I remember my first egg salad sandwich. I’m not sure how old I was, perhaps only four. It was a plain, unadulterated sandwich. No pickles. No lettuce. Just hardboiled egg smashed up with cheap mayonnaise inside a single folded slice of margarine-smeared bread—moist, somewhat sweet, gluten-rich, additive-laced, snow-white Wonder Bread. I was an instant fan. And, in retrospect, it wasn’t so much the egg salad itself that I liked, but the way that the margarine-egg salad combination enhanced the spongy-sweetness of the over-processed bread.
Bread was a staple in my diet as a kid. It was a staple for most other American kids during the 1960s and 1970s as well, and probably still is. At the time of my first egg salad sandwich, the average American got upwards of 30% of their daily calories from white bread—a pound and a half per week—and I am pretty sure that my weekly intake was at least average. I don’t eat much bread these days. In fact, I actively avoid it. I regularly go entire months without eating bread in any form whatsoever. For the last eight years or so, I have been eating “Paleo.”
The Paleo diet is not really a diet in the way that word is typically used. Although it is frequently lumped in with other “fad” diets, and often conflated with the high-fat, high-protein Keto diet, the Paleo diet, in its plainest, non-commercial, non-fad form, is simply the use of ancestral lifestyles as a way of framing food choices. It is different from most other diets in that it is primarily proscriptive, merely a list of food genres not to eat, along with loose suggestions about what to eat instead.
A quick rule of thumb with respect to what is allowed and what is disallowed on the Paleo diet is to ask, for each menu item you are considering, “Would this, or something like this, have been available to eat 20,000 years ago?” And if the answer is “No,” then don’t eat it. The basic idea is that humans have evolved to thrive on a wide variety of food substances—we are, after all, omnivores—but the overwhelming bulk of that “evolution” occurred in a hunter-gatherer context, prior to the agricultural revolution. Agricultural products that were not available in a wild form are foreign substances according to our body’s evolved expectations, and our physical systems are not prepared to deal with them to the extent that they are prepared to deal with more authentically human foods. This precludes dairy products, all modern versions of cereal grains, most legumes, and anything assembled from artificial, factory-generated ingredients.
With all “lifestyle” diets, there are variations in strictness. Some vegetarians still eat eggs and dairy. Some avoid the eggs, and some, vegans, attempt to avoid all animal byproducts entirely. Likewise, with eating Paleo. On the ultra-strict end of things, you have folks who not only avoid grains and legumes, but nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash, melons) as well, because most of the edible nightshades are New World foods, and would not have been available to humans in the Pleistocene; in addition, nightshades contain toxic alkaloids and lectins that have been anecdotally linked to immune system issues in sensitive individuals. I am on the opposite end of the Paleo-strictness continuum. Not only do I eat nightshades, but I also eat grains, legumes, and dairy on occasion—an occasional pizza or deli sandwich—and more-than-occasional wine. I estimate that I eat Paleo close to 90% of the time—actually, any way that you choose to measure that 90%: according to calories (90% or more come in a Paleo-approved form) or meals (one or two meals per week might include cheese or grains or legumes).
All diets are controversial. Sometimes the controversy has to do with differing views of the nutritional benefits. Sometimes it has to do with whether the diet is truly effective relative to its stated purpose—in all but a small minority of cases, the main purpose is weight loss. The Paleo diet has proved controversial for both of these reasons. But it is also controversial for another reason. It is controversial because the mere notion that anything humans did prior to civilization could be superior in an unqualified way to what civilized humans are doing now flies in the face of the deeply entrenched orthodoxy of human progress, a demonstrably false orthodoxy that has been with us since at least as far back as the Enlightenment.
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Civilization is a way of life that, in many ways, runs counter to our evolved physical, social, and psychological expectations as hunter-gatherers, and the mismatch would not be possible to maintain, let alone endure, without a thorough and extremely effective system of justification, a network of beliefs—many of them clearly false—that function to validate and perpetuate the civilized status quo. To challenge these “truths” of civilization is to challenge core notions about what it means to be a human being. The “march of human progress,” the idea that human history is progressive, that human innovation and achievement are continually making things better and better, is a keystone belief. And the fact that it is easily disproven by even the most superficial objective examination of the facts means that it needs to be aggressively defended, actively and proactively.
