Eat Like a Human - Review - Part 2

Are Neolithic products like grains, legumes and dairy really bad for us?

This is the second part of my review of Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health. Read Part 1.

If there's one thing that defines current popular diet fads it's that bread is the devil. Paleo, gluten-free, ketogenic—the one thing they all agree on is their wholesale rejection of one of the foundational foods of modern civilization: cereal grains, especially wheat.

People tend to focus on the Paleo diet's rejection of grains to the exclusion of everything else about it, but this prohibition was based on a couple things: 1.) The notion that cereal grains are the fundamental dividing line between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods (or between civilized and uncivilized peoples); and 2.) The idea that hunter-gatherers didn't consume cereal grains as part of their diet.

Of course, neither of those things turned out to be true. Foragers eat whatever is available in their environment; foraging is a spectrum, not a binary; foragers routinely ate wild grains in many parts of the world; and the Neolithic Revolution was not a clear dividing line between eras, nor was it a revolution (which is a theme of The Dawn of Everything that we'll explore another time).

This has led to a series of "debunkings" of the Paleo diet where evidence of Paleolithic cereal consumption is put forward as definitive proof that it's all a load of hooey, as if the originators of the concept were recommending some sort of accurate historical reenactment of diets from 15,000 years ago for contemporary people.

The other major factor was that the dietary advice given by the USDA at the time the earliest Paleo Diet books were being written was that cereal grains were the foundation of a healthy diet, and that fatty foods were to be avoided at all costs, especially animal products. That is, the majority of our diet should consist of "healthy whole grains" if we wanted to ward off epidemic diseases like heart disease and hypertension.

The problem, of course, was that this advice did not comport with the ancestral diets consumed by most hunter-gatherers around the world—hunter-gatherers who were also free from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other maladies of civilization. But unfortunately the obsession with bread—and the ensuing debates about it—overshadowed all the other aspects of the Paleo diet, which simply argues that people should eat foods closest to our ancestral diets (as diverse as those diets might have been) which are available to us.

With that in mind, Schindler's basic observation becomes even more relevant: humans aren't designed to eat practically any of the foods we eat, and that includes cereal grains. But just like other foods we've looked at so far, it's not the what, but the how.

Grains and Corn

In contrast to the many of the diet recommendations these days, Schindler doesn't strike grains entirely off the menu. Rather, as with other food groups, he looks for ways to make the nutrition in these foods maximally bioavailable to us and reduce the potential toxic effects of them.

Cereal grains are fundamentally seeds—seeds of grasses, usually annual grasses. Annual plants only live for a single growing season so they invest their energy in the creation of new seeds to scatter to regions that have been disturbed in some way—such as by fire or flooding—rather than mature ecosystems which have undergone the process of ecological succession where perennials predominate. Because annuals invest so much energy in seed production, they produce a lot of them. That's why they're so prolific as a food resource, as people in many parts of the world discovered.

Many of the common foods we eat are actually seeds. That includes not only cereal grains, but also legumes like beans, lentils, chickpeas and peanuts, as well as tree nuts like walnuts, cashews, pistachios, almonds, pecans, et cetera.

A seed has one overriding goal: to find it's way into fertile soil and germinate. To that end, it has developed all sorts of defenses against anything that might interfere with this goal. The seed is often surrounded by some sort of protective shell, either a husk as in grains, or a hard shell as with nuts. It's also developed ways to disperse itself such as being caught by the wind or hitching its way onto animals like burrs.

Much like the plants we talked about last time, seeds contain a number of toxins that help them ward off fungi, diseases and pests. Animals that have evolved to eat grains have natural 'built-in' biological mechanisms to render their nutrition available and deal with the plant's toxicity, similar to the multiple stomach chambers which allow ruminants to digest cellulose:

[M]ost birds are granivorous, subsisting primarily on seeds and grain. Near the beginning of their digestive tract they have a crop—an enlarged muscular pouch—where grains and seeds can be held for up to 16 hours. In this warm, moist environment, seeds absorb moisture, ferment, and, depending on the amount of time they remain in the crop, can even begin to sprout. These chemical processes work to neutralize the phytic acid and other chemicals, break down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, and lower the pH, transforming a difficult-to-digest grain into something the bird's body can safely and more effectively use.

