Primitivism: The Movie
by Giulianna LamannaIt’s not often that we here at Anthropik stumble upon a piece of news that makes us piss our pants in glee. But yesterday, Ran Prieur posted a brief notice about a new movie in which he’s going to appear… a movie that also interviews Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Jerry Mander, and Richard Manning. It’s called What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, and it’s a documentary about everything we’ve been saying for the past three years. Holy vindication, Batman! This might just be the greatest thing since no bread.
Naturally, this is a small-budget affair without much marketing muscle behind it. So if you want to see What a Way to Go in your hometown—or just give the filmmakers a helping hand so they can show the movie elsewhere—there’s a handy-dandy page on their site explaining how you can help with the “Get Tim and Sally Out of Debt” screening tour. If you happen to have connections to an indie movie theater, a college, a ridiculously liberal church, or if you just have a nice big living room and don’t mind inviting people over, contact the producers pronto!
Meanwhile, check out these two YouTube trailers. Awwww, yeah!
{from inside a heavily padlocked large black trunk}
Wmmmfmmmf mhmmmf!! Mwmmmpmmmf!! {THUMP!} {THUMP!} {THUMP!}
Comment by Jashee Denford — 31 May 2007 @ 3:45 PM
I’ve been waiting ever so impatiently for this film. I fail more often then not in trying to explain primitivism and collapse to the people I know and I generally can’t get them to read Jason’s, Jensen’s or even Quinn’s work (even though Quinn is a very easy read considering the immensity of the topic). I’m hoping this film will be the club to beat people over the head with. A kind of primitivist clue-stick.
Comment by locke — 31 May 2007 @ 4:03 PM
Locke, yeah, I’m been waiting for this film impatiently as well. Believe it or not, I don’t own a single DVD; I think this will be my first (not just so that I could rewatch it, but so that I could lend it to others).
Comment by Hasha — 31 May 2007 @ 4:17 PM
I am just a little annoyed at the hundred dollar cost just to host a house party, although it does look really good. However, I am afraid it might scare too many people away.
Comment by Matt — 31 May 2007 @ 8:50 PM
It ain’t the “”Get Tim and Sally Out of Debt” tour for nothin’. I hear this stuff gets expensive; though, I’ve only ever made one 10-minute documentary, and that ran me about a grand, though again, that was mostly equipment…
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 9:27 PM
I’ve broken my dependence on Depends, and just warmly peed the earth.
Comment by JCamasto — 31 May 2007 @ 11:46 PM
That filmmaker might be an interesting interview for the podcast, if you’re still doing those.
Comment by Paula — 1 June 2007 @ 2:18 PM
The podcast’ll be back, but with a very different format. Having an interview for each one is definitely not sustainable for me, though. Otherwise, definitely would.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 2:37 PM
Looking forward to that, I definitely miss the podcast.
On a totally unrelated note — you mentioned somewhere (the 30 theses?) that childbirth is much easier for people “who aren’t malnourished.” Do you have a source for that, or can you tell me how I might go about tracking down related studies? I find that extremely fascinating, being a girl and all.
Comment by Paula — 1 June 2007 @ 7:38 PM
Giuli? (She’s had a post draft waiting in the system on that topic for months now.)
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 8:39 PM
Oh, blech. I was interested in that, until I found I couldn’t find any actual, solid evidence for it. Not that I can find any solid evidence against it, either. It’s between anecdotal evidence mixed with New Agey language and the usual, “But this is common sense! I don’t need to explain why childbirth hurts when everyone knows it just does!”
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 8:52 PM
I’ve only seen a couple of trailers, but this movie looks like another The End is Nigh film in which doomsday soundbites are recited like so much dub poetry.
This is probably the worst strategy for ecologically consciousness -raising documentaries. Chicken little stories are so vulnerable to the fickle vagaries of reality, that when you miss on just one prediction, the whole message gets discredited. Better to stay out of the prediction business altogether and focus on the facts. Allow people to draw their own conclusions. The present facts and trends are scary enough.
Did they interview that media slut Zerzan at all? How about Kirkpatrick Sale? Jason? Guili?
Comment by nim chimpsky — 1 June 2007 @ 9:42 PM
Those aren’t listed by the website as interviewees, so probably not.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 11:17 PM
Giulianna > I was thinking along the lines of whether the various toxins in wheat, etc., interfere with hormone and brain chemistry during labor; or, conversely, if a lack of something that was present in a paleo diet might affect those chemistries. if I ever have time again maybe I will try looking into that. Was that the angle you were writing from?
nim > I don’t think documentaries like that are limited to ecological consciousness raising only. The end really is nigh unless humanity — and western culture especially — manages to make some drastic, species-wide changes this very minute. Since the chance of that happening is basically nonexistent, it leaves a great deal of spiritual and emotional coming-to-terms work to be done. I think those kinds of documentaries are more about coming to terms with an inevitable collapse that includes ecology along with culture, technological progress, economics as we understand it, scientific inquiry, and a host of other stuff, rather than trying to mobilize people to change their ways.
