Then about 5 years ago I saw how it was destroying our health and I transitioned back to real food that never has coupons. While I’m not foraging to the point that Dana describes (yet!), my paradigm has shifted to the point that my food view is much more like hers now, and we eat with a decidedly primal, evolutionary emphasis. Much of our food has higher price points than the processed coupon options, but our savings from the stuff I no longer buy more than makes up for buying nutrient dense food that I prepare at home.

I’m breaking the supermarket habit, bit by bit, by sourcing our produce about 90% via a local Community Supported Agriculture subscription program (I pay a farm quarterly in advance for a weekly “farm share” box of veggies & some fruit). I don’t keep a large vegetable garden anymore, but I do have some fruit trees/shrubs and herbs that we consume. I buy grass-fed meat (usually bison, but also lamb and pork) in bulk from farmers and ranchers, custom-butchered, frozen, and wrapped to stock my separate freezer. We eat no wheat anymore and the garden’s hummingbirds I feed go through more sugar than my family does. Our eggs come from a neighbor’s coworker who keeps some chickens on her horse ranch. I buy things like olive oil from local farmer’s markets (living in So Cal does mean I am near some great food producers) and I make my own condiments and dressings. My weekly trip a small, locally owned grocery store or Trader Joe’s rarely is large enough to fill two grocery bags anymore. I don’t think I go into a conventional supermarket more than 3-4 times a year anymore and it feels really “foreign” when I do (especially the cereal aisle).

1. It’s a myth that food was “scarce” before the advent of agriculture. I know the experts bat that idea around all the time and it makes sense because it fits into the Nasty, Brutish, And Short cultural narrative we like to tell ourselves. But what actually happened when agriculture was developed was that our definition of “food” narrowed considerably.

I agree, agriculture made food easier to come by, and meals more of a choice than a happenstance.

Even the dandelions you love to hate make an excellent salad before they go into bloom.

Although I don’t forage as a way of life, I do forage my yard for chickweed, dandelion and nasturtium that we add to our meals, so I am familiar with the idea of what you’re saying.

We also see fewer *parts* of an animal as food. That narrows down our potential diets considerably–making us more, NOT less, vulnerable to famine.

Precisely my point. Many of us who eat whole foods but don’t shop there (Whole Foods, capitalized) practice foraging and eating offal. I love putting chicken feet in my bone broth and making delectable delights from liver, kidney and sweetbreads. These organ meats are nutrient-dense and very inexpensive because most American consumers think they are inedible.

2. I have experimented with low-carbing a few times over the past several years. What I find is that if I get my carb intake down enough to drop my insulin level, I stop being so hungry. I have lots of body fat to burn off, so that’s part of it. But, long story short, I don’t go around craving sugar all the time. No need for it. My body’s getting the energy it needs.

Again we are in agreement. You are able to eat a low-carb diet, however, in spite of industrial food, not because of it. Carbs are artificially injected into foods into which they simply don’t belong either to encourage us to eat more of them or because they are cheap fillers, making the more costly ingredients stretch further. When you work hard to avoid carbs, your body is able to break the cycle of “Ooh! Carbs! More, please!” and you aren’t hungry as often. It’s also a dandy way to cure sugar cravings.

So I think the desire for sweetness is an acquired or cultural trait, not an innate/genetic one. The existence of individual human beings who do not like overly sweet food seems to bolster my point. They’re not exactly rare.

While I see your point, I also disagree to a certain degree. Breastmilk, the first food of nearly all humans until the twentieth century is very sweet. If our brains were not designed to enjoy sweet, many more babies would suffer a failure to thrive.

I think people become overweight because we eat wrong, not because we eat too much. Eating the proper food for our species is rather self-correcting; when we’ve had enough, we feel full. Being hungry when we’re obese, and being obese in the first place, is a sign of inadequate nourishment, not over-adequate.

Again, exactly the point I was trying to make in my post. I can eat a lot more (in quantity) of a calorie-dense, nutrient-sparse food than a calorie-dense, nutrient-dense one. My body tells me I’ve had enough and I stop. It isn’t a matter of quantity, it’s a matter of quality. We eat less on our nutrient-dense diet than we did on our Standard American Diet, not because we were overeating, but because we were undernourished.

