Meat Eaters

This week I read a fascinating article written in 1935 by Vilhjalmur Stefansson who lived with the Inuit for about 11 years in the early 1900s. He wrote of his life with them and the diet they consumed-- fish, seal, polar bears -- no vegetables or fruits at all, yet the people were healthy and without disease.  (They had not yet started eating white-man food.) They ate every bit of a fish, including the head, and they tossed the heads into a pit where they would rot, and then they would eat them. It is impossible for me to imagine eating things like that yet it  was only about 100 years ago. I have an idea that we simply can not comprehend what a paleo/caveman would have eaten.

Some detractors of the paleo diet say that ancient men might have been able to kill small animals but could not have hunted and run down large animals to kill them.  Since some modern primitive men can run down animals, ancient man must have hunted meat this way; see this rather astounding 7-minute video of the San Hunting in the Kalahari; the hunter ran for 8 hours until the kudu dropped from exhaustion. (I always wonder about the camera man who was running along too.)

This short 3-minute video illustrates another way ancient men could have obtained meat: by stealing it from animals that did the killing. This video is pretty amazing:  Three Men vs 15 Lions

"You see, Lions and the Dorobo, we feed each other. If we hunt a large animal, we take away as much as we can, but leave the rest for the lions to feed on. And sometimes the lions kill a really fat animal and we say, lets take this one. It is not simple, you have to track carefully and quietly. You are scared.. thinking – will I be mauled?

But when you are hungry and know lions have killed first – you take your chance. There are days when we eat only what the lion has killed. We live on those lion kills until we finally make our own kills."

As the paleo diet is discussed more and more in mainstream outlets, there will be those who try to debunk it by saying "You can't eat like paleo man!" -- so does this mean that we should eat boxed processed junk? No, eating real food is still going to be healthier; maybe we didn't run it down in the bush, but at least we can buy 100% grass-fed beef.

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Cicada skewers for sale  in China

On another topic...I found this in a pot of dirt today, it seems to be a cicada larva. Nic mentioned that the cicadas are due out again this year (we saw a lot two summers ago, apparently these are on a different schedule). I tossed it on the patio and when I sprinkled water on it, the tail wiggled. No way would I eat this thing, so I guess I don't qualify as paleo!