Comment by Paula — 1 June 2007 @ 11:26 PM
Nim, first, I agree with Paula. And I would like to add this: ‘facts and figures’ without a context/paradigm/narrative/frame of reference to place and interpret them in mean absolutely nothing.
So I go around telling people how we are in the middle of a mass extinction, how by conservative estimates, 200 species go extinct each day, day after day after day. It’s frightening how many people go ‘So? Diversity is not good in and of itself.’ Or alternatively: ‘So? I only care about humans.’ And the remainder generally feel that, while it is a shame that all these species are disappearing, ultimately, this is not likely to have much of an impact on us. Basically, when you present people with these ‘facts and figures’, they walk away unconcerned because they don’t see themselves as a part of a living Earth, they don’t see themselves as depending on it for their very lives.
To a lesser extent, similar things happens with Peak Oil. You tell people that, because oil is running out, cars are gradually going to disappear from the roads, and they tell you ‘Americans won’t let go of their cars!’ Granted, it’s more likely they’ll tell you all about these promising alternative sources of energy (that just won’t scale, or are just as limited as oil - nuclear comes to mind) that will ensure that the cars ‘will, too’ stay on the roads. But my feeling is that the fundamental assumption is ‘Americans won’t let go of their cars!’ It is in this context/narrative that the alternatives are interpreted. (As one of the interviewees said: ‘We are like a culture of 2 y/o’s; we just don’t understand limits.’) And then people go about looking for facts that corroborate their basic assumptions, that fit into the narrative they’ve internalized, even when the ‘facts’ are not really facts.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am decidedly not suggesting that ‘facts and figures’ are unimportant. Obviously, if you’re going to change anyone’s mind, you’d better have those to back up your more general claims. What I am saying is that ‘facts and figures’ alone are not likely to achieve much.
As for:
[quote]Chicken little stories are so vulnerable to the fickle vagaries of reality, that when you miss on just one prediction, the whole message gets discredited.[/quote]
This is indeed true when you start making very specific predictions (a la James Howard Kunstler’s predictions for the New Year; can’t you tell I’m a huge fan of JHK? :sarcasm:) of the ‘the dollar will collapse by the end of the year’ or ‘gas will be $4/gallon by the end of the summer’ sort. Not, mind you, that I’d be the least bit surprised if these things came to pass, but it’s kind of silly to stake your reputation on such prognostic work. But I don’t see how this film does that. No, this documentary seems to deal much more with the ‘big picture’. The sky really is falling, and as one of the interviewees said, ‘there’s trouble all around us’. And indeed, there is. A healthy dose of panic might just be useful here, if for no other reason, then to get us out of the ‘business as usual’ mode. But then… I’m not sure that this is what the movie is exactly about, either. As Paula said:
[quote] I think those kinds of documentaries are more about coming to terms with an inevitable collapse that includes ecology along with culture, technological progress, economics as we understand it, scientific inquiry, and a host of other stuff, rather than trying to mobilize people to change their ways.[/quote]
Because, indeed, we are daily bombarded with information about all these seemingly discrete catastrophes. And for some of us at least, these messages really start biting into the conventional wisdom according to which technology will save the day etc. Trouble is, it’s not obvious how one might come up with a different story, one that makes better sense of our current situation. What did this for me more than anything else was Derrick Jensen’s Endgame. It wasn’t the ‘facts and figures’, disturbing as those might be. It’s how they were woven into a narrative, into an alternative world view. And the thing gave me something resembling a nervous breakdown, but I consider myself better off now for having gone through it, and some changes in my life (by no means sufficient, not even close, but still changes in what seems to be the right direction) are on the horizon. I think it’s harder for a film to produce the same kind of effect, if for no other reason, because a film is necessarily much shorter. But my guess is that this film still belongs to the same species, so to say, as Endgame (or as Ishmael, for instance), and that’s what makes it potentially highly valuable for some people.
Comment by Hasha — 2 June 2007 @ 11:10 AM
Nonstop “panic” is “business as usual” mode these days… What once was “healthy panic” is now a button pressed over and over and over again, in all aspects of life. (Put out that fire! at work. Pick up the kids! at school. Pay that bill! at home.)