Next, these partially processed grains travel to the gizzard. Here, small stones—called gastroliths, which the birds intentionally consume—work with a pair of powerful muscular disks to mechanically break down and grind the seeds and grains.

Given the complexity of thee biological processes, you can imagine what might happen to a bird if grains bypasses the crop and gizzard and went straight to the stomach. Yet that's effectively what we are doing when we eat the majority of the bread that's in our grocery stores. (pp. 108-109)

Unlike birds, humans didn't evolve to eat grains and so we don't have any of those biological mechanisms. For humans these toxins can function as 'antinutrients' that prevent us form properly absorbing certain minerals. Phytic acid stores phosphorous which provides nutrition for the plant as it germinates. Humans don't produce phytase, the enzyme that breaks down phytic acid, so this substance binds with amino acids and minerals in our guts and prevents nutrients from being absorbed by our digestive system. Therefore we invented a number of processing methods to mimic the processes that these animals do biologically. Chief among these are soaking and sprouting.

Seeds are "programmed" by the plant to germinate in warm, dark, moist environments. Therefore, the best way to make seeds edible and nutritious is to "fool" the seed by mimicking the conditions it requires to germinate. This causes the seed to release the chemicals it uses as a protective measure, rendering it safe to eat:

The easiest way for humans to make grains and seeds more nutritious and easier to digest is by fooling them into letting down their defenses by mimicking the warm, moist conditions that prompt them to germinate. Various techniques that our ancestors developed, such as soaking, sprouting, fermenting, nixtamalizing (more on this later), grinding and cooking, radically alter the chemical and physical composition of grains and seeds, making them more nutritious and digestible. (p. 109)

When it comes to grains, seeds, and legumes, sprouting...has been shown to reduce the phytic acid content in grains by up to 40 percent, while a 2012 study found that soaking chickpeas (another legume) for 12 hours decreased it by up to almost 56 percent. Sprouting has also been shown to make protein more soluble and digestible in millet (by 55 percent) and barley (by 80 percent) as well as to increase vitamins such as folate, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, vitamin A, and vitamin C.

Sprouting also affect the levels of gluten. One study on sprouting several varieties of wheat over eight days found total gluten reduced by 35 percent in kamut wheat and 62 percent in svevo wheat. Even more significant, though, was the reduction in the type of gluten that provoked autoimmune responses, as in celiac disease. (p. 111)

One of the oldest food processing techniques that we know of is brewing beer. It starts by soaking mashed grains to produce a malt. This causes the grains to sprout, disabling the phytic acid and releasing the amylase enzyme which allows the conversion of complex carbohydrates into digestible sugars. Another common source of the amylase enzyme is our own saliva. Many cultures began the process of brewing by chewing the grains and spitting them out as the first step in the process, such as corn chicha in Peru and kuchikamizake in Japan (which traditionally used the saliva of virgin girls). Brewers would halt the conversion process by roasting or drying the malt, which could then be stored. The malt was heated to produce the wort, which was then fermented into beer. This process converted cereal grains to foods that could be safely (and enthusiastically) consumed by humans. Rather than just a recreational drink, many cultures considered beer tantamount to ‘liquid bread’:

We rarely think of beer as a source of nutrition, but beer-making was a food technology milestone for our ancestors, who used it to extract easily digestible nutrition from otherwise nutritionally inaccessible seeds. It's important to note that until the 19th century, just as with sourdough bread, beer-making employed a fermentation of bacteria and yeast. Unfortunately, just like bread, most beer today is made with just yeast—and commercial yeast at that—although there is a niche but growing market for "sour" beers made though bacteria and yeast fermentation. (p. 110)

Breweries have been discovered in nearly all of the cultures that started using grains as a food resource in Western Asia, China, and the Americas. This has led archaeologists to speculate that these grains were first harvested for beer brewing rather than for making porridge, flour or bread. Regardless of the ultimate use, soaking and sprouting would have been initially used to process the grains which could then be made into either product. For example, Sumerian bappir was a twice-baked barley bread that could be consumed as a food but was probably used a starter for brewing.

