Human beings (Homo Sapiens) like you and me have been walking the Earth for 300.000 years now. For the best part of this very, very long time, we would live as nomads, eating whatever we could hunt, fish, and gather out there in nature. The number and the diversity of wild edible plants is astonishing. Not only in the regions blessed with a particularly good climate, but even in the colder Northern regions there are innumerable wild edible plants. Our ancestors would gather flowers, leaves, roots, stalks and berries only few people still know and still recognise as edible.
Their nutrition was very varied and would change with the seasons. They gathered fruit and nuts whenever they could. Sometimes they would find a little bit of honey or some eggs from different birds. When they came to the sea or a river or a lake they would fish and gather shells and shrimps and seaweed. And then they would capture insects, reptiles, and hunt birds and big and small mammals. That’s what was available to them, and that was – and still is, I believe, even though I’m not too keen on the idea of insects and reptiles myself – the ideal food for us.
An objection that arises sometimes is that in those times, life expectancy was extremely short, so their diet must not have been that healthy after all… But this does not take into account that in those times, life was extremely rough. Food was often very hard to find. Many things were only available for a short part of the year, hunting and gathering were not always successful and our ancestors were often undernourished and sometimes starved to death.
The water they drank could have easily been contaminated by an animal carcass or a human corpse. There were parasites, infant mortality was very high, people were exposed to the elements and they would die from injuries, from poisonous snakes and insects, from infection. So yes, life expectancy (especially if we throw in the extremely high child mortality that lowers the average even more) was short back then, but it was certainly not down to the wrong diet… Modern people who choose a diet more similar to the one of our ancestors, now that we don’t die from all the other things that plagued us before, often see their health improve dramatically.
It’s only about 8000 years ago – a wink of an eye in the history of our evolution – that we started settling in villages, breeding animals and growing edible plants. This had many extremely positive effects on human life, it made it much safer and easier, and it made a lot more food available, so starvation went down drastically. But on the other hand we started eating grains and pulses that don’t look like they were meant for human consumption. That was not a big problem back then, for sure the pros were heavily outweighing the cons, but it has become a big problem nowadays, where so much of what we normally eat is sugars and starches that give our body and brain a hard time.
Physically we are still exactly the same as we were in the Paleolithic age. Our body was – and still is – wired for maximum fat storage, because food was so scarce that we had to make the most of every little bit of fat we could put on for even harsher times. For this reason we always preferred – and always will prefer – fattening foods, which is something that made sense back in those days and still does in some parts of the world. In these last few decades, for the first time in history, in our rich countries unlimited food of all sorts is available to us at all times. Circumstances have changed in an unprecedented way, but we haven’t. We still cannot resist the foods that make us store fat and we still find the other ones a lot less attractive.
Back then our wildest dreams and cravings would have been for some honey, some ripe fruit, a big fat animal… but then we had to get them first! We would often spend so much energy looking and fighting for them, that what we actually got from eating them would hardly make us fat! Honey and ripe fruit would of course have our insulin spike, but that was so natural and so rare that it would be no problem at all. Also, we were likely to eat one or two different foods at a time, not the incredible combinations of endless ingredients we consider normal now. Nowadays, what we crave is pizza, fried potatoes, sugary drinks, sweets…. We can have them anytime, and we do. Our insulin doesn’t get much rest and we are putting away insane amounts of fat in our cells, plus creating new ones for extra storage.
The end of nomadism and the beginning of agriculture and animal farming in villages also led to more and more cooking. With a larger availabilty of food, with the appearance of ovens and with pots and pans, the way food was prepared changed dramatically. That was the very beginning of local, regional and later national cuisines. All over the world, people developed more and more complex and varied ways of cooking, combining, and preserving food.
Today we are all able to tell an Italian dish from and Indian one, a Mexican one from a Japanese one, we might be real experts on French cheeses, Spanish hams, Belgian beers, Ethiopian, Brasilian, Vietnamese cuisine.