No wonder people’s response is tired, numbed denial…
Comment by JCamasto — 2 June 2007 @ 1:58 PM
Yeah, I see what you’re saying, JCamasto. But I don’t know that it necessarily invalidates what I said about earlier:
[quote]A healthy dose of panic might just be useful here, if for no other reason, then to get us out of the ‘business as usual’ mode.[/quote]
First of all, the fact that panic has become a way of life validates my point that ‘facts and figures’ alone won’t be able to do much - they just produce the standard panic, no worse than that ‘Pick up the kids!’ kind. What I’m talking about is the anxiety and dread caused by a person’s world view collapsing, the sort of panic that washes over a person who comes to realize (more on the instinctual than on the intellectual level) that the usual defense mechanisms don’t work anymore, that the ‘put out this fire, and then rush to put out the next’ approach will simply not do, that even the person’s best efforts (or at least, the best efforts of the sort that we’ve become accustomed to) won’t do the trick, that the fire will spread anyway. That sort of panic. Very different from the ‘Pick up the kids!’ kind.
Comment by Hasha — 2 June 2007 @ 2:29 PM
I wasn’t suggesting presenting out-of-context facts. One can explain that 200 species go extinct each day AND say that this has an effect on other species including humans. But no one knows exactly what this means in terms of actual or possible scenarios. Humans may go on to live a long time. Glacial ice sheets used to cover most of North America for tens of thousands of years. What if just before the last ice age, there were documentaries warning of loss of biodiversity, megafauna and plant life, etc. ? The sky fell then, yet humans lived on. People have learned to accept the fact that species are always dying out. Consequently, most people’s response to yet another The World is Ending prediction is likely to be a shoulder shrug.
Circumstances may turn out differently this time of course. But I think if you give people facts in their contexts, you don’t need to spell out the conclusion for them. Especially when we don’t really know what the correct conclusion is. Doomsday or survival?
Comment by nim chimpsky — 2 June 2007 @ 7:43 PM
No one here is really claiming humans won’t survive. Civilization on the other hand…
Comment by locke — 3 June 2007 @ 12:26 AM
nim > you’re missing the point. Those documentaries are for people who have already concluded that doomsday is the inevitable, correct, near-future scenario. They’re for people who are done weighing the facts in evidence and have moved on to evaluating existential outcomes. They are produced for a completely different headspace — and a mostly-different audience — than documentaries that are designed to present the facts and figures.
Comment by Paula — 3 June 2007 @ 12:36 AM
Nim, I agree with Paula. There comes a time when a person goes ‘I’ve seen enough facts and figures; now I need to figure out what to do with them.’ That includes the psychological aspect: ‘What do I do with these psychologically?’ How do you ‘process’ them, how do they ‘fit’? This is by no means a trivial question. They don’t fit into the old/conventional framework/story, so now we need a new one. Books and films and blogs dealing with this question are needed just as much as those that whose main aim is to present ‘facts and figures’ to audiences that haven’t yet been sufficiently exposed to them (to ‘facts and figures’, that is).
Comment by Hasha — 3 June 2007 @ 10:58 AM
By the way, Paula, I just visited your web site. You’ve got some good stuff there! How come you don’t have a comments section after your posts?
Comment by Hasha — 3 June 2007 @ 11:00 AM
Thanks Hasha! I don’t have comments set up for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I don’t always have time to monitor the signal-to-noise ratio.
Comment by Paula — 3 June 2007 @ 11:21 AM
I see I’m going to have to twist Giuli’s arm a little more for that childbirth article—she’s really got more than she realizes already.
Naturally, the health effects of wheat is something we have a real cultural investment in not pressing too hard, and that extends to a distinct lack of scientific curiosity on the question. Getting good, solid studies of the health effects of wheat at all is difficult enough; studies on the effects on labor pain specifically is something we’ve had some real trouble with. But there’s certainly some suggestive leads—not least of which being the “curse” of Genesis that cursed man with agriculture and woman with painful childbirth. Then there are accounts like the following:
These have some very limited usefulness. Most of the effort put into this question has been of the same type devoted to debunking the “Noble Savage”—including studies which are presumed to burst the notion forever, showing childbirth to be just as painful among horticulturalists that live off of corn, like the Pima.
The essential reason for pain in childbirth, of course, is the tension in Homo sapiens between bipedality and cranial capacity, but if the mass consumption of wheat and dairy, with all the negative health effects already established, in no way exacerbated the now-normalized childbirth experience, then that would be something that would need even greater explanation.
There is an interesting possibility in endometriosis—might this extreme case have some parallels for the more widespread phenomenon of painful childbirth?
And then there are, of course, the anecdotes.
