Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (14 page)

The fish and shellfish consumed in our ancestral diet were entirely of freshwater varieties. On the other hand, modern fish farming is concentrated mostly on seafood. It appears that this is not an important distinction—if there is a problem with aquaculture, it is with the way the creatures are often fed and the pollutants that get into their bodies.

Wild—
Up until the 1970s, virtually the only fish on our plates were ones caught in the wild. Now, we have seen the huge volume of fish, notably salmon and trout, that are produced by fish farms. Even so, most other species that we find in our supermarkets (fresh, frozen, or canned) are still wild. Cod, halibut, tuna, sardine, plaice, mackerel, pollock, herring, and many others, for the time being at least, are all caught in the wild. We can say that many of them conform to the Savanna Model while the others, if not conforming, are certainly not harmful.

Exotic Animal Foods

Reptile foods, including crocodile, alligator, and turtle, although uncommon in the Western diet, are still readily available to the enthusiast. In addition, many societies make use of snakes, such as python and boa constrictor, and the French have made a delicacy of frog’s legs. All of these foods, as they are currently available, readily fit the Savanna Model.

There are many gatherer societies around the world, such as the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon and the Cahuilla Indians of California, that eat (or used to eat) worms of all kinds. Curiously, there is little evidence that the San ate worms and we can only surmise if they were a common component of the Pleistocene diet. It is likely that they were—worms are easy to unearth at certain times of the year by wetting the ground and drumming to bring them to the surface. Italian biologist Dr. Maurizio Paoletti, from Padua University, has made a study of “mini-livestock” eaten by forager tribes today and finds that earthworms are an excellent food source,
⁶³
which we authenticate as conforming to the Savanna Model.

Hunter-gatherers around the world still eat insects of all kinds and anything is fair game. They collect the immature and adult forms of grasshoppers and crickets; the caterpillars of silk moths; and the larvae and pupae of beetles, bees, ants, flies and hornets. Dr. Paoletti has found that the larvae of palm weevils, as raised by certain Amazonian tribes, have an excellent nutritional profile and no drawbacks.
⁶⁴
The Australian Aborigines prize the witchety grub, a kind of large caterpillar up to 3” long and 1/2” in diameter. It is relatively fatty (19%) and, when toasted in the embers of a fire, tastes a bit like roasted sweet-corn.

Many primitive societies eat snails and their shell-less cousins, the slug. The idea to some minds seems grotesque, yet they are a valuable, easily collected source of food. In fact snails have been commonly raised and eaten in the Middle East and Europe for thousands of years. The French, of course, have made a national dish out of snails: “escargots” cooked in garlic and butter are even considered a delicacy. Snail and slug flesh conforms to the Savanna Model, although the French recipe is not ideal nutritionally.

The Consequences of Eating Animal Foods

We have seen how the New Stone Age farmers “improved” the breed of the pig, cow, and sheep. Quite inadvertently, these improvements changed the nutritional qualities. The flesh became much fatter, increasing from just 4% fat to 25% fat. Also, the type of fat changed from certain kinds of polyunsaturated fat to various types of saturated fat. We now associate the consumption of beef, pork, and lamb with cancers, heart disease, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular diseases. In the next chapter we will examine this link. The goat, which has remained popular with many simpler farming cultures, has not been subjected to the same processes of intensive breeding and has largely escaped this unhealthy transformation. Its meat is low in fat (just 2%), half of which is harmless monounsaturated fat. Most meats of wild origin have a similar fatty acid composition, in conformity with the Savanna Model.

Similarly, wildfowl and wild fish are just fine. Poultry, particularly chicken and turkey, tend to be fattier and contain more of the unhealthy fats. The breast (white meat) of the bird is the best, when it has the skin and fat removed, and free-range chickens tend to be leaner and healthier. Duck and goose are also fatty birds, but their fats are semi-liquid at room temperature, indicating a low saturated fat content. Eggs have more “good” fats if they come from chickens who have ranged freely and eaten a diet natural to their species. Fish have more “good” oils if they are wild or have at least been fed correctly on the fish farms.

PROTEIN-RICH FOODS OF PLANT ORIGIN

Protein-rich plant foods fall into two broad classes, nuts and legumes. Their protein content is comparable to that of lean beef steak—20% to 25% and sometimes more. In contrast, an egg is only around 13% protein. Nuts are often called “tree-nuts” to distinguish them from the peanut, which grows underground and is a legume.

Nuts

In Chapter 1, we saw how the mongongo nut was a great standby for the San. There were many other nuts too, including those of the baobab tree, the ochna, and the soapberry tree. However, the nuts that we know today have come from all over the world. Almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and chestnuts are all native to the Fertile Crescent and were domesticated early during the farming revolution. The Brazil nut and the cashew nut are native to South America, the pecan to North America, and the macadamia to Queensland in Australia, and all of these nuts have become familiar to us in the West. They are often processed in various ways, notably by roasting and salting, which improves shelf life and taste, but it is not a nutritional improvement.

The Coconut

The coconut is native to Malaya, but the first European to see one was the Venetian adventurer, Marco Polo, in his travels to China in the 13th century. Conventionally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture classifies the coconut as a tree-nut. However the nutritional profile of coconut meat is nothing like other nuts: its predominant constituent is in fact water, around 45%; the rest is oil (35%) and a high percentage of dietary fiber (9%). There is some sugar (5%) and very little protein (3%). The oil content is the determining nutritional characteristic of coconut meat and for this reason we group coconuts with fats and oils (see below).