The other major way to consume cereal grains is, of course, by baking them into bread. But ancient bread differed markedly from modern varieties. Schindler touts the traditional sourdough process which induces a long, slow bacterial fermentation to make the nutrition present in grains maximally available to our bodies. Sourdough is a bread made by the fermentation of dough using wild lactobacillaceae and yeast (Wikipedia). The yeast consumes the sugars to produce lactic acid which gives the bread its flavor. Schindler uses the sourdough bread process to make a variety of grain-based products including breads, crackers, pasta, croutons, pretzels, and pizza crusts. This was the technique most likely used in antiquity. A carbonized loaf of bread found in the ruins of Herculaneum near Pompeii was a variety of sourdough. The Ancient Egyptians also baked sourdough breads. But, as with other food sources, the key is to use the genuine sourdough process and not the shortcut methods used by the food industry:

A word about my use of the word genuine when talking about sourdough: The term sourdough has no official or legal standing, so we can't use it alone to provide guidance on purchasing bread. Companies take shortcuts and use lactic acid or something similar to produce a quickly risen, yeasted bread that artificially tasted like genuine sourdough. Truly genuine sourdough bread contains three ingredients: flour, water, and salt. If any ingredients on the label sound like lactic, citric, ascorbic, or acetic acid (vinegar), it's not true long-fermented bread, and you might was well eat a loaf of Wonder Bread, nutritionally speaking. (p. 113)

Prehistoric bake-off: Scientists discover oldest evidence of bread (BBC News)

Soaking is another common method used to make seeds safe to eat. Kidney beans, as we've already seen, contain tannins and phytic acids that can make us sick. The only way to render them safe to eat is a combination of soaking in an alkaline solution and cooking. Another food where this method has been traditionally used is corn, known throughout the rest of the world as maize.

The people who traditionally made maize a staple of their diet routinely soaked it in an an alkaline solution—traditionally a mixture of water and wood ash. We now know why they used this process, known as nixtamalization. Without it, the niacin in corn is not bioavailable leading to severe vitamin deficiency. When corn started spreading around the world, the people outside of Mesoamerica who cultivated it started suffering from a variety of symptoms collectively known as pellagra. We now this was caused by niacin deficiency since the traditional preparation methods for corn did not spread along with the crop. Today corn is artificially fortified with niacin to avoid this problem, rather than nixtamalized as the native peoples of the Americas have done for generations¹.

[Maize] presents a conundrum. It's one of the hardest foods for our bodies to digest. The main component of its cell walls is indigestible cellulose. And although it contains high levels of niacin, this important vitamin remains locked away and inaccessible to our bodies unless maize is processed in a specific way.

Early Mesoamerican farmers unknowingly stumbled onto this when they began to process maize by simmering dried kernels in a solution of water and wood ash, then steeping the mixture overnight. This is the first step in the process of nixtamalization. The next day, they could more easily remove the kernels' hard outer coatings. Then they rinsed the grains; at this point, the product is called nixtamal or hominy.

Nixtamal could be used as is, or coarsely ground into a highly digestible, nutritious dough called masa. Today, masa is used in a number of traditional ways: pressed into tortillas, formed into tamales—which bear the name of the process itself—and even mixed into a delicious and nourishing drink known as atole. Combined with beans, nixtamalized corn provides a complete protein. (p. 152)

Nixtamalized corn can be used for a wide variety of foods: tortillas, hominy grits, sourdough cornbread, tortilla chips, polenta, pozole, and more: "So while it's biologically accurate the say that we have no real business eating grains, seeds, legumes, and even nuts (and, by extension, bread), rejecting them wholesale isn't the only answer." (p. 109)

I'm surprised that Schindler didn't go into the ways that modern bread has been radically altered from the substance that sustained multiple civilizations. That's too big a topic to go into in detail, but in brief: 1.) The majority of wheat grown around the world are dwarf varieties, which invest even more of their energy in seed production rather than growth (hence why they are dwarfs). This alters their nutritional profile as we saw in the previous post—today’s varieties are far less nutritious than their ancestors. And 2.) bread today is made from refined flour, whereas traditional methods typically used coarsely-ground grains.