Perhaps even more importantly, hunter-gatherer women were in better shape, walked more, and had a cultural context for birthing less alienating than the modern, medical experience. It has been quite firmly established that a woman’s expectation of pain creates a great deal of the pain she experiences, through mechanisms like tensing her muscles, etc. All thrown together, I would be shocked to hear that hunter-gatherers had entirely painless deliveries, but I would also be shocked if a true hunter-gatherer’s experience was anywhere near as painful as that of a fully civilized woman.
I haven’t seen the movie, so that could be. That’s not how it struck me, though. That’s the hook, certainly, but they’re interviewing Quinn and Mander—I’d imagine they would essentially have to bring the subject around to the more liberating aspects of primitivism.
They certainly didn’t interview us.
I know they interviewed Ran, though. Zerzan and Sale aren’t on their list, but that might be an oversight. I doubt it, though.
That may be true, but saying so doesn’t help. Ehrlich’s prediction of a terrible famine in the 1980’s that never happened (if you don’t pay attention to that terrible famine that happened in the 1980’s throughout Ethiopia, et al) has made his name a veritable mantra to be intoned against anyone who might suggest that our economic attitudes might lead to some destructive ends. Nim is right, doomsaying makes for poor propaganda.
Ice ages are actually pretty good signs of ecological health; remember, the planet’s long-term challenge is to remain cool as the sun warms. Ice ages are not biodiversity crises, or any kind of “sky falling” scenario. In fact, they’re signs that we’re actually doing better than expected.
Which is what makes it so important to make people understand the context. Extinction does have a lot in common with personal death; both are regular features of normal life. Extinctions happen, and people die. There’s a normal, background rate. But there’s also times when something goes wrong—from this perspective, World War II was just a spike in the death rate. And yet, the spike you’d see from the Holocaust would be tiny when compared to the spike in extinctions caused by the Holocene Extinction. We’re talking about 50% of all land mammals gone in the next century, and lifeless oceans. E.O. Wilson called it, “the Death of Birth.” People should think of it in the same terms as a death rate, not that extinctions should be eliminated, but that the current mass extinction is nothing short of geocide.
Are they? I really appreciate what you’ve been trying to do in developing a mythic context that helps us cope with collapse, but is that actually what this movie’s for? End of Suburbia was an introduction for people unfamiliar with Peak Oil, and An Inconvenient Truth was for people who didn’t understand global warming. This seems more to me like primitivism for people unwilling to read Quinn, Zerzan or Jensen—for the exact opposite crowd who doesn’t know any of this yet.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 June 2007 @ 3:16 PM
[quote]But there’s certainly some suggestive leads—not least of which being the “curse” of Genesis that cursed man with agriculture and woman with painful childbirth.[/quote]
Wow. This never occurred to me before. To be sure, it’s not conclusive evidence, but it is a lead, something that suggests we might want to look a bit deeper.
As for me, well, I’ve never been pregnant, but I have noticed that I don’t react that great to wheat. Nothing dramatic, but eating pasta (whole grain wheat) for instance does tend to make me a little foggy and give me a slight headache. So I’ve been trying to avoid it. I haven’t exactly stopped eating it (because it’s so cheap and so easy to make), but I’ve cut down on it.
Comment by Hasha — 4 June 2007 @ 4:31 PM
Giuli, I just wanted to add that, in order to write a good article, you don’t need to be able to show conclusively that there’s a link between wheat and painful childbirth. All you need to do is to show that there’s evidence pointing in that direction. Of course, if you can’t show conclusively that the link exists, you shouldn’t claim that that’s what you’ve shown (this can really go on people’s nerves), but if there’s some evidence supporting the claim… Well, then it seems like a worthy cause to help bring this information to more women who can then weigh the evidence themselves and make decisions about their diet based on that; if you’re lucky, all of this might lead to more serious research, which might then be able to give us some more conclusive answers.
Comment by Hasha — 4 June 2007 @ 5:00 PM
Jason writes: “Are they? I really appreciate what you’ve been trying to do in developing a mythic context that helps us cope with collapse, but is that actually what this movie’s for?”
That was how I interpreted the trailers, but of course I could be wrong. I haven’t seen the film yet either. There seem to be a number of articles, websites and such popping up that are grappling with those kinds of questions (mostly in and around the issue of peak oil and not necessarily in an overly religious or mythical context), and I thought this film was part of that new crop. No pun intended. If it’s not then I stand corrected.
