H-G Food Procurement Strategies

In the Incestral Health Community, HG stands for Hunter-Gatherer.  If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times over the years:  humans are hunter-gatherers at heart.  True enough.  We are, after all, animals and at some ancient point we behaved just like any other wild animal seeking sustenance.  

Fast forward, and most in the IHC think Jared Diamond was correct when he wrote The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.  In that 1987 article, Diamond lays out his case for why human domestication of both plants and animals for food was not, as is commonly held, progress for our species after all.  In keeping with the HG acronym, the human transition from Hunter-Gatherer to Herder-Gardener has been nothing short of a disaster according to Diamond.

Of course the irony is totally lost on the paleos as they sit down to a meal of prime rib topped with ghee and that kale and avocado salad on the side.  Perhaps some 90% cacao with coconut butter to round out the meal ...

Harvest from a Three Sisters Garden
direct image link

But the paleo community is often rife with misrepresentations of other HG food procurement strategies.  While these folks would prefer you to focus on the select few northern tribes that were pure hunter gatherers, it would be safe to say that most of the tribes native to the Americas were Hunter-Gardeners.  







They are almost universally described as agriculturalists, who also hunted.  Where they didn't garden, in many cases it was because wild "crops" were so abundant as to not require deliberate cultivation -- berries, wild rice, potatoes, mesquite, cactus fruits, and so much more.  In some cases, one could argue that human activity helped the wild plant life proliferate.   There are also hybrid strategies of deliberate planting followed by long periods of abandonment after which humans returned to reap what they had sown -- for better or worse.  

And then we have the Masai who represent a less prevalent strategy:  Herder-Gatherer.  Nomadic peoples "domesticated" animals but transported them with them ... a lifestyle that paired well with opportunistic gathering.  Of note, the Masai diet is based on "renewable animal resources", e.g. milk.   Meat was not a mainstay according to the first-hand literature as this would obviously require killing the animal.  Note that in the realm of procuring animal food, I would include fishing and trapping under the broad term "hunting".  Likewise, I would extend my term "herding" (so I can use an h-word) to include all raising, etc. of animals for meat, dairy or eggs.

Transitions ...

Primitive humans, like all wild animals, hunted and/or gathered to survive.  Such strategies would have been driven -- consciously or not -- by maximizing nutrients (e.g. calories!) obtained, balanced by the amount of energy expended in the procurement effort.    The transition to other H-G strategies would have been influenced by the need to transition and the availability of alternate strategies combined with the ease with which said strategies could be implemented.  

I have no intention of discussing Diamond's ideas in any depth (feel free in comments!), but to paraphrase from the article as to why the Kalahari bushmen had not adopted the agricultural ways of their neighbors, it is because sustenance from mongongo nuts is apparently abundant.  So imagine these bushmen were still isolated from other cultures and the availability of mongongo nuts began to wane.  The bushmen could move to where mongongo nuts could be found in abundance, they could seek out other food sources to replace the mongongo nuts, or .... perhaps ... find ways to assist the production of more nuts.    What would be difficult to imagine, is the bushmen selecting an entirely different plant species and deciding -- hey, I think we'll grow that for food!

What I'm getting at here is that there wasn't some switch flipped 10,000 years ago.  Whatever species of plants humans began to cultivate, or animals they began to domesticate, would have been species humans were accustomed to consuming as food before hand.  It is a myth that grain would not have been abundant enough in the wild to harvest ... that it would be too labor intensive for the calorie yield.  I discussed recently the gathering of wild rice by those indigenous to what is now the Minnesota region of the US.    This tradition is carried out still today and while "wild" a certain amount of cultivation is involved in modern times.

Diagonally across the globe in Mozambique, starch granules from sorghum have been found on grinding tools dating back at least 100,000 years.  I use the comma so there is no confusion as to the number of zeros there.  While the promoters of paleoistic fantasies try to explain away evidence of grains and legumes as humans having used these plants for bedding or fires (for warmth, not cooking apparently), this processing can pretty much be consistent with only one thing:  sorghum was a food for ancient humans.  It is the logical progression for humans to have consumed this food in the wild and later recognized that they could actively grow this plant for food.  Interestingly paleo starch expert Paul Jaminet refers to this knowledge in Perfect Health Diet (Kindle Locations 4457-4467), after identifying grains and legumes as toxic!

... sorghum grain residues have also been found on stone tools at a site in Mozambique, Africa, dating to 103,000 B.C. 14 Middle Stone Age Africans used sorghum grasses for bedding, kindling, and (possibly) baskets and may have prepared and cooked sorghum grains, though there is no direct evidence of this.

Where's the direct evidence for the former?  I don't contest this, but why the qualifier on the latter, when one would be hard pressed to come up with another explanation for grain starch granules on tools!

However, Paleolithic diets were much less toxic than modern diets for several reasons:

1. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers ate a much wider variety of plant foods— hundreds of species 15 rather than a handful as in Western diets— so the quantity of any one toxin was far lower. Since “the dose makes the poison,” this reduces the toxicity of the diet.

While it is not possible to know the proportional composition of diets, sorghum starches dominated the starch types found on these tools.  

2. The most toxic foods in the modern diet were not available:

• Grains and legumes were eaten seasonally, not stored for year-round consumption. Nor were they eaten in quantity even when in season: since grains require laborious processing and cooking, they may have been backup or “starvation” foods.

Sorry, but what is Paul's evidence for any of this last paragraph.  The red-bolded statement is frankly laughable.  Didn't he read Good Calories, Bad Calories?

There is little reason to presume that the agricultural staples post the agricultural transition were randomly chosen plants previously foreign to human consumption.   Rather, it is logical to look to the plants humans have historically cultivated, for clues as to the wild plants humans would have gathered and eaten.

But They're Not The Same ...

This is a common phrase used to dismiss modern nutritive plant foods.  True.  But it is a stretch to then blame grains, legumes, fruits and tubers for modern ills due to their nutritive starch and sugar content.   Those primitive plant foods were much higher in indigestible fibers.  Which explains the modern cravings for celery and kale ...

In seriousness ... Humans are opportunistic, intelligent omnivores.  Humans have engaged in a broad range of H-G food procurement strategies depending on environmental circumstances and needs to not only survive, but thrive.  There is NO evidence to support the paleoist version of human dietary history that paints grains and legumes as foods to which our genome is not adapted, or worse, to label them as "not food".