Wow, the things you could find on the palaeo savanna, what?

[oursin]

Article about, essentially, Beyond the Palaeo Diet to the full-on Palaeo lifestyle -

I'm over here, fair lying on the ground and holding my stomach almost retching with laughter at the following:

she used to be the sort of beauty obsessive who would slap on makeup to take out the trash, in part because of her sheepishness over her acne. But when the primal path inspired her to rid her bathroom of any product containing creepy-sounding chemicals, she adopted a zero-tolerance policy to any store-bought beauty product or cleanser — even soap. As she proudly related on her blog, [she], now makes her own beauty products, including a “no-poo” shampoo method (baking soda and apple cider vinegar, with a few drops of jojoba oil for the tips as a leave-in conditioner), body scrub made from olive oil and brown sugar, and toothpaste made with coconut oil and baking soda, with activated charcoal tablets for whitening. Although houseguests are shocked to find not so much as a canister of Ajax in her house — her horrified father-in-law recently raced out to the drugstore to buy toilet cleaner, instead of her white vinegar solution — she feels transformed.

I am all 'is she going foraging in the hedgerows for soda bicarb, that completely not-chemical item?'. Has she gathered and processed the olives and the coconuts herself after gleaning them from the trees?

Brown sugar??!!! (If you're not supposed to eat this because it's Not Palaeo, is it okay to use it for body scrub? enquiring minds...)

Can we calculate the airmiles necessary to live the Palaeo Dream?

Also suspect that living in the Canaries rather than working at Harrods may have something to do with entire feel so much better scenario. (Wot, me, cynical?)

We also wonder whether actual palaeo infants were engaging in 'unstructured play' (Maria Montessori on the primeval savanna?) to expected to make their contributions to hunting and gathering as soon as they could walk?

Comments

[lexin]

I don't suppose she's living in a cave lit by tapers, either.

[davidgillon]

Evil brain insists that should be 'a cave lit by tapirs' ;)

[lexin]

Those poor, poor tapirs. You do know that they urinate backwards?

[davidgillon]

Just so long as they don't put the light out :-)

[wordweaverlynn]

Cows are also retromingent -- a word I don't get to use nearly enough.

[nineveh_uk]

Well that's my new word for the day!

[mme_hardy]

Tapers? We couldn't afford tapers! We had to do with burning tallow in hollow rocks, with wicks made from the hairs of our dead babies.

[lexin]

At least the babies were dead.

[mme_hardy]

We tried it the other way, but the tallow kept slipping off their fontanels.

[oursin]

Surely you go beddybyes when the big light thing in the sky disappears?
Though I vaguely recollect (Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies about people engaged in a serious effort to reconstruct life as an Iron Age settlement, and they found themselves sleeping a lot and doing things very slowly, because, really, not much entertainment going on there. Possibly there were fewer adrenalin-provoking risks than there were back in the Iron Age, too.

[redbird]

If she lives in a house, it's not the full paleolithic lifestyle. I am fairly certain that she owns far more than she can carry from one place to another. The article quotes one of those people as saying our ancestors timed their lives with the sun; I don't think amber goggles for the iPad after 8 p.m. quite count.

"Creepy-sounding chemicals" is almost a giveaway: if it's got a "friendly" name like "vinegar" or "baking soda," it's better than "acetic acid 5% solution in oxidane*" or "powdered sodium bicarbonate." I suppose, as luxury fads for the upper classes, it's relatively harmless: but while vinegar and baking soda are fairly cheap, there's a lot of time going into this.

*That's the other recognized-by-chemists name for H₂O.

[sara]

I read a friend on FB's recipe for "natural paleo custard" last week...it included numerous tropical ingredients and a third of a cup of ground-up Irish moss, of all things. I asked how this was more natural than making custard from the milk of cows that live within ten miles of my house, but never got an answer.

[jesuswasbatman]

I discover on Wikipedia that "activating" charcoal involves temperatures of hundreds of C, which can be lowered a little by using concentrated acids or bases that I doubt paleolithic people could have made.

[tam_nonlinear]

Hey hey hey, they had access to volcanoes. I'm sure there were some enterprising young neolithic types that were experimentally throwing things into volcanoes, fishing them out again, and then eating them. Therefore the answer is clearly that paleo people need to try living closer to volcanoes.