Comment by Paula — 4 June 2007 @ 5:16 PM
overly = overtly
Comment by Paula — 4 June 2007 @ 5:17 PM
Jason wrote:
‘Perhaps even more importantly, hunter-gatherer women were in better shape, walked more, and had a cultural context for birthing less alienating than the modern, medical experience. It has been quite firmly established that a woman’s expectation of pain creates a great deal of the pain she experiences, through mechanisms like tensing her muscles, etc. All thrown together, I would be shocked to hear that hunter-gatherers had entirely painless deliveries, but I would also be shocked if a true hunter-gatherer’s experience was anywhere near as painful as that of a fully civilized woman.’
That’s a similar point to one a friend pointed out some years ago to me. He said that the natural inclination of mammals in stress is to impede birth, so as not to birth a child into a dangerous situation. So for example, if you’re pregnant and near delivery, and are being chased by a predator, what you don’t want is to accidentally bring your child into the world while running away, since that endangers both you and child. So your body tenses and inhibits the process. According to him, the modern birthing context, especially in hospitals, with the associated stresses, creates the similar physiological effect of inhibiting birth. Except, in this case, the mother is actively trying to birth, and ends up fighting through the physical inhibition.
Seems plausible to me, at least as a partial explanation.
PS- How do you make indented quotes? They’re so much cleaner looking.
Comment by Archangel — 4 June 2007 @ 6:36 PM
Also- Jason, can you summarize why wheat is no good, again? I remember you wrote about lectins- any info or links for that? I ask because the non-paleo foods like beans and grains, while definitely demonstrating certain problems in terms of our digestibility, can be prepared in ways that make them more (or fully?) digestible. Also, unpasteurized dairy from pastured ruminants eating grass is far different from modern homogenized, pasteurized dairy from cows fed grain. I don’t eat dairy, so I’m not really invested in this, but I think it’s a little trickier than paleo supporters recognize. Another point: perhaps the reason that so few people have lactose ‘tolerance’ is not because most populations weren’t eating dairy, but because those who were in warmer climates had their milk naturally ferment into yogurt or other similar foods, thus transforming the lactose into lactic acid, and they never had to digest lactose-y milk. I don’t know if this pans out with what we know historically about animal domestication patterns (where they really as widespread as this suggests?), but it’s sort of interesting to consider. Any thoughts?
Comment by Archangel — 4 June 2007 @ 6:57 PM
not to quote the same quote twice, but:
“Perhaps even more importantly, hunter-gatherer women were in better shape, walked more, and had a cultural context for birthing less alienating than the modern, medical experience. It has been quite firmly established that a woman’s expectation of pain creates a great deal of the pain she experiences, through mechanisms like tensing her muscles, etc. All thrown together, I would be shocked to hear that hunter-gatherers had entirely painless deliveries, but I would also be shocked if a true hunter-gatherer’s experience was anywhere near as painful as that of a fully civilized woman.”
BINGO. i can’t imagine *any* place more frightening and alienating and counter-productive and *dangerous* than the modern western hospital, for giving birth!
WHEN you finish your article, G., and i am looking forward to reading it, you might also talk about how we can re-learn natural methods for family planning! i have some info i could pass along, on that topic!
Comment by patricia — 4 June 2007 @ 9:13 PM
Archangel, your comment about childbirth was quite interesting, thanks for sharing! (And really, Giuli, you must write that article so that we can move this discussion there, instead of having it in a thread about an unrelated movie!)
As for paleo diet, see, my main problem with this diet is that it’s not really paleo. You wanna eat lots of meat? That means eating lots of meat from factory-farmed animals, whose diet is drastically different from that of their evolutionary wild ancestors, and who don’t get any exercise at all, all of which results in their bodies’ containing several times more saturated fat than the animals that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. So basically, if you eat as much meat as your great-great-great-…-great grandfather the hunter-gatherer ate, you wind up consuming several times the amount of saturated fat that he did. Add to that all the man-made toxins that get accumulated in animal fat, and you begin to understand why meat consumption has been linked to all kinds of diseases that our hunter-gatherer ancestors probably didn’t even know existed in spite of eating a great deal of meat. (And this doesn’t even begin to address the unspeakable cruelty of factory farms nor the spiritual price that one pays when one consumes the flesh of thus tormented animals.)
As for grains… While I react in a less than ideal way to wheat, I don’t find that I react in the same way to other grains, certainly not to rice. (Do you have anything on grains other than wheat, Jason?) As for beans - what’s wrong with beans?… I know there’s been a lot of anti-soy talk, but I was never convinced by it. I get most of my protein from soy; as far as I can tell, I’m not suffering from any negative consequences. (It is always possible, of course, that there are consequences that I haven’t noticed yet.)
Comment by Hasha — 4 June 2007 @ 10:24 PM
Thanks Hasha!
