One topic that quite fascinates me is the question of what food we should eat, and in what combinations and proportions. The idea is that the human body will thrive best when it is fed with the diet that it evolved to eat. A person will feel healthy, energetic, and be free of many diseases caused by poor diet and improper nutrition.
Most animals have diets that are optimal for their species, although humans, as omnivores, have a relatively wide range of foods that they can eat. Lions obviously don’t eat loads of bananas and elephants don’t hunt and eat antelope. But even carnivorous lions will mostly eat large herbivores and are unlikely to thrive on a diet of mice and rabbits, though they can eat them.
Paleolithic Eating
The rationale behind this way of thinking leads some to the idea of the Paleolithic diet, named after the Paleolithic Era (“old stone age”) that lasted up to around 10,000 years ago. The Paleolithic diet is a fad based on the faulty premises that our ancestors ate a lot of meat and few carbohydrates. In reality, prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate a variety of plants and animals, in a roughly equal proportion. Many of these animals were small game, while many of these vegetables included starchy roots, so the idea that humans should be eating red meat and raw vegetables is pretty wrong, although some societies in extreme ecological niches, like the Inuit and Mongols, did eat substantially more red meat than most other cultures.
One of the best approximations of the “natural” human diet is the Hadza diet. The Hadza are an extant hunter-gatherer group that live in northern Tanzania. Much of daily their diet consists of fruits, including berries, and tubers, which provide nutrients, vitamins, fiber, fats, and carbs. The “chalky bits” of a baobab fruit can be mixed with water to make a porridge. Honey is also a bit part of the Hadza diet. The sense is that there is a constant stream of plant-matter being consumed, on top of which the hunted meat of whatever animals are around are added. Most of these animals are birds, or small mammals, with the occasional consumption of a bigger mammal. The Hadza eat hundreds of distinct animals and plants, something which, of course, is impossible for modern people to do. However, for all that was lost when people turned to agriculture, some things were gained: new crops and new cooking techniques.
Neolithic Eating
Instead of a Paleo diet, I advocate Neolithic eating. This is more practical because every element of a Neolithic diet can be sourced in almost every community around the world, whether a supermarket in the United States or a street bazaar in India. Almost all humans today live in societies where food is sourced by agriculture, which began during when the Paleolithic transitioned to the Neolithic era.
Around 10,000 years ago, something called the Neolithic (“new stone”) Revolution began, and humanity began to transform from hunting and gathering to farming. Agriculture introduced a whole new type of diet for those that took it up, and while the range of food sources drastically declined, it is still quite possible to consume a healthy diet as a member of an agricultural society. This way of eating I call the Neolithic diet: it is not a term that I invented, and I’ve seen it used other places, although it is less clearly defined than the Paleo diet. Variations of the Neolithic diet include many well-regarded idealized versions of traditional ways of eating, including the Mediterranean diet and the Japanese diet (these both seem to share a love for fish), among others. But behind these diets are a set of universal Neolithic principles.
The underlying principle behind the Neolithic diet is taking many of the practices of the pre-farming human experience and applying it to an agrarian society. Seen this way, the Neolithic Revolution was not a radical break with the past. Hunter-gatherers ground up roots and wild grasses, mixed them with water, created pastes. They ate porridge and bread, which predate agriculture. Early farmers domesticated some grasses like wheat, rice, and maize, as well as some roots such as parsnips, potatoes, and turnips, and continued to eat starches and tubers. A select number of herbs and vegetables were domesticated; animals were also added. Hunter-gatherers would hunt small mammals, lizards, and birds more often relative to larger creatures. In an agrarian society, smaller, more scavenger-like animals, like goats, pigs and poultry, were eaten more often than the more economically important cattle, sheep, and camels. Bigger animals were saved for feasts, guests, and sacrifices. So, there is something to the idea that we moderns should limit how much red meat we eat.
I do think that some elements of animal husbandry were a break between the hunter-gatherer way of life and a new one shared by farmers and herders, and this involved the secondary use of animal products such as dairy and eggs, but this can also be seen as a way to compensate for the loss of multiple sources of protein that prehistoric people would have access to via hunting. The Hadza are said to hunt 600 types of creatures. Modern people eat at most four or five meats on a regular basis.
