On 'Catching Fire:' Part 2.2: Implications for Raw-Foodists 2

Dispelling Raw-Food Mythology (and Clearing the Way to a Better Understanding)


The Rest of The Posts on this:
Part 1
Part 2.1
Part 2.3

Outgrowing the Garden of Eden

Raw-foodists love to tell an idyllic evolutionary story for humans, whereby we evolved in a balmy tropical Garden of Eden, where we didn't need clothing to keep warm, and where rich, sweet, abundant tropical fruits dripped from the trees year-round and sustained us effortlessly. Some leave their previous lives and move to the tropics in pursuit of this. I did, myself, for a time. Wrangham shows, unequivocally, in my view, that this story never happened. I will discuss how he shows this, add a few comments from my personal experience, and look at the implications for raw-foodists.

A side-note on Wrangham's credibility: it is clear to me that he knows what he is talking about. This isn't because he's professor of Anthropology at Harvard, or because his book is so thoroughly researched and well presented, so much as because of his personal engagement with the issues. He has personally spent time in Africa, studying the living conditions of great apes for extended periods of time. He has followed a chimpanzee around and tasted for himself the kinds of foods selected by it. Although nothing is for certain, I wouldn't be writing about this if I didn't believe that what he has to say is worth paying attention to.

Seasonal Fluctuations in Quantity Available

Working up to his conclusion that 'people with an anatomy like ours today could not have flourished on raw food in the Pleistocene epoch,' pp. 49-50, he dispenses with the possibility of year-round bounty, noting that in every habitat, world-wide, seasonal scarcities are the norm and force reliance on lower-density foods such as roots. 'The notion of a permanently superproductive habitat is unrealistic.' p49. This is one to take down and memorize, I'm afraid! It is the first point of key importance to note. And initially, I disagreed with it!

Personal Experience

I thought of Hawaii and my first thought was 'Coconuts! They are available year-round, nutrient dense, powerful food.' But then I had second and third thoughts. Coconuts do produce year round but you can only harvest young nuts every 4 months or so. And if you harvest all the young nuts, you won't have any mature nuts or sprouts, which are much more nutrient-dense, on the ground. In Hawaii there are many wild coconut groves where you can gather as much as you want from the ground: but part of the reason for this abundance was that relatively few people go after them. If they were a sole staple, you would need a lot of coconuts indeed to sustain even a small population.

Besides coconuts, even on the fruit farms in Hawaii there was seasonality. If you planted carefully, and had several different varieties (hailing from different original provenances), you could have avocados year-round most years. Continuous bananas and papayas are also possible, with cultivation and intentionally timed plantings, and even then there are periods of greater and lesser abundance. Durians and macadamias are highly seasonal, as are the calorie-dense annona fruits. Jakfruits and breadfruit produce continuously, and then fallow for a while, so they have no predictable season, just 'go' continuously; mamey sapotes are like this too.

But the most sobering recognition for me when I moved to the fruit farms in Hawaii was that none of these foods was wild, or native to Hawaii: that in fact, the appearance of year-round abundant fruit (with scanty periods with nothing but a few bananas) was due to the careful planting of a large variety of cultivated trees, shrubs, plants, originating from Asia, Africa, South America… And even then there were lean times in terms of variety and quantity of fruit. In a sense, I learned the lesson that Wrangham tells from my own experience there.

Outside of the fruit farms, in the jungle, there were wild (escaped/naturalized) mangos, avocados, guavas, mountain apples, nonis, besides the coconuts. But these are all seasonal and would not sustain very many people for very long (especially with all the competition from rats, pigs and mongoose).

And the Issue of Quality

Personal Experience

In addition to the fact that no habitat would have provided sufficient quantity of nutrient-dense tree-fruits to sustain humans year-round, the quality of the foods also has to be considered. I mentioned above that none of the wonderful tropical fruits mentioned above was a wild food. (It should be noted here that, while seedling durians, mangoes, avocados and jakfruit (to name but a few) can produce some of the most wonderful fruits, the vast majority of these seedlings produce fruit that is either completely inedible or very inferior. Seedlings also take much longer to fruit than grafted or air-layered trees. Some of the sapotes and annonas cannot reproduce from seed at all, although they are full of big seeds!)

From Wrangham

Wrangham mentions in first chapter that wild fruits eaten by chimps at Kibale National Park in Uganda, analyzed in their lab at Harvard, contain about as much sugar as a modern carrot. As a quality source of calories, Wrangham identifies three problems with wild fruits as compared to modern fruits that have been bred to taste delicious to us: Wild fruits are higher in fiber, lower in sugar and contain many toxins, tannins and other anti-nutrients. He lists several foods that chimps will happily chew on for hours on end that are astringent, bitter and otherwise unpalatable to humans.'In my experience of sampling many wild foods eaten by primates, items eaten by chimps eaten in the wild taste better than foods eaten by monkeys. Even so, some of the fruits, seeds and leaves that chimps select taste so foul that I can barely swallow them. The tastes are strong and rich, excellent indicators of the presence of non-nutritional compounds, many of which are likely to be toxic to humans - but presumably much less so to chimpanzees.' p.51. Lower quantities of simple sugars, higher quantities of fiber, and the presence of toxic compounds all reduce the utility of wild fruit as a viable source of calories for humans.

A smaller point here is that Wrangham's link between fire and hairlessness in humans is more convincing than the mythology that says that we wouldn't need hair if only we lived in the tropics. Even in the tropics, humans need protection from the elements! Yes, the temperature is generally more comfortable, but even in the tropics it can get cold at night. The bug situation bears some thinking about also (could tell some bugbear stories there, lol)…

So, if Wrangham is right, and cooking played a crucial role in our evolution into the beings we are today for as long as 2 million years - and his demonstration is very convincing and plausible - where does that leave raw foodists today? That will be the subject of my final post on this.