What Was Our First Protein Source?
Photos courtesy of justydrink and Roger Smith
Recently, there was a comment left by Carl on my Veganism post from October of 2007. In his comment, he made the following claim:
Just before man began to take it’s first steps towards being the humans we are today, it is actually a fact that humans began to eat legumes. Legumes have a high protein content, and also many essential vitamins and nutrients necessary for the brains development, thus making your argument completely invalid, and void of any factual basis.
My first thought was that it sounds like vegan propaganda intended to really drive home the point that humans evolved as vegetarians. As far as I know, legumes (beans) don’t contain the long-chain fatty acids EPA and DHA that are necessary for the brain’s development. But I decided to look a bit further into it. Here’s what I’ve come up with. I would love for someone to prove otherwise, as when it comes down to it, I have no dog in the fight. I simply want to understand what works best for my body. Carl, if you’re out there, please provide some references to back your claim up.
When Did We Start Eating Meat And Beans?
I’ll start with just some evidence that has been found of when certain foods entered the human diet. Evidence has been found regarding the use of seafood in the diet of H. sapiens in Africa:(1)
“Our findings show that at 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa humans expanded their diet to include shellfish and other marine resources, perhaps as a response to harsh environmental conditions,”
But that’s only looking at seafood. What about terrestrial flesh?(2)
Carnivorous humans go back a long way. Stone tools for butchering meat, and animal bones with corresponding cut marks on them, first appear in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago.
Two-and-a-half million years is a long time. Since humans have been eating meat for a couple million years, it follows that we have to find evidence of legumes being consumed more than 2.5 million years ago. Since the Agricultural Revolution, which brought along the domestication of grains, legumes, and animals, only occurred about 10,000 years ago, the “beans as primary protein” crowd is off to a bad start. The only mention of plant seed (legumes fitting this category) consumption before this time that I’ve been able to find is 160,000 years ago.(3) That there seems to be enough to close the door, but let’s explore further.
Another Stake In The Bean Claim
Let’s look at one other thing that it seems preclude legumes from having been a significant contributor to the early protohuman diet: fire. The earliest evidence of human control of fire is 1.4-1.5 million years ago, though this is disputed. The earliest undisputed evidence is only 230,000 years ago, only 1/10th the time that evidence shows the human lineage to have consumed meat.(4) Let’s compromise and say 750,000 years, some three times as long as is unequivocally accepted.
Why is fire important to this discussion? Because legumes are full of antinutrients that must be neutralized in some way lest they wreak havoc on the body. There are a few ways to neutralize these antinutrients: fermentation, sprouting, and soaking before long cooking.(5) We know that soybeans are harmful if not properly fermented.(6) Other legumes also share some antinutrient features:(7)
As with grain consumption, there are hunter-gatherers who have been documented eating legumes. However, under most cases, the legumes are cooked or the tender, early sprouts eaten raw rather than the mature pod. Some legumes in their raw state are less toxic than others. However, most legumes in their mature state are non-digestible and/or toxic to most mammals when eaten in even moderate quantities.
There’s also the fact that certain vitamins essential to human health are only available in animal products, such as vitamin B12. Any diet that requires supplementation to be complete is obviously not one that humans could have evolved with nor one that is optimal.
How Are We Constructed?
Let’s take a look at the construction of the human digestive tract and compare it to purely herbivorous and carnivorous animals. Many pro-vegetarian sites come up with lots of “proof” that the human digestive tract is identical to that of herbivores.(8)(9) You’ll find claims like “humans don’t have claws, which all carnivores have,” “humans don’t have sharp teeth” (except those ones called canines!), and “humans have digestive tracts 10-12 times their body length just like herbivores.” But if we look at Dr. Loren Cordain’s analysis, he points out that humans do have small sharp teeth in front (those aforementioned “canines”) and actually have a digestive tract shorter than that of the dog.(10) The key point is that humans are omnivores not carnivores, so any comparison to carnivores or herbivores is going to turn up some similarities.
