On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, alexs wrote:

> >    Does the Price Pottenger Foundation recommend raw dairy?
>
> Who cares?

The person who asked the question cares.

> Dairy is for infants, animal or human.

Since milk is in the stomach of young animals, and many HGs eat
the stomach contents of their prey, it follows that dairy, in
this form at least, has been available to humans for a long time.
I've yet to see an argument that they *didn't* eat it.

We have heard the argument that the amounts of dairy consumed
from this source would probably have been small, as a percentage
of total intake.  That seems reasonable to me, but if we use
*that* criterion to exclude foods then we lose a lot of otherwise
paleo foods.  Notably, we lose the spices, since they represent
only a tiny percentage of what paleolithic humans probably ate.
How many calories' worth of oregano do you suppose HGs ate in the
course of a year?  How much dill weed?  Indeed, why would they
bother gathering these things at all, given their extremely low
caloric density?

So, while I grant that adult human exposure to dairy was probably
intermittent, not constant, I submit that exactly the same thing
is true for a wide variety of other foods that we currently
accept as "paleo."

> Each milk is designed for a single species.

What is the principle here? That we should eat only foods that
were designed for us?  Does that include meat?

> Milk-drinking is the pinnacle of neoteny.

Perhaps.  Have we declared war on neoteny?

> Dairy is one of the curses of Neolithic life.

And it was arguably a part of paleolithic life as well.  In terms
of regular consumption, dairy was (and is) a staple of
pastoralists' diet.  This way of life preceded agriculture and in
fact does not depend on it.

> Milk is not paleo and this subject is way off-topic.

I disagree.

Todd Moody
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