The very best example I can give you from recent meals is our Rib Eye Steak meal. We’ve had a few of these: a couple times when rib eyes went on sale at the store and a couple more when rib eyes were in our grassfed CSA box. Two rib eye steaks in the CSA box, split among the 7 of us fill us up to the point we are done eating. The grocery store steaks are not any smaller, but I would buy and cook 4 to feed us all.

Our Standard American Diet required me to feed a snack to the children every afternoon. They were looking for nutrition, I was shoveling the cheapest food possible at them. After they broke the habit of asking me for a snack because nutrient-dense snacks (liver pate, kombucha, etc.) were available for them to eat whenever they wanted it, they started snacking much less. So yes, quality made a huge difference.

Gary Taubes is a fascinating read on this subject if you haven’t already.

I have heard him speak and read a little of his work. He’s on my “continuing projects” list!

I think we agree more than we disagree, Dana!

I hate to say it, and I don’t mean to pick at you, but I find this very difficult to believe, for a few different reasons.

1. It’s a myth that food was “scarce” before the advent of agriculture. I know the experts bat that idea around all the time and it makes sense because it fits into the Nasty, Brutish, And Short cultural narrative we like to tell ourselves. But what actually happened when agriculture was developed was that our definition of “food” narrowed considerably.

See, there’s a difference between “food” and “edible.” There are literally thousands and thousands of foods that are edible to us, on six of seven continents. But we only consider a handful of them “food,” and our definitions vary widely according to culture and custom. In some cultures cows’ brains are “food”; in others they’re barely considered “edible.”

It took me getting in touch with people who practice modern-day foraging to really understand this. I can walk out my front door and point out at least five edible plants to you, and I don’t even have a garden. There is abundant food all over this city. Most of it is uncultivated–weeds, basically. Even the dandelions you love to hate make an excellent salad before they go into bloom.

It was no different when our pre-agricultural ancestors lived. And even when the plants died out in autumn, there were animals to hunt. Again, we think of a lot fewer animals as “food” these days than we did when we hunted them. We also see fewer *parts* of an animal as food. That narrows down our potential diets considerably–making us more, NOT less, vulnerable to famine.

It doesn’t help that our fates are tied to how the fields fare. When we could travel with the food supply, it was a different matter. We can’t travel with it anymore. No land, no harvest, no meal–and people starve.

2. I have experimented with low-carbing a few times over the past several years. What I find is that if I get my carb intake down enough to drop my insulin level, I stop being so hungry. I have lots of body fat to burn off, so that’s part of it. But, long story short, I don’t go around craving sugar all the time. No need for it. My body’s getting the energy it needs.

Pre-agricultural humanity would have gone through cycles with this. During the summer they may have craved more sweets and starches to build up a fat reserve for the winter. (We have not always had tame fire, so whether or not we hibernated, we did sleep a lot more during the colder months.) As the sweets and starches came exclusively from honey and from plant foods, neither of which was available in winter, we wouldn’t have craved them during that time–what would be the point? And by then we’d be burning fat reserves, not because we were starving, but because we were eating in a different way and causing a different endocrine response. If you eat protein, you get an insulin release, but you also get a corresponding release of glucagon–the hormone that counterbalances insulin. Fat causes no insulin release at all. If you’re not constantly spiking insulin, you’re not constantly craving sugar.

3. It’s worth noting that primates are an insectivore order. Every primate is a bug-eater at bottom. Some of us have chosen to add other foods to our diets; gorillas and orangs eat leaves and fruits, and human beings went on to scavenging and hunting larger animals, then developed grain agriculture (a move Jared Diamond terms the “biggest mistake” we have ever made, metabolically and sociologically speaking). But except for a few insects that produce sweet substances–and the one we would have encountered most often, the bee, was too dangerous to confront on a regular basis with us having no natural defenses against them–most insects do not taste sweet. So I think the desire for sweetness is an acquired or cultural trait, not an innate/genetic one. The existence of individual human beings who do not like overly sweet food seems to bolster my point. They’re not exactly rare.

I think people become overweight because we eat wrong, not because we eat too much. Eating the proper food for our species is rather self-correcting; when we’ve had enough, we feel full. Being hungry when we’re obese, and being obese in the first place, is a sign of inadequate nourishment, not over-adequate.

Gary Taubes is a fascinating read on this subject if you haven’t already.