But That Doesn’t Stop The Crazy Claims…
There are also quite a few other attempts to discredit meat-eating as a whole that vegetarians like to use. One site makes the following point:(8)
However, eating raw or bloody meat disgust us as humans. Therefore, we must cook it and season it to buffer the taste of flesh.
That, my friends, is societal conditioning. There are plenty of people that eat raw meat (steak tartare anyone?), raw eggs, and raw seafood (oysters-on-the-half-shell?). Many Hispanic countries have a dish known as ceviche (or seviche or cebiche) which is raw seafood marinated in citrus juices to “cook” the flesh. But rest assured that heat never touches the meat. I know plenty of people that eat extremely rare meat, me being one of them. Cooking meat is an aversion to parasites, not that we can’t or won’t eat raw meat. And disgust at the sight, smell, or taste of raw meat is pure societal conditioning.
And then there’s this claim:(9)
No matter how much fat carnivores eat, they do not develop atheroschlerosis. It’s virtually impossible, for example, to produce atheroschlerosis in the dog even when 100 grams of cholesterol are added to its meat ration. (This amount of cholesterol is approximately 200 times the average amount that human beings in the USA eat each day!) In contrast, herbivores rapidly develop atheroschlerosis if they are fed foods, namely fat and cholesterol, intended for carnivores…
But that’s based on faulty logic regarding the role of cholesterol and fat in the atherogenic process.
Comparing Humans To Other Species
Here’s a fun one: brain size and intelligence. If you look at this site, we see the claim that carnivores have small brains and are less capable of adaptive reasoning, while vegetarians and humans have large brains and are able to rationalize. First, has anyone seen even the dumbest dog learn how to sit, lay, and roll over in exchange for a treat? That sure seems like adaptive behavior to me, but we’ll move on to something more concrete. Brain-to-body-mass ratio, or the Encephalization Quotient (EQ), “is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism.”(11) Dolphins have the largest EQ of all cetaceans. The diet of dolphins is mainly fish and squid and they are commonly considered one of the most intelligent animals around. Sharks, definitely a carnivore, have the highest EQ of all fish species. Sharks are at least intelligent enough to figure out how to work together.(12) But what about mammals?
Looking at a chart of mammalian EQs shows that humans (which we have to exclude for this discussion), dolphins, chimpanzees, and rhesus monkeys top the list.(13) We’ve already discussed the seafood-heavy diet of dolphins. Chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys eat lots of fruit, but rhesus monkeys are also known to tap into invertebrates and Jane Goodall, an excellent source for information on chimpanzees, has mentioned that chimps hunt prey like red colobus monkeys and eat some 35 species of vertebrates.(14) So it looks like the rhesus monkey is the closest thing to a vegetarian at the top of the list. But the herbivores sure do bring up the bottom: rabbit, sheep, horse. I think we can all agree that little of value one way or the other can be gleaned from this and it’s merely a “fact” the author assumed wouldn’t be checked. That’s ignoring the circular logic of “humans are vegetarians because vegetarians have larger brains and humans have the largest brains.”
Finally, there have been points in the history of the Earth that it was covered in ice. In the industry, we call these “ice ages” (no, not the movies). All sarcasm aside (for at least a sentence or two), there have been at least four of these events. During these extreme cold periods, vegetable sustenance would be difficult, if not impossible to find, pretty much making it mandatory that humans subsisted on meat during these times.
What it boils down to is that I can’t find any facts to support the notion that legumes were consumed heavily in the human diet prior to the Agricultural Revolution some 10 millennia ago. Given all of the evidence for meat consumption in the evolutionary human diet and the lack of evidence for legume consumption, it defies logic to make a claim that legumes made a major contribution to human evolution. Have I missed something? Does someone have a source that can back up the legumes claim?
Sources:
(1) Earliest Evidence Of Modern Humans Detected
(2) “Evolving to Eat Mush”: How Meat Changed Our Bodies
(3) Natural food-Grains Beans and Seeds
(4) When was fire first controlled by human beings?
(5) Legumes (beans): Poor source of hard-to digest nutrition
(6) Newest Research On Why You Should Avoid Soy
(7) The Late Role of Grains and Legumes in the Human Diet, and Biochemical Evidence of their Evolutionary Discordance
(8) How humans are not physically created to eat meat
(9) Are humans designed to eat meat?