Legumes

We saw too that the San consumed foods called “beans,” notably the tsin bean. These are podded seeds that belong to the pea family, similar to the legumes. However, the class of legumes known as “dry beans” first entered the food supply of humans only 11,000 years ago with the Farming Revolution. Lentils and chickpeas are indigenous to the Kurdistan area and their cultivation spread rapidly to other civilizations in Egypt, India, and China. Those peoples then developed local varieties—for example, the soybean in China, the fava (or broad) bean in Egypt, and mung bean in India. Across the Pacific, the new civilizations in Central and South America were developing the native kidney bean, pinto bean, haricot bean, and lima bean. These beans, together with the fava bean and mung bean, all come from the genus (a grouping of species)
Phaseolus
and form the class of legumes that we think of as “beans.” Unlike the case with grains, consumers in the developed world have not taken up the use of beans (
Phaseolus
) with enthusiasm: in the U.S., consumption is around 7 pounds per person annually; in Europe, it is 5 pounds annually. We will see that this is not a bad thing.

Soy comes from a different genus of legumes called
Glycine
. Even though soy originated in China, consumption there was minimal. According to K. C. Chang, editor of
Food in Chinese Culture
, the total soy protein intake in 1930s China was no more than 5 grams per person weekly. In Japan, consumption has increased slowly since those days, but even now soy protein intake is still only a modest 8 grams per day, according to Chisato Nagata, a researcher at Gifu University School of Medicine, in Japan.
⁶⁵
In America, soy was unknown until about 80 years ago, when it was introduced to feed cows. Then, in a promotional campaign reminiscent of Kellogg’s breakfast cereal marketing wonder (see Chapter 2), just since 1970 Americans have been taught to eat soy. Consumption has been doubling every 12 years. The publicity touted soy as a meat substitute with supposed health benefits and vegetarians and vegans have enthusiastically adopted soy in all its forms—tofu, soy burgers, soy yogurt, soy milk, soy cheeses, and so on. Their consumption can reach a massive 70 grams per person daily. Even the average consumer is unwittingly consuming soy as soy flour is added to all kinds of processed foods.

When we buy a pack of dried beans or lentils, the label warns that the contents must be thoroughly boiled. This tells us that, in their raw natural state, legumes are poisonous. Our savanna ancestors could not even boil water, let alone cook legumes, so humans never developed resistance to the poisons in them. However, even after boiling, legumes still contain harmful substances, slow-acting poisons that disrupt the harmonious working of the body. According to their variety, beans and lentils can provoke immune depression, malignant tumors, red blood cell disruption, pancreatic problems, intestinal disease, and allergies. Soy contains at least 15 allergens, of which three are considered “major” by researcher Hideaki Tsuji of Okayama Prefectoral University, in Japan.
⁶⁶
Soy is also strongly linked to cancers,
⁶⁷
senile dementia,
⁶⁸
thyroid disorders,
⁶⁹
pancreatic problems,
⁷⁰
and disrupted hormone function.

MILK GROUP

The San tribe hunter would track an antelope for several days to get close enough to shoot it with poisonous arrows. We can be certain that neither the San, nor our Pleistocene ancestors, ever got close enough to a mother antelope to suckle its teats. Such a feat only became possible after the farming revolution with the domestication of farm animals. Even so, not many societies made much use of this unusual idea.

It took the special circumstances encountered by the nomads of the Russian Steppes to change that. They were early Europeans who lived in the treeless plains of what is now the eastern Ukraine. By 4000 b.c., these people had learned to keep herds of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. However, under the sparse conditions of the steppe, a migratory way of life became necessary. The animals consumed the grass faster than it could grow, so the herders had to keep their animals moving in search of new pastures and, as a consequence, abandon planting. This was the first time that human beings learned to live largely from their animals. In practice, this meant consuming the only renewable resource: milk, cheese, and other dairy products. To do that, they had to tame mother animals that had just given birth to a calf to allow milking by human hand. By about 2000 b.c., the herders had mastered their techniques and, constantly in search of new pastures, these nomads infiltrated much of northwest Europe, carrying the practice of dairy farming with them.

In this way, Slavs, Germans, Scandinavians, and Anglo-Saxons became dairy farmers too, focusing on the cow. Some parts of southern Europe adopted, in a minor way, sheep’s milk and goat’s milk. Roquefort cheese is made from sheep’s milk in Toulouse, France, and the Greeks use goat’s milk to make feta cheese. To the east, the Mongols took up the practice of dairying with the yak (a kind of massive ox).

Other nomadic tribes stumbled upon the use of milk too. About the time the Ukrainians were carrying dairy farming to Europe (4,000 years ago), another herder, Abraham, was setting out from present-day Iraq for his “land of milk and honey” in Palestine. However, neither the Israelites nor for that matter the Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans made an industry out of dairying.

Just 500 years ago, Mongol invaders (the descendants of Genghis Khan) brought dairying to the fringes of their empire in northern India and Persia. A little later, the English, Germans, and Scandinavians brought dairy farming to North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Nevertheless, it comes as a surprise to us in the West to discover that, as dairy consumers, we are in a small minority. A large majority of the world’s population (some 5 billion out of 6 billion people) had no idea about dairy until the last 50 years. These non-milk drinkers lived in vast swathes of territory, from Africa to southern India, from China to Japan, and from Latin America to Polynesia. The regular consumption of dairy foods, even today, only applies to a minority of people on the planet—those mostly living in the industrialized West.