Gatherers

I was reading yet another article discussing the benefits of a high protein, low carbohydrate diet today, and once again the comment was made that we need to eat "the way we evolved to eat" - that being the famous Hunter-Gatherer diet.

I don't know what these people are actually thinking when they make this comment, but my guess is they aren't thinking through what is involved in a Hunter-Gatherer diet. For some unfathomable reason, they seem to think that a Hunter-Gatherer diet is high in meat and low in fruit, which makes no sense at all.

In an H-G society you have two primary ways of procuring food. One involves high adrenaline, high risk, high energy activities in which one is just as likely to be killed by a boar as one is to successfully kill a boar and bring it back to the "tribe" (which, according to some theorists, is a group of about 50 or so people for a nomadic tribe, about 150 people for a more stationary settlement).

The other involves seemingly safe, boring and repetitive tasks that require patience, concentration, a good eye for detail, decent levels of dexterity and the ability to remember that Rita said her cousin Sam ate those red berries last spring and they made him really sick.

One involves going for an adventure and hopefully bringing back something you've managed to kill. The other involves going for a walk and finding whatever happens to be lying around.

Now, think for a moment about three things: a) the kinds of people who are likely to engage in each method, b) the likely success rate of each method when it comes to actually supplying food, c) the kind of food most likely to be procured over all.

Would you eat the meat whenever you could get it? Of course! But say a hunting party successfully returns with a couple of deer (or goannas). How wonderful! How exciting! How manly! How the heck are you going to feed 50 or so people with two deer?

And, you know, the hunting party most probably consists of growing teenage boys and the kinds of men who can only bring themselves to provide food if it involves some kind of danger (in this day and age, they'd be the men who only cook if it involves a barbecue). I've just described people who like to eat meat. They've just been running around all day trying to kill things and have worked up an appetite (and earned it - you just ask them and they'll tell you)...

So, really, the majority of the meat brought home by the Hunters is probably going to go towards feeding the Hunters. What little is left for the rest of the community isn't going to be the major source of anything in their diet - not even protein.

What is going to be the major part of their diet? Things the Gatherers found when they went out gathering, that's what.

Obviously fruit, vegetables and fungi are going to be high on that list, but you'll also get sources of protein like snails, slugs, frogs, sundry other creepy-crawlies and the "fruits of the sea" if they have a watercourse to access (muscles, oysters, shellfish).

I would also expect the Gatherers would be the ones trapping small critters like rabbits - and possibly even fishing, although I wouldn't at all be surprised if the H-G societies that lived near fish would actually split off into three groups, Hunters, Gatherers and Fishers.

So, really, if we went for a Hunter-Gatherer diet, we'd split into two groups. One group would be eating lots of meat and feeling very proud about hardly ever eating vegetable matter. The rest of us would be eating a lot of nuts, berries, fruit and mushrooms, a fair amount of other vegetables and a lot more snails than we realise. Occasionally, we'd augment that with a bit of casserole, using up the meat that the first group generously left for us after they had eaten all of the good bits (because they earned it - you just ask them and they'll tell you).

Now, you can tell the proponents of these high-protein diets are thinking of the diet of a typical Hunter when they talk about H-G diets. Something that would probably be entirely appropriate if we lived the lifestyle of a typical Hunter. So let's do that.

Let's all go out and spend all day chasing after our food and carrying it back to our homes using our own arms and legs. Then we can happily eat the kind of diet that goes with that activity.

You know what, though? I've never heard anyone say that Hunters enjoyed long life spans...