(10) Functional and Structural Comparison of Man’s Digestive Tract with that of a Dog and Sheep
(11) Encephalization Quotient – Wikipedia
(12) Smart Sharks
(13) A New Hypothesis for Sleep: Tuning for Criticality, Table 1 on Page 4
(14) The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees
About Scott
Scott Kustes loves to cook and loves to eat. He started Real Food University to help you get maximum enjoyment out of the meals that you eat. To find out more about how he has rebelled against the fast food culture and counting calories or carbs, join the Real Food Revolution.
40 Reader Comments
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This aggravates me:
http://body.aol.com/diet/basics/carb-resistant-starch
Very well written post! Let’s see what the pro-beaners say here in the comments…..keeping an open mind as we do.
CHEERS!
D
I agree with you Scott, so does archeological evidence.
One theory of human evolution is the Aquatic Ape Theory. To develop large brains requires eating large amounts of fat and cholesterol and shoreline gathering is a very energy efficient way to get both. So the theory is that the preancestors of humans were a wading ape that ate crustacian and mollusks thus evolving larger brains. It also explains human hairlessness, ear wax, and instinctive breath holding in water by humans.
I don’t know if I completely buy the Aquatic Ape theory but it makes more sense than evolving on legumes. I can see our paleo ancestors eating sprouted legumes and grains gathered as a seasonal treat.
oh, I forgot that the aquatic ape theory also explains the need for bipedalism.
It’s not credible that humans evolved to eat seeds. In nature, seeds are not around year round.
So much for the legume theory. As Terry suggests, they could have been no more than an occasional supplement to the human food supply. Critters, however, are available year round.
Sarena,
That whole resistant starch thing is annoying. Dr. Eades handled it deftly here.
Terry,
You’re like a mind-reader. I have an Aquatic Ape Hypothesis post sitting on the back burner that I’ve been meaning to finish up. I’ll try to get that done post-haste.
I had a feeling that the evidence would point overwhelmingly in favor of meat, but thought it would be a good exercise to disprove the “legume as main protein” theory outright for any future questions.
Cheers
Scott
Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn’t mean it’s ethical. Rape and murder are all parts of our evolutionary heritage and those behaviors are indisputably unethical. See this video and tell me if you can still maintain that eating meat is ethical: http://meat.org
Nice collation and anlysis of research. I’m impressed that you have the interest and patience to keep demonstrating how spurious these claims are.
The biological basis for a vegan or vegetarian diet is completely unsubstantiated. I respect that people make that choice because they feel healthier on that diet or it is in line with their value system. People do not need to justify it as “natural†and hijack science to support the claim.
The ethics of eating animals are of course open to debate and the exposes we’ve seen lately are great. While most people probably won’t give up eating meat, many will be persuaded to seek out “happy and healthy†livestock to feed themselves.
Here’s another video you can watch to help you consider the ethics:
http://www.folkstreams.net/film,144
Please explain how attempting to guilt trip people into eating a diet that makes them obese and causes disease so that they become a burden to society and thereby raising medical care for everyone, is ethical.
Are the foods you eat produced in an ethical manner? I know if we look at rice and lentil production we will find unethical production methods too.
Just because some sectors of food production use unethical practices does not mean people should commit slow and painful suicide. Farmers and ranchers handle thier livestock ethically, it’s in thier best interest to do so, both financially and otherwise. Even some meat packers handle things as best they know how, even if they are wrong. Yes, some meat packers are unethical. They get away with it because each packer has a choke hold on each region, its a dirty job and few want to do it.
A better way is to only buy healthy, farm raised grass fed and free range meats. Direct from the growers when possible. Cut out the middlemen, apply and encourage fair trade practices in the US and everywhere else in the world. The growers who do the real work will get fairly compensated and we will have a healthier food supply
In other word, use your dollars to support ethical food production practices and at the same time promote healthy eating which will increase health and reduce medical costs and the burden on society.
When have you ever seen a cave drawing of a pile of beans?
