Angela
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It's actually "With the Grain and Against the new Paleo-Politics" by Rachel Laudan.
I completely agree with it, for the little that's worth.
See:
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/no.-9-summer-2018/with-the-grain
"The anti-grain consensus, ostensibly focused on the improvement of diet, equality, and environment, rejects in theory if not in practice the very notions of progress and civilization. That the turn to grain-based agriculture transformed the healthful, leisured, and carefree life enjoyed by hunter-gatherers into the dull drudgery of peasant society is a theme promulgated by prominent scholars, notably the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who termed hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society,” and the biologist Jared Diamond, who declared agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”5 The historian Yuval Noah Harari takes a similar tack in his bestselling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015). Underlying each of these criticisms is a rejection of the old idea, implicit in the foundational myths of the first civilizations and explicit in Enlightenment conjectural histories, that the postulated passage through the stages of hunting and gathering, herding, and farming constituted progress: an improvement in the quality of human life."
"Hungry humans thought that cereal grains made great food long before they began farming them. In today’s terms, cereals have a high calorie per area yield — in the case of corn, as much as 15 million calories an acre, or enough to sustain 15 people for a year. This yield has been rivaled in the past four hundred years only by potatoes, sugar cane, and rice.10 Even the wild ancestors of cereals were productive, as the American botanist Jack Harlan demonstrated in the 1960s when he ventured into a stand of wild einkorn wheat in Turkey and harvested four pounds in one hour, enough to feed two people for a day. Unlike sugar cane stalks, grains contain a wide range of nutrients, including carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and certain minerals and vitamins. Unlike potatoes, they have a high nutrient-to-weight value. As a rule of thumb, two pounds of grain a day sustain an adult, compared to ten or more pounds of wet, heavy roots, making grain a much better candidate to provision cities. In addition, unlike many roots that contain protective toxins, grains are generally safe to eat. They are also easy to store because they are hard and dry, and, being annuals, can be quickly improved through breeding, planted in response to changing demands, and established in new places. Thus, the contrast between grains as food and grains as commodities is ill-drawn. One reason why grains were good food was precisely that they could be commoditized."
"Plants and carcasses could be turned into food, then, but it took so much effort that the results had to be worthwhile. Leaves, shoots (vegetables), tough stems, and bitter fruits rarely passed that test. Nuts, roots, and flesh were more promising if they could be cracked, detoxified and softened, and tenderized, respectively.12 By the late Paleolithic, humans had learned to prepare meat and roots in earth ovens and to grate and soak roots to extract the starch.13The Paleolithic diet, in short, was constantly evolving and at no point more “natural” than at any other. Nor did some primitive egalitarianism reign. Processing, which required as much or more energy than gathering (and, later, farming), built inequality into the human food system long before grains entered the diet. Those who collected the wood, dug the pits, and cracked the nuts lost. The group as a whole benefitted, the way now being open to more-complex societies and economies:
She doesn't mention it, but the so-called Paleo diet was only the diet of the "Paleo" people of northern Eurasia. Paleo hunter-gatherers who had access to a lot of wild grain ate it, i.e. Natufians.
"Grain foods offered a variety of delicious tastes and textures for different purposes. They made shelf-stable provision for travelers, portable food for field and construction workers, stretchable porridges and pottages for hungry families, beer for energy and cheer, pap for babies and grandmothers, white breads and rice for rulers, and brown for their subjects. Add a few legumes, oil from oil seeds, and foraged greens, and diets were complete, varied, and satisfying. Hence, wherever cereal grains could be gathered from the wild, people added them to their diet: in the Yellow River and Yangtze valleys, the Fertile Crescent, the Sahel, and Mexico. Many remain valuable — particularly wheat, rice, and maize, and to a lesser extent barley, oats, millets, and sorghum — while others, such as Job’s tears and hemp, are no longer on the table.15
This is the stuff I hate about people writing from an agenda. They just leave out the facts which don't fit their narrative.
"Absent their benefits, humans would never have persisted with grains, given their appalling costs. The energy required for their processing came not from fire but from human effort. Twenty repetitive steps of threshing, winnowing, and cleaning were required just to rid barley and wheat of their husks.16 Most cereals had to be ground because whole grains remained chewy even when boiled. Grinding enough with a saddle stone to provide one adult with bread for one day took an hour, so where bread was the staple, one out of five adults spent their lives grinding for themselves and others. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said the Old Testament, and sweat it was, a job forced on women and slaves, the lowliest in society. The social differences already inherent to eating processed plants and animals were only amplified by the shift to grains. Archaeologists have found that among modern women, only elite competition rowers who train 21 hours a week rival the upper body strength of prehistoric Central European women. "
However,
"Over the centuries, though, human drudgery was reduced by innovations in processing and farming even as the variety of foods made from grains continued to grow. To attempt to give a sense of the scale of the change, the proportion of the population required to grind the harder grains such as wheat, barley, or maize fell from around 1 in 5 with the saddle stone to between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 with the rotary quern, and then again to between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000 with water mills. After 1900, with the adoption of fossil fuel–powered roller mills, the proportion grinding wheat was too small to be recorded. Fossil fuel–powered rice mills quickly followed, transforming the lives of millions of women. In the mid-20th century, mills for wet-grinding maize freed Mexican women from toil (and made it possible to extract oil from corn). Only in the poorest parts of the world did women still pound and grind."
I'm also rather amused sometimes that people seem to think that a man can't be muscular unless he consumes tons of red meat and dairy. Henry Cavill is the walking, talking refutation of that. He completely eschews red meat. When he's not training he won't eat dairy either.
