Ashley Moran wrote:

> Thanks for your comments Keith
>
>
> On Oct 23, 2005, at 10:28 pm, Keith Thomas wrote:
>
>> No. His problem is that he isn't thinking Paleo.  Look at it
>> another way.  It didn't cost any money to
>> eat in the Palaeolithic, but there was time spent hunting and
>> gathering. Suppose this took three
>> hours a day. You could make the case that, until he has spent three
>> hours a day working for
>> money or gardening to acquire food, he can't say it's costing him
>> too much. He just needs to get
>> his head around the fact that finding good food is one of the basic
>> tasks of existence for any
>> animal, including the human animal. He will probably find there are
>> a few other things he's
>> spending money on which are not so basic / essential / core.
>
>
> I have to say I feel the same way.  I prefer to look at it another
> way though.  If I would have spent 3 hours a day getting food, then 3
> hours a day out of my wages should pay for my food (ie 40%).  As it
> happens, I only spend about 20% of my income on food, so I guess I'm
> doing twice as well as a hunter-gatherer (ignoring other things like
> shelter and clothes).
>
If the typical work week is 40 hours, and 3 hours a day is for food,
then the percentage is 3 * 7 / 40 == 52.5%

The reality is that Paleo hunters would have spent an average of three
hours a day, although it was more like nine hours every three days,
which averages out to three hours a day actually hunting, but they would
have spent a lot of additional time engaged in exercises designed to
improve their success in the hunt (From which modern sports, among other
things, are eventually derived.) This is analogous to the modern soldier
who spends many hours training for a few minutes of fighting and weeks
of sitting around playing with his pistol (hehe.)

Women would have had a similar schedule they would go out gathering some
days, and spend other days processing the gathered materials for food,
clothing, or other uses.

>> Non-Paleo food costs less money because its total costs - the
>> externalities - are not factored into
>> the monetary cost.  For example, the damage done to the soils by
>> artificial fertilizers, the loss of
>> biodiversity through monocultures, the greenhouse damage done by
>> using fossil fuels to transport
>> and process foods - all these are costs which we pass on to be
>> absorbed by the environment
>> rather than paying at the shop. When he understands this, it won't
>> make it any easier for him to
>> pay for his food, but it will increase his understanding: there is
>> no such thing as a free lunch.
>
>
> I'd never thought of this at all.  What I said to him (my boss btw)
> the other day was that cheap foods are generally a sign of something
> that other animals avoid.  EG you can grow beans quite easily in the
> garden, because other animals stay well clear of them, but lettuces,
> berries and carrots won't last long.  Plus there's government
> subsidy.  So effectively we pay for our food in taxes (paleo eaters
> are subsidising the ill-health of the rest of the population!)

The Paleolithic style eating is intrinsically more expensive than the
Neolithic style of eating, always has been, and always will be. That is
why the Neolithic style evolved and supplanted the Paleolithic style in
almost every culture. The Neolithic style has many advantages. It allows
more people to be fed by less workers over a smaller area. It allows a
larger population to feed itself while remaining sedentary (In the
anthropological sense of the word i.e. build permanent structures and
live in them year round.) Modern technology does not appreciably change
this. Although refrigeration and modern distribution allow Paleo foods
to be available to anyone who can afford them, it is still far cheaper
to make and distribute foods based on grains. A lot of calories can be
grown in a small area, they can be stored for a long time without
refrigeration, and they can be easily distributed (Again, no need for
refrigeration.)

The central tennet of the Paleo Diet *is not* that the Paleo style of
eating is better in every way. In fact, if everyone switched to the
Paleo Diet tomorrow a lot of us would starve. There just isn't enough of
this type of food in the world to feed six billiion or so people. The
truth is that our evolution in to Homo Sapiens happened in a certain
environment with a certain diet. Our ancestors subsisted on that diet
for hundreds of thousands (millions, depending on what you call an
"ancestor") of years, and we have only been on our current diet for tens
of thousands at most. Therefore, in a biological sense we are more Paleo
than we are Neo, and we can view certain diseases, many of them derived
from food difficulties, as a failure to adapt to this new diet.
Nonetheless, adaptation to the Neolithic style of eating is vital to the
continued ability of homo sapiens to thrive. We cannot feed the
population and maintain our infrastructure on a mostly Paleolithic diet.
Thus, in a very real sense, the Neolithic diet is the "diet of the
future" and the Paleolithic Diet is a throwback.