Hunt

" We are Paleo hunters; only truly ALIVE in these moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises & stimuli frm envrmnt. If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead -the more precision, the more dead." - Nassim Taleb

We live in a culture were "unplanned" is a derogatory adjective. Into The Wild devotes some time to adventurers besides Chris McCandless who were criticized in death for their "foolhardy" unplanned ventures into the wilderness. You need a plan- a life plan, a shopping plan, and a diet plan to name a few. If you don't have one, you are probably irresponsible and immature.

Well, I don't have a plan. I don't know what I'm eating tomorrow. I have lost every shopping list I've made. This was originally unintentional and I've often felt guilty about it. I've often thought that my life would be better if I had "healthy habits." Lots of diet books and magazines have little pink bullet point lists with banal little habits you can oh so virtuously build- drink lots of water, pack your gym bag before work, snack on nuts, blah blah blah

It's a tyranny that makes us hothouse flowers. People are grumpy because their sleep got interrupted by barking dogs or they forgot to eat their oatmeal for breakfast.

Hasn't anyone stopped to think that people managed quite well for millions of years without worrying about their bedtime, how many apples they needed to buy, or regular mealtimes? In fact, perhaps people are quite well adapted for randomness.

The evidence seems to be to that effect. Not many people do well on rigid diets that require lots of planning. We can't do much about living in a world where many of us are forced to have routines, but we can control the diet part.

It's really impossible for us to understand the existence of paleolithic peoples, but of the remaining hunter-gatherer cultures we can see they have no bedtimes, supper times, or balanced meals. They eat what is there. They eat what the chaotic natural environment provides them. The gods are fickle and sometimes fain to dole out success. The animals they hunt are cunning and able to use supernatural powers to disappear into the thick foliage. At night, the rustlings in the trees and the stirring of relatives talking late into the night by the fire fade in and out. But really, we don't know much besides they probably didn't have a plan. They didn't need one. Things just were.

I don't know what I will eat tomorrow. Perhaps I will decide to eat breakfast, but probably not. I'll go to the farmer's market and get what appeals to me for lunch. Sometimes my meals look wildly unbalanced. Some days I eat only meat, others only plants, but most are in between. There is so much that even the sparse and unnatural environs of the city can provide to a pseudo forager.

I remember my time in Sweden. I never had much of a schedule there, not even my classes had a real schedule. Some weeks entomology was on a Wednesday at 8 in a random spot in the woods, others it was on Monday at 1 PM in the ecology building. I often went out foraging in the woods on a whim. Some days I had nothing, other days I was greeted by a rare glade of prized berries.

People in the North of Sweden are especially fond of berries and will spend inordinate amounts of time searching for treasures like arctic raspberries or cloudberries. You can't cultivate them, though many have tried. Make Prayers To The Raven describes how the arctic Koyoukon tribe prized the exact same berries as the Lapplander. How can you not? There is something very basically appealing about them with their jewel-like colors contrasting against the dark moss. You never know what they will taste like either. Some cloudberries are very bitter, others sweet like candy.

Occasionally I do an analysis on my diet just out of curiosity. But I know better than to look at days, an arbitrary delineation for diet. I like at averages over the week and they are excellent despite bizarre meals at odd times and the very unplanned intermittent fasting I do.

You don't need a diet plan. Eat real foods that a hunter-gatherer would eat. Be an opportunist.That's not a plan, it's a simple maxim that doesn't tell you which foods to eat or when to eat them. If you are really following the spirit of this and exposing yourself to a wealth of good foods, your diet will be fairly diverse, but don't worry if it isn't yet. My first year of paleo was lots of salmon and spinach salads, but now I eat offal and tiny bone-in fish.

Unfortunately in this day and age, some thought is required to get this exposure, whether it be from reading about food or going to a farmer's market or other similar rich environment. We don't have the elders to show us the good foods and teach us how to prepare it. We don't have the woodlands with their strange giving and taking ways- chanterelles one day and stringing nettles the next. We will have to strive, but we don't need a plan.

Apparently anthropologists have found that many women crave clay during pregnancy. In most of the Western medical literature it is considered pathological, but:

Worldwide, clays are used to relieve diarrhea..., detoxify compounds, and provide minerals that are insuficient in the diet. In Africa, this practice is also employed by women seeking to relieve nausea of pregnancy and it can serve to bind toxins that would harm that fetus in this stage. When geophagy continues beyond the early stages of pregnancy, it probably adds important nutrients to the diet, especially calcium, essential for fetal skeletal development and maintenance of blood pressure in pregnancy.

Anthropologists Andrea Wiley and Sol Katz propose that clay as a source of calcium helps to explain the distribution of geophagy in African populations. Their survey of 60 societies confirms that whee dairying is practiced and calcium is available in the diets of pregnant women, geophagy is less common...

Given evidence that clay consumption occurs in chimpanzees and may have been practiced by early hominins, it seems to have a long evolutionary history. Certainly most of the sources of calcium sought by pregnant women today (dairy products) were not available to our ancestors and clay consumption may have made the difference between a healthy and unhealthy pregnancy. As with all practices, however, geophagy may have negative consequences, including exposure to pathogens in soil, iron deficiency, and lead poisoning.

From Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women's Health.

Making laaaaard

A few years back, a government agency promoting the American agrarian ideal shipped baby chickens and piglets to Koyukon Indian villagers- people who have been hunters, trappers, and fishers all their lives. Some folks took to the notion, built pens, raised healthy pigs and successful flocks, and eventually found eggs under their hens. That's when things started going awry. After watching the chickens grow, many couldn't bring themselves to eat the eggs, and it was even worse to think of dining on the birds or pigs. "People felt like they'd be eating their own children," a Koyukon woman told me. "A lot of them said, from now on they would only eat wild game they got by hunting. It felt a lot better that way.

That's from the excellent Heart and Blood by Richard K. Nelson. I actually recommend this book more to former vegans than I do The Vegetarian Myth, because it's an incredibly well written eco-humanistic journey through our place in nature. I've been meaning to give it one big post, but it's hard to do because it's such an amazing book...so I guess I'll keep doing posts about it until I keep thinking about it. 

Having experience with farming, I can say that there are animal husbandry methods that make me uncomfortable. People make much ago about foie gras, but they would find other more common methods just as distasteful if they were exposed to them. But they aren't. People live in a fantasy land where Bessie the cow gets retired to Green Acres when her milk production goes down and chickens die a painless death for McNuggets.

Knowing what I know about human evolution, my uncomfortableness with animal husbandry makes sense. Paleolithic humans may have kept animals, but only as allies like dogs, not as future food. With the domestication of animals comes the issue of killing something you raised yourself, that often bears some resemblance physically or behavioral to your pets and children.

I've had this problem in particular with goats. Domestic goats, unlike sheep or chickens, often crave human contact and react towards humans in a way similar to dogs. I think most of my readers would have a hard time slaughtering a domestic goat, even if they have pretensions against sentimentality. I've known goat dairy farmers to cry when sending away the male kids who have been born so they can be raised for meat. Although this disconnect and unhappiness among farmers has certainly gotten worse since the USDA mandated all slaughter for sale for non-poultry animals be done in a USDA inspected slaughterhouse that is usually unpleasant and far away from the farm.

I think it's partially a recognition of this inappropriate relationship that humans now have with animals that more and more people are interested in hunting from former vegans to Betty Fussell, an 82-year old NYC food writer who I met at a hunting workshop.