The problems with soy are that they are especially potent in phytic acid and otehr ‘antinutrients,’ which bind to minerals in our digestive tract, and inhibit our absorbion of them. I htink that, like white sugar, they actually decrease the amount of nutrients in our system. This is teh case with all seeds, from grains to pulses/legumes, and is a means to preserve itself until the conditions for its germination are right. This is why seeds need to be soaked and sprouted or fermented: once the seed germinates, those antinutrients are neutralized, and the nutrition is available. But again, soy is especially high in these and even heavy fermentation (as in tempeh or natto) doesn’t remove them all. Also, soy is a goitrogen, and suppresses thyroid function, so it’s more like to cause decreased metabolism and weight gain if consumed on a long-term basis. Traditional east Asian uses of soy, such as in soy sauce, were fermented, and even then were often accompanied by fish broth, high in iodine, and thyroid enhancer, which neutralized the effects.
As for saturated fat, I tend to agree with the Weston A Price folks, as well as the cholesterol skeptics (i.e. http://www.thincs.org/ ), who point out teh scant evidence for diaseas as linked to saturated fat. One of the big studies ‘demontsrating’ the connection used artificially saturated fats, that is hydrogenated or ‘trans’ fats,’ which we’re now realizing are horrible for the body, sicne we have so little evolutionary experience dealing with them (aside from one variety of naturally occuring trans fat found in in butter and a handful of other fats, which effect us in a different and seemingly beneficial way). Here’s a good article about the fat content of Natiev American h/g’s: http://www.westonaprice.org/traditional_diets/native_americans.html
That said, you’re totally right about the difference between modern factory farmed meat, with toxins and torture, versus wild hunted meat. There’s the obvious spiritual element of relating to those who will feed you on a far more egalitarian basis, and there’s the biochemistry of the meat. Jason’s mentioned elsewhere that the difference between these meats is somewhat negligible, and that may be, but I suspect it’s wider than maybe we realize. Nevertheless, I eat pasture raised, grass-fed ruminant and healthfully fed non-ruminant meat regularly. Not every day, but often, and coming from a vegan background, I do feel better. Of course I still hate supporting domestication, but that’s where all my food comes from, and I can only do so much where I am.
Good luck with your food travels!
Comment by Archangel — 5 June 2007 @ 6:17 AM
blockquote
See also thesis #21.
More, but not fully. Cooking will break down some of the nastiest neurotoxins, some of which would kill you instantly, but they don’t do much to break down lectins, nor to change the chemical composition to make those foods digestible in the human body.
That is true, but that doesn’t change the fact that “lactose intolerant” is by far more common than not. It’s the normal mode, after all; mammals are supposed to lose their ability to digest milk. Nor does it change the fact that cow milk has been tailored by evolution for the nutritional needs of baby cows; unlike plants that co-evolve with animals, human needs are not an evolutionary concern for cow’s milk.
We know that the mutation allowing adult digestion of dairy emerged about 4,000 years ago, and only in two places: the Middle East (which might fit your model), and Sweden (which certainly doesn’t). But we do know that it was not widespread.
Most people who have a few slices of bread with every meal don’t notice any effects, either. But beans are another Neolithic food, with many of the same problems: difficulty in digestion (chemically; you may have normalized the symptoms by now, both in physical and mental adaptation), lectins, and neurotoxins. Uncooked soy, for instance, contains an enzyme that blocks the absorption of protein, which leads to starvation even while stuffing your face with meat. Heat breaks that down, but any time that you’re relying on heat breaking something done, you have to expect that it will be imperfect, and some amount of it will survive. Archangel hit a lot of the other points above.
I don’t remember ever saying that the difference between wild and factory-farmed meat was negligible, but if I did, boy was I off-base. There’s a world of difference between them on every level. Nearly all the negative health effects normally associated with eating meat come from the corn-fed, CAFO lifestyle.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2007 @ 10:26 AM
Hey –
Just a quick note on the paleo thing…. i am STILL not 100% paleo, but I’m at about 90% for almost 18 mos now….
So… when I started I did the whole one week food test to see how my body reacted to various food types…. and I found virtually NO effects from anything. But I stuck with the paleo anyway, and after the first month, maybe two, then I discovered that if I ate grains or (properly fermented) beans I most certainly *would* feel it over the next 48 hours.
And don’t even get me started on unfermented beans….
I still eat dairy but about 1/10th as much as I used to — and again, I do notice anytime I have extra….
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 June 2007 @ 10:58 AM
The model would have it the other way around, actually. What it says is: the places were milk stayed cold (like Sweden), would need lactose tolerance, since the milk didn’t curdle naturally into yogurt or other ferments. In the mid-East, it’s warmer, and the need for lactose tolerance would go down, since lactose there has mostly been transformed to lactic acid.
