PART TWO
CHAPTER 6
The Great Nutrition Migration
From the Culinary Garden of Eden to Outer Space
Talking about what constitutes nutritious food as if we’re chemists has turned our focus on chemicals and away from what really matters: ingredient source and cooking tradition.
Most foods in the grocery are not much different from pet foods.
To avoid getting lost in conflicting nutritional paradigms, think like a chef.
According to skeletal records, access to greater quantities of animal products historically produces bigger, tougher bodies.
Access to nature is the real source of genetic wealth.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. —George Orwell
In 1987, my friend Eduardo, an antiquities conservator for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, was called to Laetoli in Northern Tanzania to restore fossilized footprints left by a wandering family of hominids some 3.5 million years ago. Befriended by local tribesmen, Eduardo soon found himself immersed in a world both unimaginably vibrant and deeply spiritual. By day, Eduardo used hypodermic needles to inject poison into tiny plant shoots that threatened to break apart the footprints left by our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors. By night, he shared food—on one memorable occasion, the still-beating heart of a goat—with Tanzanian herder-gatherers, known as Maasai, whose culinary rituals had remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.
Hearing Eduardo describe his time with the Maasai, I was reminded of the kind of awe with which Weston Price described the cultures he visited and the people he studied. Eduardo was most impressed by the
tribal chief, who, while rumored to have been over seventy years old, was still an impressive physical specimen, standing over six-foot-five, completely free of wrinkles, and still able to keep the peace among his several wives. It seems that few people who journey to visit the Maasai have returned home without feeling profoundly changed. Jen Bagget, a travel writer, describes her visit to Tanzania as if she’d discovered Shangri-La. “With distinctively tall and willowy frames and striking facial features, the Maasai are easily the most beautiful people we’ve seen in the world. We were instantly captured by their friendly dispositions, open manner, and natural elegance.” 199
The Maasai represent one of the rare surviving intact and functional indigenous cultures. These societies are, in essence, windows into our past. Reading accounts of travelers who’ve spent time among people like the Maasai, one could get the impression that—as far as human health is concerned—once upon a time really existed. In the good old days, people enjoyed an almost idyllic physiologic prosperity. This prosperity was earned, in large part, by the maintenance of an intimate relationship between the people and the land, their animals, and the edible plants that rounded out their diets. As a result of this intimacy, they talked about food differently than we do. To us food is primarily a fuel, a source of energy, and sometimes a source of guilty pleasure. To people who remain connected to their culinary origins, food is so much more. It is part of their religion and identity. And its value is reinforced with story.
In the beginning, Ngai [the Maasai word for God, which also means sky] was one with the earth. But one day the earth and sky separated, so that Ngai was no longer among men. His cattle, though, needed the material sustenance of grass from the earth, so to prevent them dying Ngai sent down the cattle to the Maasai…. No Maasai was willing to break the ground, even to bury the dead within it, for soil was sacred on account of its producing grass which fed the cattle which belonged to God.200
In a few sentences, this story articulates the cattle’s central position in Maasai life and the necessary injunction against harming the land. As startled as Eduardo was when invited to take his share of a still-beating
goat heart, he might have been more unnerved had they started talking about the total number of calories in their meal, the percentage of their daily intake of protein, carbs, and fat, and the benefits of eating fiber.
Such reductionist terminology would have been out of step with the way the Maasai see the world. If they did start talking that way, as a physician, I’d be concerned. Because, no matter where you live, talking about—and then envisioning—food in such arbitrary categories is bad for your health.
Of course, here in the United States, we talk about food that way all the time. These days, very few of us participate in any deeply rooted culinary traditions, let alone share mythical stories connecting the food we eat to the environment it came from. Like everything else,
“foodspeak” has to meet the requirements of a sound bite culture and is limited to grunting imperatives such as “eat your veggies,” “watch your carbs,” and “avoid saturated fat.” Having lost the old ways of talking about food, we’ve also lost the physiologic prosperity that once endowed us with the gift of perfectly proportionate growth. George Orwell warned that the acceptance of newspeak is no small matter; it can ultimately convince us to trade liberty for totalitarianism.201 So what have we lost by accepting the reductionists’ foodspeak?