economics

I'm going to call the paleo diet portrayed in the media the PaleoStrawman diet. It contains only lean meat and non-starchy vegetables. The meat comes from factory farms. The latest place it has showed up on is NPR, where anthropologist Barbara King contends that it is not the way to a healthy future for the world. She says she has interacted with paleo dieters online and has read Paleo magazine, but it doesn't show at all.

She says:

• Paleo means more factory farmed animals
• Paleo means more grains diverted from feeding the hungry to feeding livestock
• Paleo has a dearth of carbohydrates
• Paleo is a monolith
• Paleo is bad for a crowded planet

I think there are only a few holdouts in the lean meat camp. The no-starch camp is in its death throes as we speak, embracing a doctor who believes anyone who eats carbohydrates has diabetes and drfiting further into denialism territory. There is not a single paleo book on the market that I can think of that advocates eating grain-fed meat. PaleoStrawman has gotten considerable criticism from within the ancestral health community.

But in the end, it doesn't matter, because even if the paleo diet involved chomping down on grain-fed steaks all day, it would have nothing to do with our ability to feed the world. 

We all want to believe our diet has the power to change the world, but it does not. If every person in NYC chose to stop eating grain-fed meat today, it would not help people in Africa. When grain doesn't go to the feedlot, it doesn't get sent to Africa either. Farmers would chose to grow less grain or grow it for biofuels. We already produce enough food to feed the entire population of the world. What is hurting poor countries is political corruption and poor infrastructure. What poor countries need is good leaders and investment in infrastructure and education. 

As for vegetarianism and factory farming, sadly, the worst offenders in factory farming are vegetarian products such as dairy and eggs. Vegetarianism is more efficient compared to grain-fed meat partially because the industrialization of eggs and dairy has made these industries very productive. However, they are the most cruel and environmentally destructive animal industries besides the industrial hog farm industry. Jonathan Safran Foer, certainly no paleo dieter, recommends in Eating Animals that if you care about animals, conventional eggs and dairy are the first foods you eliminate.

As for the anthropology, it makes little sense to worry about australopithecines being vegetarian, a hominid with significantly different morphology. Or to worry about the local context very much. Of course people ate diverse diets then. You can eat a diverse locally-based paleo diet now. And for those of us in the North, it makes absolute sense to eat meat rather than trucked-in grain products. Solutions for world hunger do not have to involve the same diet for everyone. Sustainable solutions will be local solutions.

There was an excellent and rather balanced article by anthropologists on the paleo diet in Good magazine that I do recommend.

From a New Yorker article I was reading about eating bugs

At the conference, Dunkel talked about her frustration working in West Africa, where for decades European and American entomologists, through programs like U.S.A.I.D. and British Locust Control, have killed grasshoppers and locusts, which are complete proteins, in order to preserve the incomplete proteins in millet, wheat, barley, sorghum, and maize. Her field work in Mali focusses on the role of grasshoppers in the diets of children, who, for cultural reasons, do not eat chicken or eggs. Grasshoppers contain essential amino acids and serve as a crucial buffer against kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency that impedes physical and neurological development. In the village where Dunkel works, kwashiorkor is on the rise; in recent years, nearby fields have been planted with cotton, and pesticide use has intensified. Mothers now warn their children not to collect the grasshoppers, which they rightly fear may be contaminated.

Fail. If you rely on insects you can be perfectly healthy. Near the equator, insects are an important food source for foraging people. There are even several species that are very rich in important fats. I'd rather eat locusts than a grain like millet, which is responsible for goiter in many Africas. 

For more info on stupid food aid mistakes, I highly suggest The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by Wililam Easterly. 

 In his latest editorial, cookbook author turned food expert (I don't know how), Mark Bittman argues that our instinct to gorge on meat is what is causing people all over the world to eat too much meat. 

Once, we had to combine hunting skills and luck to eat meat, which could supply then-rare nutrients in large quantities. This progressed — or at least moved on — to a stage where a family could raise an annual pig and maybe keep a cow and some chickens. Quite suddenly (this development is no more than 50 years old, even in America), we can drive to our nearest burger shop and scarf down a patty — or two! — at will.

Because evolution is a slow process, this revolutionary change has had zero impact on the primal urge that screams, “Listen, dummy, if you can find meat you’d better eat it, because who knows when you’ll eat it again!” At some point our bodies may adapt to consuming unlimited quantities of meat or — a better alternative — our minds will crave less. Right now, primal urge and modern availability form a deadly combo.

We’re crack addicts with a steady supply. Beyond instinct and availability, there’s a third factor: marketing. When you add “It’s what’s for dinner” to the equation, you have a powerful combination: biology, economics and propaganda all pushing us in the same direction.