Perhaps ‘negligible’ wasn’t fair. You wrote in ‘Going Paleo:’
But in any event, I don’t think we disagree in this regard. Factory farming animals is horrifically unhealthy on every level.
I have a hard time believing that on first listen, since cancer didn’t seem to be too common until the last century or two, and we’ve been eating grains for quite a while before that. Maybe it was because we didn’t live so long until the twentieth century, when we started eating more meat, like our ancestors? I think that idea was tossed around these parts before. But I don’t know if that’s the case. Did we really live fewer years before the last century and a half? (Who’s the ‘we’ of course, since elites don’t eat the same as the peasants?) I don’t know what exactly causes cancer, but my pet suspicion is Vitamin B17 deficiency. If the theory is correct, then ample B17 means our bodies can recognize when to stop multiplying cells in response to stresses (excess UV rays, various poisons, etc.)
Anyway, lectins could be it, or part of it. I can’t say for sure, yet.
Comment by Archangel — 5 June 2007 @ 8:57 PM
Also, on the no-grains/beans/dairy thing: I perceive a certain amount of dogmatism about it, and perhaps short-sighted refusal. I see the strict paleo-diet advocates somewhat akin to the strict forager advocates, who think that any cultivation, any gardening, is a wrong turn from a million+ years of a successful adaptive strategy. And it’s true, horticulture, broadly speaking, does seem to be a recent adaptation. And maybe it’s not really sustainable in the long term. But it’s a step in the right direction, I think.
In a similar way, the real foods revival, for lack of a better term, in which people are returning to traditionally prepared grains, beans and dairy, does seem to be a step in the right direction. Many people are experiencing greater health on the Maker’s Diet, a WAP-style diet, a Nina Planck ‘Real Food’ diet, etc. This of couse could just be because of the atrocious nature of industrial foods, which our bodies have even less experience dealing with. But maybe thee foods are not so black and white bad.
In fairness, the differences between paleo foods and neo foods are not the same as between foraging/horticulture and agriculture. And in fairness, we’re really talking about just a small handful of species, and we tend to forget that there are millions, millions of edible species that foragers have access to, and that it’s mostly cultural conditioning that leads us to think that the loss of seeds (grains and beans) and ruminant’s milk, and their subsequent byproducts, is a sentence of culinary destitution. That more accurately describes our condition than forager’s.
Nevertheless, I haven’t ruled out the possibility that some of these foods are alright for us, even nutritious and strengthening. Humans are adaptable, and rigidity doesn’t always square with reality.
Comment by Archangel — 6 June 2007 @ 3:31 PM
I agree heartily with most of your last post, Archangel, except that I think a lot of these diets see improvements simply because the standard, industrialized diet is so awful. But there’s a much more basic reason that neolithic foods are necessarily substandard: we haven’t evolved to eat them. There’s nothing “wrong” or “impure” or “bad” about them. Grains make great food for birds, and cow milk is the best food a baby cow could ask for. But adult digestion of lactose is so off the scale for the mammalian existence that it’s going to take a lot more than just 10,000 years to fully adapt. Same with grains. Neither you, nor I, nor any of our great-grandchildren will be able to really use these things as food. It isn’t about purism, either; in a pinch, any hunter-gatherer will eat a handful of wheat. But it’s hardly the kind of thing you want to make a regular part of your diet, because you can’t really eat it.
By way of what I mean; yes, we’ve developed the very basic adaptations so, for instance, wheat will not (usually) kill us immediately. But compare how we handle wheat compared to an honest-to-gods granivore, like your average songbird. We have molars; they have beaks. Both accomplish that part well enough. We both dissolve the carbohydrates into sugars; so far, so good. Birds have lectin-inhibitors—enzymes that bond with the lectins in grains adn neutralize them, so they don’t start acting on the bird’s hormonal receptors. We … well, don’t. That’s huge; that’s the difference between grain being a healthy food, and being a deadly carcinogen.
That’s it exactly, though you’ve more often heard it around here with regards to the claims about cancer among hunter-gatherers. From that direction, it’s fairly absurd, since hunter-gatherers live as long as we do. But earlier generations of farmers really did die in their 30’s and 40’s. Moreover, cancer isn’t all that modern, but it wasn’t as lethal as the plague or famine that so often came first.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 June 2007 @ 5:43 PM
Jason,
I understand, and it’s a good point. The question is, why would we be able to eat these things? There simply was plenty of everything else, and it’s evolutionarily not worthwhile to invest energy in learning to digest these things when they were fairly hard to come by, to begin with.