[wordweaverlynn]

Very handy for toasting marshmallows.

[tam_nonlinear]

Only if you made them out of organically sourced humanely grown actual mallow roots. Although the volcanic gases might also benefit as all-natural mood enhancers. With possible side effects of dying. But everything has the side effect, in sufficient quantities. It's an all-natural side effect.

[wordweaverlynn]

Not only is death all-natural, it's organic!

[sara]

I do not want them all over my nice volcanoes, tyvm.

[quillori]

This seems applicable. Also, taking Ms Pedrazzi at her word that her previous beauty routine was obsessive, I don't quite follow how it's a psychological improvement to replace it with obsessively policing the ingredients of every product in her home to remove those with names she finds scary.

[mme_hardy]

This is especially hilarious because brown sugar is manufactured by adding molasses to white refined sugar.

[perennialanna]

Depends on your brown sugar - most recipes here specify light or dark brown soft sugar (which is essentially dyed white sugar, particularly if it comes from Silver Spoon, brand name of British Sugar so it's all from sugar beet not sugar cane. Fine for white sugar, but you don't get brown sugar from sugar beet), I substitute light or dark muscavado sugar, which is less refined.

[mme_hardy]

I should have specified 'American brown sugar'. Most American recipes that specify brown sugar are depending on the extra moisture as well as the different flavor. I like crystallized raw sugar in my tea, for flavor rather than health, but if I substituted it for brown in recipes I'd have to do the same substitutions you do when subbing white sugar for brown here. ("-Substitute white sugar for brown sugar on a 1 to 1 basis, but add 4 tablespoons of molasses per cup, and decrease the total amount of liquid in the recipe by 3 tablespoons.")

[perennialanna]

I may be slightly obsessive about baking sugar - I keep ten different kinds in (caster sugar in golden for flavour and white for snowy meringues, granulated, white and golden icing sugars, demerara sugar, light and dark muscavado, molasses sugar for the Christmas cake and white sugar nibs I bought in Belgium for the tops of fruit cakes).

[mme_hardy]

I envy you the golden icing sugar.

I have (somewhere) the Swedish baking sugar that doesn't melt in the oven, which I suspect is the same as your nibs. Otherwise, a bag of brown sugar, white sugar, white "baker's sugar" (finer), "confectioner's sugar" (much finer, with cornstarch), raw sugar for tea, molasses, dark corn syrup for pecan pie, a can of Lyle's Golden Syrup in case I want to bake anything British. Oh, and a bottle of malt syrup for baking. [gah, cannot post from mail without it adding a signature.]

[perennialanna]

Oh, I didn't count golden syrup and black treacle as sugar. Also honey and maple syrup (really maple syrup, not maple flavoured). I can't get molasses easily though.

Another name for the nibs is pearl sugar (but that can also be just very large crystals, these are a powder slightly finer than caster sugar compressed into little rocks). I've never found them in this country (they're used commercially, and probably are available via the internet now, but the boxes I bought in Belgium pre-babies are still going strong).

[davidgillon]

Canaries and 'pasture raised meat' is going to be a bit problematic. Choice of rabbit, goat (do either count?), or Argentinian beef!

I certainly felt much better down in the Canaries, but suspect that probably had more to do with the temperature and the tapas ;)

[tam_nonlinear]

For a moment, I forgot the discussion was about the physical location of the Canaries and I thought you meant another category of meat, to go along with the pasture raised beef. It seemed impractical, because there can't be much to eat on such a small bird, but no weirder than a few things I've heard from Paleo advocates.

[oursin]

You presumably crunch them whole, as in those parts of Europe where they shoot (?net) and eat songbirds. Mmmmmm, calcium!

[sollers]

I've said it before but I'll say it again: the time when we know that life was best wasn't the Palaeolithic, it was the Mesolithic (sophisticated tools and astonishing woodworking - I suspect that some tools usually considered were chisel-headed arrows actually were chisels). In the right areas you can have actual houses, of a type that continued till historic times.

But vinegar is dead dodgy; first you have to have alcoholic drinks, then you have to let them go off.

Salt is OK, but almost certainly not soda.

