of it but
certainly not nourishing food.
That is the beauty of it,  everyone can change it,  at least for themselves.

>think our paleo ancestors lived in what we would consider a constant
>struggle for the most basic of necessities, >

you must be one of the rare peoples on earth who doesn't struggle  . I see
lot of peoples around who are struggling to get the useless compensations to
the basic of necessities. It si precisely why we don't get the basic that we
are looking for so many compensations.
an example very symbolic of modern food production system. Formula
Ask a baby bottle fed if he get the basic of necessities .
Yes it is true that sucking a bottle is freeing lot of free time for the
baby , it doesn't require  the effort of sucking a breast.  but god,  how
blissfull it is to suck a bottle in comparaison with the voluptuous work of
extracting milk from a breast.

>The paleolithic diet is sound for reasons of evolutionary biology ...

For biology to evolve it need interaction with ecology.It doesn't evolve in
a vacuum.
A diet is not separated of its ecologic impact and context.

the emotional and spiritual relationship and attitude  to our environment in
the paleolithic and in the neolithic are  very different.
In my opinion a paleolithic diet without a change in that relationship  and
attitude is not going to fulfill its goal : Health
I think what i am saying is in the ethymology of the word health ( holy ,
whole, ) isn't it ?

> I think anyone who would actually prefer a real paleolithic
>lifestyle over this one needs to have his head examined.  :)

By who and for what purpose?
jean-claude