Most grain processing methods today remove the bran husk because it makes the product last longer. That's why polished white rice is cheaper than brown rice, despite the fact that it’s more heavily processed—it can be stored longer and shipped farther. The bran husk is what microorganisms like to eat, which is why the ultra-refined version lasts a long time. But the fact that this product is "sterile" should tell us something, especially considering the vital role that microorganisms play in our health. Refined flour also has a very different effect on our blood sugar than the high-fiber grains which have been traditionally used to make bread. Michael Pollan writes about this in his book Cooked:

Pollan says that humans have been trying to make their bread whiter as long as we've been making bread. But we didn't get really good at it until the roller mill was invented in the mid-1800's. In the olden days every community had a flour mill, because milled flour only lasted 2 weeks before it became stale. At first the white flour was a modern miracle: perfectly airy/fluffy bread, flour able to be stored, transported and shipped long distances, etc. Then degenerative diseases started appearing.

Fortification started around 1940's / 1950's, after the Army noticed the recruits for WWII weren't nearly as healthy as in decades past. The joke of fortification is that they only replace some of what was removed by turning wheat into white flour.²

With the implementation of the Chorleywood Process for making bread and the introduction of baking enzymes in the 1970s, breadmaking was transformed yet again. The long shelf-life enabled by the enzymes was the death-knell for local bakeries. Eventually store-bought bread displaced baking at home (at least until Covid came along). But this helps clear up some of the confusion surrounding grains and bread: it's not so much that they are inherently bad for us, but the ways they are processed today makes them so. That's why the so-called "debunkings" of the Paleo diet relying on historical evidence are so dishonest, and only give part of the story.

A lot of the Paleo recipes I see are for the same kinds of products we see in our regular Western diets, just substituting flour from some other source besides wheat, like almond or arrowroot. This is missing the point—there is nothing magical about wheat that makes it especially bad—it's all in the processing. In fact, nuts contain their own set of problems as Schindler describes:

Nuts, seeds, and food products made from them become go-to ingredients in our recipes and snacks in our diets. Milks made from them become staples in households that reject the modern dairy industry and seek a healthier diet, yet consumption of almond milk is now producing kidney stones in children. Baked goods made from nut flours (such as almond flour) become gluten-free alternatives.

This is really a ticking time bomb in our pantries and refrigerators, and whether soaking and sprouting can ameliorate some of these issues is up for debate. The fact is, not enough formal research has been done to explore detoxification of nuts and seeds...The few studies that do exist refute soaking and sprouting as viable detoxification strategies. Soaking nuts, despite the lay literature, does not seem to make any difference in the phylate or oxalate content...Nor does roasting seem to detoxify nuts or make them more bioavailable, although it does release flavors and aromas...Bottom line in our household is this: we don't really trust nuts. We eat very few, and we are highly selective about those we do eat. (p. 115)

The book contains plenty of recipes for all sorts of grain-based products. Obviously, heirloom varieties of grain are ideal if you can get your hands on them, and long, slow fermentation using sourdough methods is key to the process. By coincidence, I ran across this recipe from Ran Prieur which Dr. Schindler would surely approve: Raw Sprouted Crackers. The video below gives a good overview of how bread was transformed into what we eat today:

Dairy

Dairy products are another food category often eschewed by Paleo diets because of their association with the Neolithic revolution. However, this is short-sighted. In fact, the evidence indicates that—even in the absence of domesticated animals—hunter-gatherers made full use of milk whenever they encountered it in the wild:

There is no doubt that early hunter-gatherers, who used every part of the animal, consumed milk from the mammary glands of lactating animals that they killed. We know that our ancestors had access to the milk of other animals at least 49,000 years ago: this is the date of art in the Witwatersrand Cave in Johannesburg, South Africa, for which the natural pigment ochre was mixed with milk, likely obtained from a lactating bovid (an animal from the cattle family).

However, direct evidence of milk consumption from animals harvested by hunter-gatherers is difficult to identify in the archaeological record. Instead, we can turn to historic ethnographic studies as proxy evidence to help understand how our ancestors, who epitomized the nose-to-tail approach of their kills, may have operated.