Humans everywhere in the world are creative, curious, ambitious, they like having fun and enjoying life. Our nature and basic needs and traits are the same throughout the planet, but the outcomes of what we do vary greatly from one place to another, which makes it all so rich and fascinating…
“Old, time-honoured” traditions
One of the big challenges our health faces today is our tradition, I believe. Many people think that what their great-grandparents used to do was healthy because then people would take time to cook and eat, foods were not or very little processed, there was very little pollution compared to today, and more significantly, their practices and beliefs came from what is often considered a long tradition. But a few generations and even 8000 years of cereal culture are no time at all on the scale of human evolution! These great, respected traditions are actually brand new for our old setup.
It can be really difficult and sometimes absolutely awkward to hear that the biggest part of what we eat, and which is part of our very sophisticated cultures and cuisines, should not be considered food in the first place… It can feel like a huge blow in the face or it can look like nonsense or a bad joke to many people, but the truth is that so many things that greatly damage our health are an integral part if not the pillars of our eating cultures. And food is a very emotionally loaded topic. Apart from the mere nutritional aspect, food has a myriad of very deep personal and social meanings and implications, which make it a very hard problem to deal with.
I come from the great Italian culinary tradition on my father’s side and from the less known Swiss and the world famous French tradition on my mother’s side. I love cooking and baking since I was a child and I have a rather big repertoire that then started expanding towards a few different cuisines over the years. I will cook any and every thing from scratch, from the basic ingredients, and there’s probably no category of food I wouldn’t know how to handle – apart from insects and reptiles. 🙂
But over the years I have been simplifying my everyday cooking and really stripping it down to the essentials. I will still make one or the other of the great, gorgeous, famous traditional dishes from time to time, but this is a rare occurrence and I usually classify it somewhere under “fun”, “art”, or “drugs” but not under “food”.
I believe nothing is totally black or white in life. I like all the colours in between light and darkness and wouldn’t want to miss them. When it comes to health, especially nutrition, I know because I found out for myself what is good for me and I stick to it I think 95% of the time. And I find that you cannot beat that fantastic feeling when you’re looking after your body in a way that keeps it strong and young and healthy and happy… you just feel happy all round. But then I’m not one of those hard-core fundamentalists that will refuse to touch anything that doesn’t satisfy all of their criteria a 100%.
So sometimes (maybe once every two or three months or more, I don’t know exactly) I will make a fantastic cake or a big rich pasta, or whatever will grab my fancy. I will have it, and lots of it, enjoy it to the fullest – sometimes regret it afterwards if it makes me feel bad, especially when I get a bad sugar crash from it! – and then go back to my beautiful, natural, minimal, roughly paleo lifestyle.
I say “roughly paleo” because I only eat a couple of wild plants, the rest is modern vegetables that I either buy or grow in my garden. I don’t fish nor hunt, I just buy what I can find in the shops local to me, and that’s mostly farmed. Also, I’m sure I eat a lot more than our nomadic ancestors would be able to get, but then I keep it seasonal and regional. I find it important to keep it simple and to only eat a few different things in one meal.
I think the closest you can get to paleo nutrition would be with a “forest garden”, a nice concept I came across recently. I guess you need a lot of land for that, it’s a combination of different trees and perennial plants that’s much more similar to what we find in nature than to cultivated land as we know it.
This lifestyle makes me feel amazing and I know many other people who love it too. I think it’s definitely worth experimenting with it a little bit, you might be surprised if you’ve never tried it before!
Here’s a couple of interesting links for you:
This one is to a recent study that dates the appearance of Homo Sapiens another 100.000 years earlier than previously accepted.
Go to article
This one is to a very interesting study on wild edible plants in the North and East of Europe
Go to article
A quick note about my statement that grains are bad for our body and brain: if you browse the internet you’ll find thousands of articles and studies explaining how grains and many types of sugar affect our health. In one word, they create inflammation, which is the worst thing that can happen to us. If you want to get more information on the subject, Dr. David Perlmutter’s book “Grain Brain” will give you a few interesting clues
Go to book
I also like the “Transcendence” series on Food Matters TV very much, especially the first episode will set you thinking….
Go to FMTV
And this one is to an article and video on forest gardens
Go to article