ROFL! That’s a good one Regina! No, can’t say that I have.
*typos from my last post Farmers handle their….it’s in their…
Terry wrote: “Please explain how attempting to guilt trip people into eating a diet that makes them obese and causes disease so that they become a burden to society and thereby raising medical care for everyone, is ethical.”
Good point. If you remain healthy on a vegetarian or vegan diet, great. Personally, even minimally processed grains (like steel cut oats) raise my blood sugar higher and keep it elevated for far longer than is conducive to health, and I am sure I am not alone in this. And two things that are often forgotten in this debate are 1) pharmaceuticals are tested on animals, which means that one who believes in humane treatment of animals has an ethical responsibility to stay as healthy as possible in order to avoid drugs; and 2) plowing for crops not only disturbs the habitats of animals but also directly takes the lives of small critters like voles and field mice.
Missy, if we evolved to eat something, then how can doing so be unethical? Ethics are a human invention and are subjective, dependent on the whims of the particular actor in question. Why is it not unethical for a lion or a wolf to eat meat? I bet that the death of an antelope at the hands of a lion is far more gruesome and painful than that of a cow, chicken, or pig in modern facilities.
That’s not to say that I condone the actions of the agribusiness food producers. On the contrary, I choose animals raised and killed humanely from local producers, producers who raise their animals on the foods the animals are evolved to eat (i.e., grass) and let the animals live the lives that cows, chickens, and pigs are intended to live. In the end, we’re all just part of one big food chain and will serve as nourishment for some other creature, be that creature another animal or some plot of greenery in a forest (well, until humans invented graveyards and took ourselves out of the biological loop). What is truly ethical is to live the life that one is evolved to live, be that the life of a happy cow, a happy pig, a happy dog, or a happy human.
If choosing vegetarianism or veganism for health reasons and one truly thrives on such a diet, that’s great. If choosing for ethical reasons, that’s fine too, though one needs to realize that they are merely closing their eyes to the death that is involved in modern harvesting. As Migraineur pointed out, many small animals that have taken up residence in grain fields die when the combines come through. You can shove the death into the hands of others, but that doesn’t mean it goes away.
Regina, CLASSIC!
Cheers all and great discussion!
Scott
To touch on “disgusting” being a learned trait, think of balut, which is popular in SE Asia:
“A Balut is a fertilized duck (or chicken) egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside that is boiled and eaten in the shell.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut
I’m sure many people in the US would find it pretty disgusting.
Nice post.
Nicholas, you just reminded me of a TV show I saw the other night called “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” on Travel. He ate some interesting things. On the tame end were things like jellied moose nose and akutaq (an Eskimo “ice cream”). On the more extreme end were foods like chicken uterus, rooster combs, unlaid eggs, bull penis, and chicken testicles. It’s all in what you were taught it “normal food”. I think I’d have at least tried everything that he did.
Cheers
Scott
You know, I never really got what was so gross about unborn eggs. Then I ran into this piece:
http://www.chow.com/grinder/tag/unborn+eggs
“… the practice of harvesting embryonic eggs turns the egg, which has traditionally been throught of as a vegetarian food, into something that can’t quite be defined as vegetarian anymore.”
Ahhh … so people think it’s weird because to get at the egg, you have to kill the chicken first. But if you were going to kill the chicken anyway, what’s the problem? Just seems to me to be another instance of nose-to-tail eating. And anyway, if you would eat an egg that a hen has laid, why wouldn’t you eat an egg that the hen would have laid, had she not been sacrificed for soup? Still an egg, isn’t it?
Oddly, I’d have a hard time with the chicken uterus. And yes, the Balut-egg, too. It would be like eating a kitten or something. Yecch!
Dr. Gabriel Cousens is a big advocate of the raw food vegan movement, and highly recommends significant supplementation of B12, the largest indicator of the inherent deficiency in the vegan dietary approach for HUMANS.