For instance, the Hare, also known as Kawchottine, living in northwestern Canada "are reported to relish moose mammary glands wen the female is lactating in the summer," according to anthropologist Hiroko Hara. Likewise, the Chippewa savored the udders of "milk-giving does" so much that they consumed them on the spot when the animal was killed. Anthropologist Lorna Marshall documented how the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari would give the udders from their kills to the elderly because they were soft. In the 1969 ethnography Food and Emergency Food in the Circumpolar Area, anthropologist Kerstin Eidlitz Kuoljok recorded how the Igluik Inuit cooked ringed seal pup stomachs when they were full of milk after they nursed from their mothers and noted how the final product tasted like cheese. John J. Honigmann reported that the Kaska from northeastern British Columbia and southeastern Yukon drank moose milk (I have had deer milk myself; the milk was delicious and full of fat. In fact, while cow's milk contains on average 4 percent fat, milk from deer is between 10 and 20 percent fat). (pp. 169-170)

Unlike many other foods we've looked at so far, as mammals we are biologically equipped to digest milk, but only as infants. One again, fermentation plays an essential role in the process. Have you ever noticed that when babies burp up milk, it looks and smells kind of like Provolone cheese? That's because it basically is cheese! Bacteria in the stomachs of babies "digests" the milk for them, turning it into a superfood: "As we digest our mother's milk, bacterial fermentation is transforming it into the safest, most nutritious food it can be." (p. 169). For much of the human population, though, these enzymes are lost in adulthood making about 65 percent of the world's adult population lactose-intolerant.

This process occurs in other mammals, too. In cattle, for example, calves position their digestive tracts so that milk flows directly to the fourth stomach chamber—the abomasum—bypassing the others where it ferments into a cheese-like substance. To this day, this is the source of the bacteria for cheesemaking: the rennet. Schindler speculates that ancient people noticed this substance in the stomachs of slaughtered cattle and used the bacteria from this source to make fermented milk products like cheese, kefir, yoghurt and butter. By fermenting milk outside the body using lactobacillus bacteria and storage vessels, the lactose in the milk could be rendered safe and nutritious to consume regardless of whether people were lactose tolerant or not.

Once we domesticated animals like sheep and goats—and later cattle, horses, buffalo and reindeer—we had regular access to milk and it appears that we immediately started using the lacto-fermentation process to churn out a wide variety of dairy products. This has a very old vintage: pottery was found in Croatia which shows evidence of cheesemaking from 7,200 years ago. Another site in Poland contains vessels which show definitive evidence of cheesemaking around 7000 years ago, complete with holes to drain the whey. Analysis of coprolites found in Austria shows that Neolithic inhabitants of Halstatt were eating both beer and blue cheese 2700 years ago, and the builders of Stonehenge were enjoying a rich diet of “roast sweetened pork consumed with a range of rich dairy products including cheese and butter” in 2500 BCE. A 3,200 year old cheese was found in an Egyptian tomb. Recently, the oldest cheese in the world was discovered with a mummy in the Taklamakan desert. Scientists were even able to extract DNA from the 3,600-year-old kefir cheese. Today there are literally hundred of types of cheeses from all around the world, with thousands of regional varieties.

Why humans have evolved to drink milk (BBC)

The problem with much of modern milk is that it is typically pasteurized or ultrapasteurized, killing the beneficial bacteria found in the milk and rendering it biologically inert. To add insult to injury, fat-phobia has led to things like 1% and 2% milk which removes much of the satisfying milkfat. The reason milk became unsafe to drink has nothing to do with the product itself, however, but rather the unsanitary and unethical methods used in dairying to increase profits in past eras:

[As] we've seen with other foods that have been safely consumed for ages when processed using traditional technologies (maize, for example), much to our detriment we left these tried-and-true methods behind as population and milk demand grew. The swill dairies of the mid-1800s in the United States present one of the most egregious examples.