Incidentally, re free play, two points: first, my younger daughter would have been a successful gatherer at the age of two and a half; at a pick your own farm she only had to be shown a couple of examples of the ripe fruit or vegetable and she got it right every time. Second, it's quite a recent thing to see play as appropriate only for children - in Breughel's paintings and even 16th/17th century descriptions we get adults playing in a way that we now associate only with children.

I try to follow as Mesolithic a diet as possible given that I'm not legally allowed to go out shooting deer and catching salmon whenever and wherever I want to. But I bear in mind that the main available carbohydrates - bread flour, maize, potatoes - are the result of selective breeding in the Neolithic. And yes, I do eat plants like Good King Henry.

[thistleingrey]

I do wonder why "pal(a)eo" has caught on--cave-dwellers and pulled hair--especially in locales like mine, where Pollan's "what your (great-)grandmother knew as food" index is generally sensible enough. Semi-Mesolithic is how I have ended up eating in order to respect late-onset food allergies and intolerances. I like beans and rice, separately or together; beans at least are meso-.

[mme_hardy]

Pollan's "grandmother" rule drives me insane. My grandmother and grandfather lived in South-West Texas. Am I supposed to eat only the things that grew in South-West Texas before refrigerated shipping? Swell. My best friend's grandmother left Sicily to avoid slow starvation. What's she supposed to eat? What about the people whose grandparents had pellagra, or rickets?

That rule is horrifically class-based. The wealthy and those in bountiful agricultural areas had much more complex diets than the poor and those subsisting in marginal farming lands.

(It also depends on age; my grandparents ate very restricted diets, while my children's grandparents were all gourmands.)

[thistleingrey]

"Class-based" is a bit of a dodge. (My grandmother ate tree bark at times from deprivation and died while my mother was an infant during the short upheaval between two wars, so you needn't tell me.) I think the key to Pollan's thing is "knew as," better phrased as "recognized"; that's distinguishable from the good fortune or bad fortune that individuals have experienced during their lives. And I do think that there are regions where diets are justly restricted by what the environment can bear; it doesn't make sense to me for some regions to support much of a human population.

The wealthy and those in bountiful agricultural areas had much more complex diets than the poor and those subsisting in marginal farming lands.

Depends upon cultural norms and geographical/environmental variation. In some areas, the poor have had much more complex diets because they foraged and the rich didn't.

[mme_hardy]

Yes, but my friend's grandmother got the hell out of Dodge. Why should her granddaughter's food choices be restricted by what was available in a completely different climate? An impoverished subsistence farmer in Sicily in the early 20th century wouldn't have recognized wild asparagus, or catfish, or pawpaws, or any of a number of local foods freely available to her granddaughter.

My grandparents, and my friend's, and it sounds like yours, had a limited diet because they were poor, not because of what they wanted to eat. When they lived in poor communities, in the pre-broadcast-media era, they weren't exposed to many foods that are now commonplace. Why should I avoid soy sauce and tofu and fish sauce and portabello mushrooms?

Depends upon cultural norms and geographical/environmental variation. In some areas, the poor have had much more complex diets because they foraged and the rich didn't.

The cultural norms and environmental variation are the crux of it, for me. Americans are more mobile than many other cultures; many of us live hundreds or indeed thousands of miles from where our grandparents were born. For the middle classes, those most likely to have time for Pollan, many of our grandparents were much poorer than we are. Pellagra and rickets and goiter were very real threats a hundred years ago.

I think there's a big difference between "why are mangoes being flown several thousand miles to you?" and "don't eat locally-grown eggplant because it wasn't eaten in your grandmother's district".

[kindkit]

When they lived in poor communities, in the pre-broadcast-media era, they weren't exposed to many foods that are now commonplace

There's a telling little incident in Willa Cather's novel My Antonia. The narrator's family is given a gift by a Czech immigrant family: a bag of something funny-smelling that looks like pieces of wood. They throw it away. Later, the narrator learns that they were wild mushrooms, gathered in the Czech woods, dried, and carefully carried all the way to America.

[mme_hardy]

By the way, I'm not at all angry at you; I just have Pollan issues and Alice Waters issues, big-time. I have lived in New England, North Carolina, and Indiana, and moved to California. This makes me very, very aware of how much lusher the local diet here is than in most of the places I've lived. It's much easier to say "eat only local" when you have an enormously varied set of local microclimates. In Northern New England? Not so much.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I like apples and potatoes as much as anyone, but c'mon.