Is it ethical to malnourish a newborn simply to follow a philosophy not based in reason or evolutionary biology? See here for Dr. Cousens’ description of what is in store for vegan mothers who don’t supplement their diet, from http://www.live-food.com/community/past_emails/B12_Advisory.html:
“Consistent research over the last decade has shown that vegans and live food people of all ages and sexes have a much higher risk of becoming B-12 deficient. This does not mean that everyone becomes B-12 deficient. This deficiency is particularly true with newborn babies, especially babies of vegan live-food nursing mothers who are not using B-12 supplementation. In contrast to the average adult storage of 2,000-3,000 pg. of B-12, newborns of mothers with normal B-12 have about 25 pg. Studies have shown that the milk during the first week of life does contain large amounts of B-12. This means that the B-12 storage in infants at birth is normally adequate to last the first few weeks of life. Afterwards, they must get it from breast milk or other sources. If a vegan or live-food mother is already B-12 deficient during pregnancy, the baby may be born with seriously low B-12 levels and develop clinical signs of deficiency as soon as two weeks. The general research suggests that even among non-vegetarians, B-12 can be insufficient in infants, and that perhaps all breastfeeding mothers should consider B-12 supplements for themselves and their infants during the time of breastfeeding. This lack of B-12 in the mother’s diet during pregnancy has been associated with a lack of myelin production, which is the coating of the nerves. It takes somewhere between one to twelve months to develop, and manifests as failure to thrive and slow developmental progression. The babies are often lethargic, lose their ability to use muscle adequately, and even their sensory attunement decreases. They also have irregular macrocytic anemia.”
Humans are supposed to eat meat. The less cooked, the better. New slogan–”MEAT, Always Ready to Eat!”
Once again, we’re still waiting for someone (other than a raw food vegan author without references) to trot out the FIRST raw food vegan (or cooked food vegan) centenarian!
Beans are for the birds.
Excellent post Dr. Smith. When I think about it, the woman I have known who had troubles breastfeeding were often vegetarian or ate little animal protein. I never had problems and it never occurred to me anyone would have problems until I started going to La Leche League meetings.
I had the advantage of raising my son’s in a rural community composed of cattlemen, loggers, miners, “back to the land” types and people on welfare who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. Many of the back to the land types had chosen vegetarian/vegan lifestyles. The school my son’s attended was a blend of kids from all these groups and because of the small community everyone pretty much knew everyone’s lifestyle. My son’s who were raised eating plenty of meat and fats, were able to see the vast differences diet made in each group of kids.
One event in particular my oldest will never forget is how an accident in a 7th grade classroom, that shouldn’t have caused more than a bruise, caused a vegetarian friend to break her arm in three places. Every child in the classroom heard the sound of the breaks. And how that same student broke the same arm again falling playing flag football only two years later and my son was again a close witness to that event. This girl was raised on soy and also being a typical teen ate a lot of junk food like soda pop, chips and candy. All of which make brittle bones.
An additional point is that all the vegetarian/vegan kids were of tiny delicate statures. The meat/fat eating boys were uniformly well over 6′ tall and the girls about 5’8†tall by 16-17 years old, the kids from vegetarian families were 6-8″ shorter and poorly muscled while the lower income kids where in between.
My son’s also learned by eating low carb that they could completely eliminate acne and dental cavities. Cold cereals were the worst culprits in the acne, Cheerios in particular.
Scott, you read my mind. I had just this week set Bizarre Foods to record on the DVR so we could watch it as a family. What I like about that show is that it places these foods in a better context, unlike those “reality” shows which make eating culturally unusual foods to be a show of bravado.
Great comments on this post from just about everyone. The only thing I can think to add is that larger animals are killed and maimed in the industrial harvesting of grain/corn, too (which I never hear “muffin vegetarians” acknowledging). It’s not unusual for deer, fox, and other larger animals to get caught in combine harvesters. I’m sure the USDA has some sort of tolerance level for the amount of deer, or rabbit fragments in their grain samples, just as they do for insect and rodent fragments. Yummy, huh?