Farmer diets are knocked as unhealthy by some people today because in their most extreme form—that of a peasant eating only gruel—it is unhealthy and imbalanced. However, even though a farmer diet doesn’t offer the variety of foods that a hunter-gatherer diet would, it can still be balanced when it is based on a few essential crops and supplemented with other vegetables and meats. In ancient Mexico, there were the three sisters—maize, beans, and squash—and in Greece, there was the Mediterranean trio of grapes, olives, and wheat. In India, a meal of rice and dal (lentils) is a complete protein and if you add a common leafy vegetable, such as spinach, you have a baseline nutritious meal that can then be supplemented with other foods. A favorite dish of mine, Japanese kare raisu (curry rice) is optimal as a full meal: there’s rice, and there’s a curry with carrots, chicken, potatoes, scallions, onions, and daikon radishes.
In fact, there is something to be said about the idea of having a basic, daily staple—like the Hadza have berries, honey, and baobab porridge, upon which all meals are built. In the world built by agriculture, this would include (whole) grains, tubers, legumes, and greens: pick two or three that suit you. Growing up, at home, and at the homes of family friends, almost every meal would have a dal (lentil) and a grain (rice or roti), no matter whatever else was served. Most people from an Asian background eat rice every day, often in multiple ways and forms. It was common in my household growing up to eat rice cakes, idlis for breakfast. When I lived in Shanghai for a summer, breakfast was either rice noodle soup or congee (rice porridge). As for dal, growing up, there would not only be a main lentil dish, called pappu in Telugu, the language of my parents, there would also be a lentil soup (rasam or chaaru), often garnished with vegetables, to wash down the meal afterward. Therefore, a basic set of crops—such as rice and lentils or maize and beans—can form the foundation for a complete and healthy set of foods and nutrients, thought obviously, these should be supplemented with other items.
Finally, in regard to processed foods: a meal should be created from plant and animal matter that could have been processed by a family or village 10,000 years ago. The grinding of a cereal into a flour was something that even hunter-gatherers did. Sausage-making is a traditional practice in villages around the world and does not involve mechanization.
But if a factory is needed to create that food, it should probably be eaten only sparingly, even if it is marketed as healthy or ethical; take for example, Beyond Meat patties. Instead, one can mash chickpeas and make a falafel or grate potatoes and make a latke. Unfortunately, even something as simple as an organic salad dressing make from things such as olive oil and balsamic vinegar usually contains extra additives like xanthan gum (most people have no idea what this even is).
Pottery & Stew
I am ending this post with a separate section on the impact of pottery (and metal, later on) on human cooking, because this one invention truly did change and revolutionize humanity’s relationship with food. Presumably, roasting was the primary method of food preparation for hunter-gatherers, who did not eat many stews, although there is some research to contradict that view. The research suggests that some Paleolithic people boiled water in vessels made of animal skins or tree bark suspended over a fire. However, other groups, such as hunter-gatherers who live in the Kalahari Desert, did not boil water until the arrival of Europeans.
Regardless, it does seem as though boiling took off after the invention of earthenware during the late Paleolithic (so pottery predates agriculture it seems). And once invented, cooking food in a pot seems to have become the default for most people, possibly because it is easy to passively allow the dish to cook for several hours without tending to it all the time; one can also stretch fuel to create a low flame that is more ideal to slow cooking in a pot than for stir-frying or roasting. Multi-ingredient dishes aside, cooking even a simple staple like rice is contingent on a culture where boiling water and earthenware vessels are the norm.
Pottery and metal pots thus led to the creation of multiple stew-like and curry-like dishes (food prepared in a sauce or liquid) that now form the basis of many, if not most, of the basic foundational dishes mentioned above. This is not to suggest that a stew is healthier per se than the same meats and vegetables roasted and served together, but stewing does make it easier to combine and meld different ingredients and flavors. In other words, sauces and curries tend to be more flavorful than grilled items.
Earthenware combined with people staying in one place also helped in the development of foods that take a while to prepare because they need to be boiled—like soups, casseroles, and stews—fermented, and stored, among other things. Yogurt, cheese, beer, pickles: these are all a function of pottery and sedentarism. Storing grains in large quantities are also a function of pottery, and as the storage of grain allows for surplus accumulation, leading to population growth and the specialization of labor. Therefore, pottery could be said to be a major milestone in the development of civilization, although at least one book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, is very critical of the role of grain in leading to the creation of coercive states that could measure and tax grain in a way that would be difficult to do for vegetables or tubers (which are hidden in the ground).
We are no longer able to live like hunter-gatherers. Most of us live in societies built off of agriculture. But we can still select and combine the fruits of the earth in ways to optimize our diets.