I completely agree with it, for the little that's worth.
See:
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/no.-9-summer-2018/with-the-grain
"The anti-grain consensus, ostensibly focused on the improvement of diet, equality, and environment, rejects in theory if not in practice the very notions of progress and civilization. That the turn to grain-based agriculture transformed the healthful, leisured, and carefree life enjoyed by hunter-gatherers into the dull drudgery of peasant society is a theme promulgated by prominent scholars, notably the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who termed hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society,” and the biologist Jared Diamond, who declared agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”5 The historian Yuval Noah Harari takes a similar tack in his bestselling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015). Underlying each of these criticisms is a rejection of the old idea, implicit in the foundational myths of the first civilizations and explicit in Enlightenment conjectural histories, that the postulated passage through the stages of hunting and gathering, herding, and farming constituted progress: an improvement in the quality of human life."
"Hungry humans thought that cereal grains made great food long before they began farming them. In today’s terms, cereals have a high calorie per area yield — in the case of corn, as much as 15 million calories an acre, or enough to sustain 15 people for a year. This yield has been rivaled in the past four hundred years only by potatoes, sugar cane, and rice.10 Even the wild ancestors of cereals were productive, as the American botanist Jack Harlan demonstrated in the 1960s when he ventured into a stand of wild einkorn wheat in Turkey and harvested four pounds in one hour, enough to feed two people for a day. Unlike sugar cane stalks, grains contain a wide range of nutrients, including carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and certain minerals and vitamins. Unlike potatoes, they have a high nutrient-to-weight value. As a rule of thumb, two pounds of grain a day sustain an adult, compared to ten or more pounds of wet, heavy roots, making grain a much better candidate to provision cities. In addition, unlike many roots that contain protective toxins, grains are generally safe to eat. They are also easy to store because they are hard and dry, and, being annuals, can be quickly improved through breeding, planted in response to changing demands, and established in new places. Thus, the contrast between grains as food and grains as commodities is ill-drawn. One reason why grains were good food was precisely that they could be commoditized."
"Plants and carcasses could be turned into food, then, but it took so much effort that the results had to be worthwhile. Leaves, shoots (vegetables), tough stems, and bitter fruits rarely passed that test. Nuts, roots, and flesh were more promising if they could be cracked, detoxified and softened, and tenderized, respectively.12 By the late Paleolithic, humans had learned to prepare meat and roots in earth ovens and to grate and soak roots to extract the starch.13The Paleolithic diet, in short, was constantly evolving and at no point more “natural” than at any other. Nor did some primitive egalitarianism reign. Processing, which required as much or more energy than gathering (and, later, farming), built inequality into the human food system long before grains entered the diet. Those who collected the wood, dug the pits, and cracked the nuts lost. The group as a whole benefitted, the way now being open to more-complex societies and economies:
She doesn't mention it, but the so-called Paleo diet was only the diet of the "Paleo" people of northern Eurasia. Paleo hunter-gatherers who had access to a lot of wild grain ate it, i.e. Natufians.
"Grain foods offered a variety of delicious tastes and textures for different purposes. They made shelf-stable provision for travelers, portable food for field and construction workers, stretchable porridges and pottages for hungry families, beer for energy and cheer, pap for babies and grandmothers, white breads and rice for rulers, and brown for their subjects. Add a few legumes, oil from oil seeds, and foraged greens, and diets were complete, varied, and satisfying. Hence, wherever cereal grains could be gathered from the wild, people added them to their diet: in the Yellow River and Yangtze valleys, the Fertile Crescent, the Sahel, and Mexico. Many remain valuable — particularly wheat, rice, and maize, and to a lesser extent barley, oats, millets, and sorghum — while others, such as Job’s tears and hemp, are no longer on the table.15
This is the stuff I hate about people writing from an agenda. They just leave out the facts which don't fit their narrative.
"Absent their benefits, humans would never have persisted with grains, given their appalling costs. The energy required for their processing came not from fire but from human effort. Twenty repetitive steps of threshing, winnowing, and cleaning were required just to rid barley and wheat of their husks.16 Most cereals had to be ground because whole grains remained chewy even when boiled. Grinding enough with a saddle stone to provide one adult with bread for one day took an hour, so where bread was the staple, one out of five adults spent their lives grinding for themselves and others. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said the Old Testament, and sweat it was, a job forced on women and slaves, the lowliest in society. The social differences already inherent to eating processed plants and animals were only amplified by the shift to grains. Archaeologists have found that among modern women, only elite competition rowers who train 21 hours a week rival the upper body strength of prehistoric Central European women. "
However,
"Over the centuries, though, human drudgery was reduced by innovations in processing and farming even as the variety of foods made from grains continued to grow. To attempt to give a sense of the scale of the change, the proportion of the population required to grind the harder grains such as wheat, barley, or maize fell from around 1 in 5 with the saddle stone to between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 with the rotary quern, and then again to between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000 with water mills. After 1900, with the adoption of fossil fuel–powered roller mills, the proportion grinding wheat was too small to be recorded. Fossil fuel–powered rice mills quickly followed, transforming the lives of millions of women. In the mid-20th century, mills for wet-grinding maize freed Mexican women from toil (and made it possible to extract oil from corn). Only in the poorest parts of the world did women still pound and grind."
I'm also rather amused sometimes that people seem to think that a man can't be muscular unless he consumes tons of red meat and dairy. Henry Cavill is the walking, talking refutation of that. He completely eschews red meat. When he's not training he won't eat dairy either.