Also, on a smaller scale, turning of the soil for continual industrial scale planting disrupts worms and the soil microbes, reducing soil fertility, and contributing to soil erosion and desertification. This is a huge problem around the world, and has causes other than global warming, though you wouldn’t know it from the “news”, perhaps because it isn’t new, just swept under the carpet. The huge dust bowl storms of the 1930s are an extreme example of this but it continues today. *Thousands of millions of pounds* of soil that had been anchored down by native grasses for centuries (fostered by grazing bison) basically were blown into the air over a decade period, across the continent, and 100s of miles into the Atlantic Ocean, all because of commodity wheat farming and get-rich-quick mania in a area ill-suited for plowed earth. You can’t fool Mother Nature, but we don’t seem to learn that, do we?
Worms, bacteria and soil ecosystems just get no respect, yet they are a major part of the foundation of a balanced ecosystem. I just got a copy of The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, by Amy Stewart. Can’t wait to dig into it.
Dr. G., that B-12 thing always makes me wonder how anyone can believe such a diet to be proper for the human animal? Our big brains unfortunately allow us to reason away from our Paleolithic roots.
Terry, that’s a good story and a telling tale of how important meat is to the diet of humans. As we know, humans can and do thrive on diets of all meat, but over time, vegans don’t thrive without massive supplementation. I’m glad your sons are on the right path for maintaining their health. I would bet all those stereotypically big, strong farm boys aren’t raised on vegetarian fare. Just a hunch.
Anna, I agree about that show. It’s cool because he doesn’t just go around eating, but actually explores the cultures that he’s in. It’s funny that some cultures will eat chicken uterus and I know people that won’t even eat meat off of a bone. As for worms, after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the story of how all of those unloved critters under the soil do their work, they are quite possibly the most important aspect of the ecosystem, coupled with the sun.
Cheers
Scott
You neglect to mention one likely early protein source.
Bone marrow. There is evidence to suggest that besides hunting small and large game, humans may have also scavenged fresh (and maybe not so fresh) kills by driving away large carnivores en masse with the usual suite of implements and, perhaps, fire.
My gut feeling is that early humans very literally tapped into bone for a tasty snack of marrow.
Must admit I have not read all the replies but the facts are as follows:
Legumes cannot be eaten raw.
First evidence of humans using fire date back to around 350.000 years ago. But it was not for cooking ,just for keeping warm. And humans were not able to control fire (i.e. start it whenever they need it) until around 35.000 years ago. That’s when they actually started regularly using it for cooking.
We know for a fact that:
1) human brain developed in the past 3 million years and
2) the brain mass doubled in the time since 3 mil. years ago till 1 mil. years ago, and then doubled again in just a million years until today.
Obviously, this couldn’t have been done with legumes (even if the legumes contaned the enormous smount of proteins that were needed for such a mass increase) because our human ancestors couldn’t have been eating them back then.
(My data sources are the following books: The last Human, by G.J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak and Esteban Sarmiento; Genome by Matt Ridley; The Making of the Fittest – DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll, and The Brain Trust, by dr. Larry McCleary, one of the greatest brain experts alive.)
Oh, and I forgot to mention:
The last period of ice ages lasted for almost 80.000 years. As you can imagine, not much vegetation (or vegetarians!) could be found during that time.
Only after ice started backing away towards the Poles, which happened around 10.000 yearsa ago, could the Man settle down and start dedicating some time to agriculture.
Varangy, Good call on the bone marrow, though according to Nutrition Data, (caribou) bone marrow is actually about 96.5% fat and only 3.5% protein. I would presume that other wild and domestic animals have similar profile. It was this important fat that helped humans have the energy they needed.
Xenia, legumes can be sprouted or fermented, so it’s not technically impossible that they could have been eaten prior to control of fire, though for all of the other reasons, it is unlikely they would have had much impact on the diet as a whole. The very fact that they don’t contain the long-chain fatty acids necessary for proper brain growth and that the earliest evidence is only 160K years ago is enough for me.
Cheers
Scott
Another early source of fat and some protein may have been grubs and insects.
Such as these ones:
http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2008/03/the-tree-of-l-2.html
Mmm! Grubs! I’ve never had insects or worms as food, though I would eat them. I can’t see that they would taste like a whole lot other than crunch. I’ve heard that you should fast them before eating them though so the digestive tract is cleared out. It looks like once again, it comes back to foods of animal (or insect in this case) origin. Plants still have no showing in providing the huge amounts of protein and fat humans used throughout evolution.