Conceived as a way to maximize profits, these dairies were established next to distilleries so that cows could be fed the grain mash (swill) left over from alcohol production. Kept in miserable, filthy conditions and fed unnatural waste products, these cows produced bluish, foul milk that the producers doctored with everything from molasses to plaster of Paris to animal brains for a more natural appearance, creamy top, and thick consistency. Then, they marketed it as country-fresh milk, sickening and killing thousands who consumed it. The New York Times attributed 8,000 deaths a year—mostly children—to this milk, causing an understandable national uproar and a push toward better regulation of milk. (pp. 171-172)

Today it is illegal in many places to sell or purchase raw milk. And, as with most other products churned out by the industrial food system, traditional processes are often bypassed making the food less healthy and safe to consume. For example, mozzarella cheese typically requires about eight hours to reach the necessary pH to stretch it. However, some cheesemakers bypass the full fermentation process by using vinegar or lactic acid to speed up the process, leaving much of the lactose intact causing problems for lactose intolerant people. Modern commercial yoghurts are made from pasteurized milk and artificially add back in the probiotics touted on the label (along with sugar). And that's not to mention things like processed cheese food, processed cheese spread, processed cheese product, and imitation cheese. True cheeses should contain only milk, rennet and salt. Even butter was once a fermented product:

Before refrigeration, butter was a naturally fermented food...Fermenting cream before it is made into butter offers several advantages. First, the act of churning butter physically breaks down the membrane on the inside of the fat globules so that they come together to form the mass of butter. Fermenting helps to chemically break down the membrane so that it's easier and quicker to churn. Fermenting also improves the flavor, lowers the pH to create a safer environment, and increases the probiotic content of the butter. (p. 189)

Insects

Insects have been a part of the human diet form the very beginning. We can surmise this because insects like ants and termites from a significant part of the diet of our closest ape relatives. Unlike many of the other foods in the book, we are biologically equipped to consume them, perhaps a remnant of our arboreal evolutionary background: “In fact, other than when we are infants and well equipped to drink mother's milk, the only foods our digestive tracts are biologically designed to consume are the insects and limited amounts of wild fruits and vegetables that made up the diets of our early ancestors.” (p. 13)

Today over 1,900 species of insects are consumed in myriad ways all over the world by more than two billion people, from tacos to curries to stir-fry. Bees, wasps, crickets, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, cicadas, leafhoppers, termites, dragonflies, beetles, mealworms, eggs, larvae, pupae—you name it, someone's probably eating it. Chapulines (grasshoppers) are a delicacy in Mexico, and have also been used medicinally. In previous posts, I've mentioned the Ache people "farming" their favorite beetle delicacy in the South American rain forest.

Today, there's a lot of buzz (sorry!) right now around insects for both environmental and nutritional benefits. Insects take far less resources, such as land and water, to raise than traditional livestock. And in many cases they are even more nutritious than conventional livestock: for example, the Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio in mealworms is closer to grass-fed beef and fish at an ideal 3:1 rather than grain fed meat which is closer to 20:1. This skewed ratio is implicated in all sorts of health maladies like heart disease. Insects are richer in protein, vitamins and minerals than a lot of conventional meats. Insects can be made into just about anything, from omelettes to baked goods to candies. Flour made from crickets is becoming an ever-more common protein supplement in foods. In fact, bug parts are in all sort of foods we eat every day, desired or not.

While our ancestors' bug gourmet was probably akin to a primate slurping ants off a stock that's just been pulled from an ant mound, today's technologies let us consume insects in myriad ways, and it's well worth it. The same FAO report notes that 100 grams of mealworms have 20 grams of protein and 13 grams of fat; ant eggs have 14 grams of protein and 4 grams of fat; and grasshoppers have a whopping 30 grams of protein and 3.8 grams of fat. Compare that to the same quantity of 85 percent lean ground beef, which has 26 grams of protein and 15.41 grams of fat (according to the USDA FoodData Central), or two eggs, which have 12 grams of protein and 10 grams of fat. (p. 208)

While Schindler laments the “yuck factor” in the consumption of insects in European/West Asian cultures, an even bigger barrier might be what I call the “Snowpiercer factor.” If you haven't seen the movie or TV series, it depicts the last remnants of humanity all living inside a train endlessly traveling around a snowball earth. The train is an obvious metaphor for human social structure. The residents of the forward cars live in luxury and dine on fine foods. The residents of the rear cars, by contrast, are crammed into crowded, filthy conditions and live on processed nutrition bricks made from crickets. It's hard not to see this as a class issue, regardless of humanity’s deep history of entomophagy. For example, a cricket factory in Canada was recently implicated as part of the so-called “Great Reset” by far-Right politicians and online conspiracy mongers:

How a London, Ont., cricket plant found itself at the heart of an international conspiracy theory (CBC)

I'm surprised Schindler didn't mention Sardinian Casu Martzu, a traditional Sardinian sheep milk cheese that contains live insect larvae which brings together the previous two chapters of the book—dairy and insects!

Earth, Ash and Charcoal

Yes, believe it or not, even ashes, charcoal and dirt can be part of a balanced diet! Ash is what is left over after combustion in the presence of oxygen. Charcoal is what remains when organic material has been exposed to high heat in the absence of oxygen.

We've already seen the critical role played by wood ash in the nixtamalization of corn, but ash and charcoal have been added to a variety of foods for a long time. Schindler describes a traditional yoghurt called mursik which is a staple food of the Pokot people of Kenya made from milk, blood, and ashes prepared in a calabash gourd. Evidence from the Qesem cave in Israel indicates that ash was used as a preservative for meat 300,000 years ago. Potash and pearlash were traditionally used as chemical leavening agents in baking, to later be replaced by baking soda and baking powder—both byproducts made from ash³. Also, the alkaline nature of ash can assist in the process of cheesemaking:

Ash's alkaline characteristics can alter the environment within which food is processed, producing a multitude of benefits. A source of essential minerals such as calcium, manganese, iron, copper, zinc, sodium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorous, ash acts to detoxify and restore balance in our bodies, its alkaline base counteracting the acids we take in from our environment.

Today, ash is a component in some of the world's best cheese, including the French Morbier and the Californian Humboldt Fog, because it changes the microenvironment in and around the cheese, producing desirable effects...Ash neutralizes the acidity and helps promote certain ripening processes. Also, the environment produced by coating a cheese with ash attracts certain favorable molds, such as Penecillum candidum, which is essential to the production of the white mold that coats cheeses like Brie and Camembert. (p. 227)

Activated charcoal binds to certain toxic chemicals, which is why it is often used for water purification. However, even regular charcoal has detoxification properties. Charcoal isn't absorbed by the body, making it a powerful remedy for the intake of toxic substances—it's still used in the emergency treatment for drug overdoses or poisoning. Charcoal has been used by humans for all sort of other purposes as well including bodily adornment, making glues, and metalworking.

Finally, the consumption of earth—called geophagy—has been part of traditional diets in many places. There is evidence that Homo habilis consumed calcium rich clay based on the location of the finds. Many animals routinely consume earth. Pregnant women often feel a desire to consume earth—a fact noted by Hippocrates. In times of nutritional stress, earth and clay provide a valuable source of minerals like calcium, iron and magnesium. It can also act as a digestive aid—one of the ingredients in kaopectate is kaolinite, "a clay mineral whose absorbent properties act as a detoxifier. Much like charcoal, it binds to toxins and allows us to safely pass them." (p. 231) Kaolinite and bentonite clay are commonly sold and consumed as digestive aids in African markets.

But perhaps the most interesting use of earth is in the Andean cultures of South America. In this region, potatoes are often served with a clay mixture almost the way mayonnaise and ketchup are served with fries (chips). This began as a way of neutralizing the toxins present in early varieties of wild potatoes:

Talking about clay makes Amilcar Apaza nostalgic for his childhood in Juliaca, Peru, a city in the Andean highlands. He remembers gathering with his family in his grandmother's fields in the nearby countryside for the potato harvest. There, they would build a small oven to cook the fresh potatoes and eat them, dipping the potatoes in a sauce made of clay, water and salt.

The type of clay that Apaza ate is known as chaco in Quechua or pasa in Aymara, two native Andean languages. Edible clay is collected from several main deposits in the altiplano. While the exact composition varies depending on where the clay was unearthed, it is normally rich in certain minerals called smectites.