So do hunter-gatherers gorge on as much meat as they can possibly get their hands on? No. The human body is actually not very inclined to gorge on meat, at least lean meat. I made an impulse comment that got highlighted:

The narrative that humans are evolved to crave large quantities of meat is a false one. Hunter-gatherers regularly discard game that is too low in fat. When the Mbuti foragers are surrounded by large amounts of game, but they have no starch, they will say they "have no food." Anthropologist John Speth has written extensively on the false myth of protein. Protein in large amount is stressful for the human body to digest, to the point where it's possible for hunter-gatherers to die of rabbit starvation when they have only lean game. Human evolution is a continuous struggle for starch and fat, not protein.
 

I forgot to mention the other factor I think is the major one in the human struggle- water, which is important because protein also increases water requirements (so much for the idea that humans evolved to run for miles and miles on the hot arid savanna in pursuit of some lean antelope). In John D. Speth's magnum opus on the subject, he discusses this and in the end argues that hunter-gatherers that hunt this way like some San do it for cultural reasons, not to procure needed nutrients. It's more about sex than food. 

So why are people eating so much meat? It's interesting to think about what KIND of meat people are now eating so much of. I pulled up my beloved FAOSTAT, the friend to everyone who does agecon, and ran some data on food supply kcal per capita a day in the US:

Guess mutton and goat were never very popular. Total meat consumption has definitely increased, but it seems like it's mostly from the ultimate crap meat: chicken. I'm betting it isn't roast chicken with French herbs either. I'd love to get data on this, but I know that most of the dark meat is exported. If anyone thinks we are evolved to gorge on white chicken meat, I'd like you to try cooking some tonight with very little seasoning. I doubt you are going to have the desire to eat much of it. Fortunately, companies figured out that if you bread it and/or fry it, it's much better. I wonder what percentage of chicken consumed is breaded/fried? Either way, I don't think the meat part here has much to do with evolution. The desire for fat and carbs is what makes us gorge on fried chicken. 

China is interesting too: 

Seems like pork is the major engine of meat consumption there. At least they have taste. I could definitely gorge on pork. Unfortunately, much of it is probably factory farmed. 

These graphs are in calories, so it's quite amazing how poultry is above fat/pigmeat for the US considering that the latter is so much more calorically dense. 

Let me know if you find anything else interesting in FAOSTAT!

What purpose in these deeds
Oh fox confessor, please
Who married me to these orphaned blues
"It's not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder
When the death of your civilization precedes you,"- Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

I've been reading Tyler Cowan's The Great Stagnation, which is what he calls the period we are in. I believe it. Maybe it's just the fact I graduated college in this period, but it does feel like stagnation is a very palpable part of my life. I sometimes imagine I am part of a new sort of people- the nouveau poor. We make much less money than our parents did at our ages and don't have many career advancement opportunities. We aren't impoverished, but some of us linger below the federal poverty line, as I did for the year or so after I graduated.

But we grew up in the middle or upper middle class and went to college, so we don't fit the "poor" stereotypes. We are used to a certain standard of living and maintain it somewhat, even if it means scrimping by to do it or approaching it in a novel way. We live in pretty nice areas, but share our tiny apartments with an inordinate amount of roommates. We eat good food, but save money on it through buying clubs, community gardens, and DIY processing. We shop in thrift stores and scavenge furniture from the trash. Time consuming things like canning or backyard chickens don't have a high opportunity cost for us because there isn't much work to go around. Most of us are "creatives," but almost all of us have college degrees that aren't easily convertible to work skills such as those in English or History. A lot of us pay the bills in unrelated fields as baristas or waiters. 

If we can afford to have families, many of us chose to spend more time with the children realizing it doesn't make sense to work 40 hours of a job that has nothing to do with what you like so you can give 80% of your income to paying someone else to raise your children and quite a bit of the rest to a government that seems like a dying dinosaur. In fact, there is a general return to homemaking and a greater value placed on quality of life. More time is spent on things like cooking and gardening. The paradox is while we might make less money than our parents did, we might be much healthier since many of us have more time for good food, family, and exercise. The idea that housekeeping might be banal has fallen in the face of the fact that most of us will never posses the fulfilling careers our college counselors promised. 

Other nouveau poors might be more stressed because they still have dreams about their creative career and are trying to balance it with bartending. But most of us have given up on that sort of thing. It's not that there is no innovation or ambition, we're just learning we shouldn't base our lives on our careers. 

The downsides are real of course. There is a worry that men aren't "manning up", but in reality many men and women seem stuck in adolescence because they cannot afford to start households. Another problem is that some people spend an exorbitant amount of money on education that may not have much of a payoff, such as graduate school in British Literature or expensive private colleges. As a result, many of us have large amounts of debt and no hope of ever paying it off.*

*I've been lucky in this respect since I went to a state school