Cheers
Scott
’ve never had insects or worms as food, though I would eat them.
You’ve never had escargot? You should try it–the snails themselves are low in fat, high in protein, and most of the fat that they do have is polyunsaturated fat and very good for you.
Plus, they’re very low in the food chain, and so you greatly reduce your ecological footprint. (I’m actually thinking of raising them–much easier and more economical than good beef/chicken/etc.)
Also? Amazingly tasty.
Maya, nope never had escargot. Never had the opportunity. Perhaps I should seek it out.
Cheers
Scott
[...] know something now and then. Refreshing, to say the least, and you gotta love his post on Humans’ First Protein Source (don’t forget to read the comments). And also the post covering the new study showing that [...]
[...] know something now and then. Refreshing, to say the least, and you gotta love his post on Humans’ First Protein Source (don’t forget to read the comments). And also the post covering the new study showing that [...]
[...] know something now and then. Refreshing, to say the least, and you gotta love his post on Humans’ First Protein Source (don’t forget to read the comments). And also the post covering the new study showing that [...]
Well done and wonderfully sourced. Thanks for taking the time.
In no way, shape, nor form is Missy ethical. She is quite the opposite.
Hi Scott,
Appreciate the post. I was a former vegan of five and a half years, now eating a WAPF/Paleo inspired diet. The addition of eggs, meat, organs and cod liver oil seems to be helping me tremendously, and I feel like, after two years back on the omnivore train, I’m getting closer to vibrant and well. I’ve read ti suggested that the likelihood of success as a long-term vegan enhances with the frequency of ‘cheating’ and eating some animal foods. Seems to make sense for me and some of the vegans/vegetarians I know who have stuck with it. Also, anecdotally, I find that longer-term vegans are just less energetic and healthy-looking, though one can take that with a grain of salt.
As for me, I still enjoy soaked, sprouted and fermented seed food, but am really leaning on greens these days. (I’m curious- you advocate eating raw nuts: do you soak and dry them to minimize the presence of anti-nutrients as the WAPF folks advocate?) Eating them from local sources at this time of the year is tricky, though, so stored staples are more common for me. Having sweet potatoes and squash from the summer and autumn harvest is real helpful. I’m curious if there are folks who are successfully eating bioregional paleo meals and writing about their experiences. I wonder how those folks stretch their local food resources to make due in lean months.
And also: grubs. I’ve had them a few times. They’re actually not bad. I bit into the couple I’ve eaten so far just below the head with pinchers, tossing that aside. I found them to be juicy and leathery, and a one or two-bite food. I’m guessing that one could harvest a bunch from dead wood in the landscape and make an occasional habit of it, sharing with friends. Maybe it’d help to fast them for a day or two, but right off the log worked just fine for me.
Thanks again,
Rob
Rob, I don’t soak and sprout the raw nuts. I probably should for the reasons you mention. I don’t eat much in the way of nuts though. But I need to look into that, as soon as I can find a decent price on raw almonds again.
My farmer’s market is pretty much drained of vegetation now. I have a few butternut and spaghetti squashes, a few sweet potatoes, and pumpkins set back. For the lean months, I just try to buy more each week of the roots and squashes and set them aside. I’d like to get into canning and such for other foods that won’t keep, but it’s not something I’ve put my mind into yet. I end up at the grocery for a few months, but try to stick to winter foods like greens, roots, and cruciferous vegetables. I did pick up enough kale and Brussels sprouts Saturday to last me a week or so into January, but the farmer’s market won’t be fully running again until April.
Grubs…hmm. I need to try some bugs.
Cheers
Scott
Very interesting discussion. Even though this horse may be beat nearly to death since it began in March 08, I’d like to throw an additional bit of common logic into the mix here.
God love vegans and vegetarians at least for their good intentions, but why do so many of them seem to think that early humans would have the same aversion to certain foods that so many have today? Here’s one example of a train of thought I heard on a veg blog: humans didn’t have fire until about 100,000 years ago, so they could not have eaten meat up until that point.