[legionseagle]

My mother once deconstructed Margaret Thatcher's claim to have had Spam and lettuce and tomatoes for Christmas dinner. The Spam was basic four yorskshiremen stuff, but the lettuce and tomatoes were either outright lies or proof of epic black-market involvement if not outright Nazi collaboration. Tomatoes - which came from Guernsey even as late as the 60s - in Lincolnshire? In December?

[thistleingrey]

Certainly we agree that "eating locally" need not mean the foods grown in a given locale 100 years ago, or even the foods grown exactly there right now. (Since you mention California: hello, microclimates all up the West Coast.) There are some larger issues, however; changes in access to irrigation or drainage, for example, improve farming in some areas but at a significant cost to other areas.

And it's not class--only more complicated, as our esteemed host might say--insofar as my mother's parents were relatively privileged until wartime. Well enough educated, at least, that her father could work for the city government easily once a government had been reestablished.

Sorry I wasn't clear; I recognize that Pollan's shorthand is too blunt when taken as an absolute rule--yet his exclusion of packaged chips/crisps and tv dinners is well taken, at least, insofar as those were not available ca. 1900 or at any time/place prior and are not an immediate result of, say, home icebox availability. And his shorthand fails culturalist critique: sugary treats like meringue are food to many people of western European descent but not to my grandparents, though one was W Euro, one E Euro (and anything that sugary tastes like poison to me personally). I don't love Pollan's work, either--only somewhat more than you do, I suppose!

[kore]

The Pollan "eat what your grandmothers would!" thing cracks me up because they both cooked with HUGE amounts of fat -- one was Southern/Midwestern and everything was drenched in lard, butter or Crisco, and the other was Hungarian and saved bacon drippings and everything was also drenched in butter, and all vegetables were boiled or fried or canned or jarred within an inch of their lives.

[fallingtowers]

Yeah, my grandmother was a big adherent of traditional Bavarian cuisine - which involves lots and lots of meat, though my grandparents might not have been able to afford to eat a roast pork every day. But they sure knew what to do with offal and animal-based left-overs!

And apparently my great-grandmother's favourite treat was to eat the fatty crust off said roast pork. But I guess they ate lots of cabbages, beets, and turnips, too, so that might be okay with Pollan...

[sollers]

I'll bow out of this personally because my grandmother was born in 1877 and the late 19th century was notorious for the adulteration of foodstuffs.

So I'll look at my adult daughters' grandmothers instead. Their food choices weren't affected by class at all at the key point in their lives: what they got was what their rations allowed, and what was available. An upper middle class lawyer living in London would have less access to fresh vegetables than an agricultural labourer as he might not even have a garden in which to "dig for victory". My mother-in-law's father had apple trees, and had to hand over nearly all the crop to the Ministry of Food.

[kathmandu]

"My grandmother and grandfather lived in South-West Texas. Am I supposed to eat only the things that grew in South-West Texas before refrigerated shipping?"

No, because if you actually read his work, it's very clear he doesn't mean 'only the specific foods your individual grandmother ate'. It's quite clear he means 'eat only what your grandmother would have recognized as [a product of nature, possibly edible after correct processing].' As distinct from lab-synthesized chemicals added to boxed food.

Myself, I'm tired of people reading fourth-hand reports and repeating that misreading.

[mme_hardy]

I have read his work, and although I incorrectly remembered his intended connotation of the "grandmother would have eaten", his work is full of unexamined classist and sexist issues -- his long essay in the Times magazine was full of women-blaming on the decline of the American diet. I have also seen him quoted as telling people in the Atlantic North-East that yes, they should stick to what's locally available in the winter.

[firecat]

Plus she's probably adding dihydrogen monoxide to that body scrub.

I wonder what Pollan would have thought about the maraschino cherries in my grandmother's fridge.

[parlstickare]

I wonder what she would make of the dhmo.org website?

[parthenia]

I am enjoying the concept of the Paleo glossy magazine. Not to mention being a professional paleo lifestyle blogger.

I wonder if we will end up devising a vintage version of the internet, made with organic electrons.