While there are many theories about the origins of clay eating, scientists now think this unusual culinary tradition may have served a protective purpose…clay may have allowed early inhabitants of the Andes to eat wild potatoes, which are toxic…Some Peruvian scientists think that the same characteristics that allow the clay to stick to potato toxins give it therapeutic properties as well. Throughout Peru, chaco is now sold as an alleged treatment for stomach problems ranging from indigestion to ulcers.

The Ancient Andean Tradition of Eating Clay May Have Helped To Protect Health (NPR)

Sugar

Schindler concludes his book with a plea for moderation in all things diet-related, including the consumption of sugar. That large amounts of sugar are bad for us is another common tenet of dieting, except this one happens to be true. But, as always, the dose makes the poison. Schindler advises us to enjoy a bit of birthday cake now and then. But the best way to consume sugar, as with all the foods in the book, is to combine it with other substances in a way to make it maximally nutritious for us—for example, honey or dark chocolate.

Schindler misses the opportunity to tell the story of how sugar became such a uniquely integral part of the Western diet. How sugarcane originated in southeast Asia and was spread by Muslim traders. How it started as an addictive white powder exclusively for the very wealthiest members of society (whose teeth were the first to rot, for example Queen Elizabeth and George Washington). Later much of the Caribbean and Brazil were transformed into sugar plantations staffed by African slaves (along with indentured laborers) after entire native peoples were wiped out. Literally tons of sugar were shipped across the Atlantic to Europe every year over the ensuing centuries. In fact, sugar production gave rise to the world's first factory systems, and the labor techniques developed for sugar production were critical for the Industrial Revolution in England. You could also look at how and why sugar (and other sweeteners) are put into almost everything we eat and drink by the commercial food industry, and the deleterious effects this has on public health (as Dr. Robert Lustig has written about). Nowadays we have to take heroic efforts just to avoid sugar, even if we are just eating normally.

But Schindler is an anthropologist and not a historian, so that is for another book which I'm sure has already been written by someone. So we'll conclude it there.

Final Thoughts

I learned a lot from this book, and I hope you did from my review. But I couldn't help but feel a profound sense of sadness. The reason is because books like this make me realize how fundamentally and irreparably broken our food system is, and how it’s almost impossible to eat an ideal, healthy, nutritious diet in the midst of our vaunted food abundance, especially if you are unfortunate enough to live in the United States like I do.

And while Bill Schindler may be able take on the elaborate and time-consuming food preparation methods he outlines in the book—from soaking grains, to baking sourdough pretzels and bread, to fermenting vegetables and ketchup, to preparing cheese and kefir, to hunting wild animals, to rendering fat, to foraging for wild plants—it just seems unrealistic for the rest of us to do this kind of stuff in our hectic lives. That’s even more true for those of us poor in time, money, or living space. Most of us are not going to undertake these kinds of heroic efforts to produce healthy, nutritious food for ourselves and our families. And that makes me sad, because in the past, we didn’t have to—it was just a part of daily life.

Once we stopped eating local foods and processing them in the traditional ways, our health started to deteriorate precipitously and it’s difficult to even see how we can find our way back at this point. Basically, all of the work we supposedly saved by not preparing foods in the traditional manner we've instead plowed into remunerated employment, but no amount of money can give us our health back. This also allowed big corporations to gain an iron grip over our food supply, with profits—not public health—as the only concern. And individual solutions won't remove the costs and burden of poor public health that hangs over entire countries and is spreading like a cancer all over the world (quite literally in many instances).

That's what we'll be talking about next time. In the meantime, if any of you have tried, or would like to try some of these recipes and food production techniques, I highly encourage you to do so. I'd love to hear about it (and be invited for dinner, lol). Leave them comments below. You can follow Dr. Bill Schindler’s activities at these sites:

eatlikeahuman.com

T: @drbillschindler

I: @drbillschindler

F: drbillschindler

© 2022

1. One of the most remarkable things about these methods is the fact that the people who use them often do not know the reasons why they use them aside from 'tradition.' A great deal about this is made in The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. See: Tradition is Smarter than You Are (The Scholar's Stage)

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31636769

3. See: The Great Uprising: How a Powder Revolutionized Baking (Smithsonian)