The question of what our ancestors lived, and thrived on, as food sources is to me fascinating. Not because science has indicated through fossil records what that ancient paleolithic diet was composed of, but because of what science has failed to provide in this regard and what our own intuition must therefore attempt to complete.
Have you ever wandered through a woods or other semi- or fully wilderness setting and wondered what it might have looked like there 100, 300, 1,000, or even a million years ago? I have often, and most times my answer to the question is that it probably wasn’t all that different from what it looks like right now.
The same logic can be applied to food gathering. What did people in this wilderness setting gather to eat? Probably the same thing I can gather right now. I see a variety of plants, mushrooms, leaves, nuts, seeds, bark, and insects that I could gather right now and eat with minimal if any preparation. I could pick up a rock or stick and try my luck at bringing down that squirrel on the branch above my head, or with a few pals could try to corral a rabbit or two (admittedly both would be a real trick). The little stream I cross could have a few snails, mussels, crawfish, even fish that could be snagged with a bit of luck and no equipment but my bare hands. There are lots of plants along the edge of the pond that would make a fine meal.
If I want to get more sophisticated, I could fashion a rock fall or snare from some of the other useful plants and raw materials, or dig a pit trap and check on all of them regularly. After all, they are working for me for long stretches of time, even when I’m gone. I could even try to fashion a rudimentary net and go fishing. Those people living by the sea are certainly fortunate, since there is a much greater variety of clams and the like within easy reach, not to mention tidal pools that trap fish and many kinds of kelp and other sea “vegetables.”
As for skinning mammals for consumption, if it was even necessary, one could use fractured flint, which is very sharp, or even a sharp rock. It’s no Ginsu but it gets the job done. But then who is to say that early humans didn’t just use their given sharp instrument, i.e., their teeth? You or I probably wouldn’t fancy skinning a tree rodent with our choppers, but do you really think a human living one million years ago really had any such hang ups? Certainly not one that was hungry enough. Teeth do just fine on fish, amphibians, and lizards, that’s for certain. And you can bet that not one part of even such a small animal as a squirrel went to waste – eyes, glands, guts, stomach contents, sex organs, marrow, even some bones likely went right down the hatch.
Early humans were also probably scavengers on of the highest order, competing with coyotes and hyenas in their quest to get at uneaten fresh meat. Just follow the vultures and scare them away and you’ve got what might even be a hot meal. Might even be able to kill a vulture or two while your at it for supper.
I have no doubt that early humans were probably on the menu of a great many predators. But I also believe humans have always been cunning, well organized, and powerful creatures in their own right. Primitive masai men were observed by Weston Price in the 1930s to kill lions with nothing but a wooden spear when such predators threatened their herds. Then there are stories, legends perhaps, from old Russia and the American Old West of men able to single handedly kill an animal as large as a brown bear with only a knife or other hand held weapon. Unlikely, perhaps, and certainly something that didn’t happen very often (too dangerous), but I think that even during our early existence most animals had reason to be fearful of humans.
My point in all of this is that we must really think far outside of the box that encompasses our modern culinary experiences to imagine what early humans dined on. These humans did not live like us, think like us, or act like us, and were probably about as wild as any other animal. But yet they still undoubtedly had the intellect and yearning for discovery that we maintain to this day.
Scott,
Re: good price for raw almonds. I just purchased some from glorybeefoods.com at $21.98 for 5# (plus shipping). They are of excellent quality. Since shipping has to be figured into the price, I try to stock up on other items, such as raw sunflower seeds and honey when I buy from this source. I’ve been using them for 3 years and never been disappointed.
[...] out this article about what protein sources humans evolved to eat, and post thoughts to [...]
[...] read In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto byMichael Pollan. An interesting blog post argues “What Was Our First Protein Source?”. There are plenty of other reasons others then meat that make the western Diet a unhealthy diet! [...]
[...] read In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto byMichael Pollan. An interesting blog post argues “What Was Our First Protein Source?”. There are plenty of other reasons others then meat that make the western Diet a unhealthy diet! [...]