In July of 2018, there was an article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that got considerable media attention, as scientific articles go, about the discovery of 14,500-year-old bread from an archaeological site in Jordan. The bread that the archeologists found was more along the lines of a tortilla, made from wild harvested grain and the root of an aquatic plant (presumably as a binding agent), and baked in a stone oven by prehistoric people known as the Natufians. The scientific community was supposedly shocked by this finding. Why? What is surprising about a group of people who figured out how to process grass seed in a way that makes it more portable and perhaps more palatable? Imagine that instead of the Natufians we were talking about a group of people in a slum in the Philippines who figured out how to do exactly the same thing. What makes the first case surprising and the second not is that the first is a challenge to the orthodoxy of human progress. Each of the sites I found that reported on this article made a big deal about the dates involved. This “bread” happened too soon to fit easily into the standard narrative of progress. These people were uncivilized, after all. And, in an attempt to assimilate the new information into existing orthodoxy—and in an egregious misapplication of hindsight—it was speculated that the discovery of bread might have played a pivotal role in the beginnings of agriculture itself. The Natufians were living in the part of the world that would later be known as the fertile crescent, the place where the first verifiable large-scale agriculture occurred. The bread’s popularity might have encouraged the intentional cultivation of the grass seed it was made from.
But one of the most flagrant distortions of the findings, in a reflexive attempt to safeguard the orthodoxy of progress, can be seen in an article from the site Geek.com with the headline “Turns Out Early Humans weren’t Paleo – Ancient Bread Oven Discovered.” The article began by denigrating the Paleo diet and its followers: “Paleo dieting is trendy. In essence, its practitioners think it best, or at least try to limit themselves to foods that a few very poorly informed people think early humans ate. Anyone familiar with the bulk of the research on what ancient humans ate could tell you that the practice is silly, but the plan got another nail in the coffin earlier this week.” The folks over at Geek.com are actively antagonistic toward the Paleo diet. And, given that they bill themselves as a technology news weblog, they are clearly committed to promoting the orthodoxy of progress. The use of the pejoratives “silly” and “poorly informed” are not accidental. They reflect a strawman rhetorical strategy designed to nip any potential challenge to the orthodoxy of progress in the bud. Ignoring the fact that the Natufians were not even close to being “early humans”—humans have existed for somewhere between 250,000 and 2.5 million years, depending on how nitpicky you are with your definition of “human”—they are wrong to assume that there is any meaningful relationship between the wild-harvested einkorn grain-tuber flatbread and what ends up on the grocery shelves today, other than that both were baked in an oven. In addition, the Natufian bread meets the major criteria for a Paleo food: wild harvested, non-domesticated, non-GMO seeds milled by hand and mixed with organic wild-harvested tubers is about as far away from Wonder Bread as it is possible to be and still serve as a vehicle for egg salad.
The danger of orthodoxy is that it works behind the scenes, framing our world view and preventing us from detecting critical flaws in our thinking. The orthodoxy of progress crosses political boundaries, showing up in conservative rhetoric and undergirding left-leaning—progressive—ideology. Many folks in the environmental activism community have also fallen prey to its seductive siren song, believing that there are innovative regulatory or technological solutions to the problem of civilization. I cannot count the times I have heard someone say that we should adopt strategy X as a way of slowing down the increase in atmospheric carbon or reducing population growth or limiting species extinction, as if slowing an increase in something or reducing its growth or imposing limits somehow fixes things, or, at the very least, buys us more time so that progress can work its magic. Unfortunately, no matter how much you slow the increase or reduce growth, the fact that things are still increasing and growing means that they are getting progressively worse. Suppose that you had your hand on a burner that was becoming increasingly hot, causing you to suffer increasing levels of pain. Slowing down the rate at which the burner heats up is not going to make your pain go away. You need to pull your hand off the burner for that.
And as far as the Paleo diet goes, food is important, but it is only one part of an authentic human lifestyle. We are also being forced to engage in artificial “processed” behavior and to participate in unnatural forms of interpersonal interaction that leave us socially and emotionally malnourished. The folks over at Geek.com might be right. The Paleo diet might be silly, and its popularity might simply reflect a point in the natural life course of yet another consumer fad. But maybe, just maybe, if you start to eat from an undomesticated plate, you might start to wonder what it would be like to think with an undomesticated mind.