I think a big part of what I’m perceiving does have to do with the way people behave with regards to this issue, and not with the reasoning behind it.
I get you.
I also think, and I doubt I’ll find any argument, that all sorts of other elements came into play when talking about health and vitality of h/g’s. Much of it was the rest of their lifestyle: the safety and security they experienced, the fresh air they breathed, the vigorous and stimulating movement they engaged in, etc. Basically, they lived and were happy because that’s how they evolved. It makes no sense to think that we’d evolve as miserable, depressed people. I can’t see how people could honestly suggest that the rising rates of depression and mental anguish are just an artifact of better detection, and that in fact, people have always been mentally ill and unhappy with existence writ large. It’s crazy to me. It makes so much more sense to think that what we long for and are happy when we live the way we lived for so long, and that the brief flicker of empire, not the human condition, is what ails us.
Comment by Archangel — 7 June 2007 @ 5:38 PM
Also, You can’t “Learn” to digest something. A species can adapt to digesting something ONLY if some member of that species has some amount of that ability already, and if that ability allows one to produce more and/or healthier offspring. We all have the ability to digest a certain amount of lactose as an infant, adapting to adult lactose tolerance is basically selecting for individuals that keep that tolerance to an older age.
JimFive
Comment by Anonymous — 7 June 2007 @ 10:09 PM
I’m waiting with baited breath for the childbirth article. Does it look at complications like obstetric fistula and cephalo-pelvic disproportion in hunter-gatherers vs. agriculturalists?
Comment by Vicky — 8 June 2007 @ 2:36 PM
Paula wrote: nim >” you’re missing the point. Those documentaries are for people who have already concluded that doomsday is the inevitable, correct, near-future scenario. They’re for people who are done weighing the facts in evidence and have moved on to evaluating existential outcomes. They are produced for a completely different headspace — and a mostly-different audience — than documentaries that are designed to present the facts and figures.”
ok, I’m trying to post this for the umpteenth time. Don’t know what’s wrong with this comments page, but I’m having only a ten per cent success rate getting my posts uploaded. What’s going on?
Trying one more time:
Paula, look at the “What a Way to Go” website again. Daniel Quinn opines….” but I really think it would be more to the point to have What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire seen in every high school classroom in the world!” So Paula, are you saying high school students .. “have already concluded that doomsday is the inevitable, correct, near-future scenario.” ?
This movie seems to contain an ample amount of facts and figures all imbedded in arguments presented to convince. It seems highly unlikely this film is aimed at Ish Con groupies, Teaching Drum grads or Black Clad Messengers from Eugene, Oregon, for example. Not that these kinds of people wouldn’t be interested in the film, only that, judging from the trailers and the websites and links, this documentary would seem to be covering old ground, using some of the same arguments, claims and speculations in the service of promoting specific scenarios. Again, from the trailers and website, What a Way to Go seems short on ..”evaluating existential outcomes”, as you insist. Instead, it seems to lean toward explaining basic assumptions like: “Peaking fossil fuel flow rates”, “Critically degraded ecosystems”, “A changing climate”, “An exploding global population”, “Teetering global economies”, “An unstable political climate”.
If this is preaching to the choir, it must be a choir of slow learners. Either that, or (more plausibly) the film is really just recruiting new choir members.
Comment by nim chimpsky — 9 June 2007 @ 12:30 AM
I don’t know, Nim, but pretty much everything you post goes into Akismet. It seems quite certain you’re a spambot. You don’t go around spamming WordPress installations all day, do you? You’re the only person I’ve seen that this happens to so consistently–the only other person who even comes close is jhereg.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 June 2007 @ 12:32 AM
yaay! It worked this time. So, the website program thinks I’m a spambot? I’ve been called a lot of things before in my life, but spambot? hmmff. I deleted my temp files and cookies, that seemed to work.
Comment by nim chimpsky — 9 June 2007 @ 11:20 AM
I’m afraid it didn’t work; I rescued your comment from the filter. And it’s not just this website, it’s pretty much every WordPress blog thinks you’re a spambot. It’s not anything local on your machine, but some combination of your name, email and IP address has Akismet dead sure that anything from you must be spam.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 June 2007 @ 12:14 PM
Lactose tolerance in East Africa points to a surprisingly recent moment in human evolution
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 June 2007 @ 5:23 PM
I just watched What A Way To Go this evening. It is expletive fantastic. Definitely good to see, good to hear. I always find it encouraging when other people are reaching a similar conclusion: that civilization is unsustainable, that it will collapse . . . and soon.
Comment by Luke — 6 August 2007 @ 11:58 PM