100 Million Years of Food, page 7
One time, while studying anthropology in Los Angeles, I found myself with a few days off. Not having made many friends in L.A. by that point, I packed up a tent, a stove, some tins of octopus and sardines, and a couple of gallons of water in plastic jugs and piled everything into the hatchback of my ’92 Ford Escort. During a recent teaching session, an archaeology student had demonstrated the art of knapping, or shaping a stone tool—an Acheulean hand-axe, in this case. The exercise seemed dangerous but fun, so I headed off to the desert to see if I could bang out some hand-axe replicas myself. I set up camp in a valley without a soul in sight. Overlooking my campsite was a long-abandoned dwelling high on top of a hill. I hiked up the boulder slope and explored the foundation ruins, wondering what kind of man would choose to lead his family out here and how long it took before the wife packed up her suitcases and left her misfit ex-husband alone to ponder life in this desolate spot. The landscape was painted in ochre and sandstone, peppered with forlorn Joshua trees, yucca, and low thorny bushes, the shadows distinct and long. I picked up different kinds of rocks and chipped away at them, and eventually, after cutting my hands, succeeded in creating a crude hand-axe, with none of the smooth curves on the Acheulean hand-axes but of approximately the right proportions.
There were a few skinny gray hares hopping about. I picked up my hand-axe and stalked them, trying to ding one with the weapon. I could not even get within a few feet of hitting one because the hares were too fast and wary and my aim was terrible. Hungry, discouraged, and dusty with all the running about, I gave up and started back to camp. Perhaps that night I would crack open a tin of sardines in tomato sauce and gaze at the stars; perhaps, before the sun disappeared altogether, I would have time to carve my initials into the hand-axe—or someone else’s initials? I could spend the night under the blazing stars pondering which lady-friend would be most impressed with the symmetry of my crude handiwork. Who knows, if the fellow up on the hill had been a better knapper, he might have been able to woo another wife for company in this lonely desert.
*
The Paleo diet, often slammed by mainstream nutritionists as one of the worst contemporary diet plans, takes its name from the interval when stone tools first appear in the archaeological record, more than 2 million years ago. Similar to the Atkins/low-carb diet, it embraces meat and fat. The standard argument is that humans evolved to eat meat, fish, vegetables, and occasionally fruit and tubers, and any dietary innovations that came afterward, like milk, wheat, potatoes, corn, and beans, were too recent for evolution to have caught up and modified our genes and digestive systems. (Although people who believe in human evolution and those who subscribe to literal interpretations of the Bible have generally quarreled in the past, some of them now find themselves strange bedfellows in their unity concerning the virtues of meat.) The Paleo diet looks and sounds evolutionary, but some paleoanthropologists dismiss it as overly simplistic, a caricature of actual evidence—like dividing the world into good guys and bad guys.
Supporters of the Paleo diet argue that it was not just the Inuit who could thrive on a meat-rich diet. They point to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a second-generation Icelandic American anthropologist, writer, and Arctic explorer in the beginning of the twentieth century, as one example. Stefansson and one of his Danish expedition mates, Karsten Andersen, thrived on boiled mutton and mutton broth for a year, thereby settling a long-standing debate about whether it was possible for humans to live on meat alone.19 All the meat eating on his Arctic expeditions didn’t seem to adversely affect Stefansson’s health. He was romantically involved with the American novelist Fannie Hurst, had a child with an Inuit woman, and finally settled down with a twenty-eight-year-old woman when he was sixty-two. He passed away from a stroke at the age of eighty-two.
Recent genetic studies offer potential backing for Paleo and low-carb diets in combating obesity. It turns out that people vary in the number of genes required to produce salivary amylase, an enzyme used to break down starches in the mouth. Most people have around five copies of this gene; the overall range is between two and thirteen. People who have fewer copies of this gene are more likely to be obese. In theory, this means that eating fewer starches should help these people lose weight, but this depends critically on what people eat instead of starches. Substituting fat for starch increases the palatability of food, which could make people eat more; substituting animal protein for starch may trigger similar problems. Substituting plant protein for starch might seem like a good idea, but then too much protein leads to protein intoxication and lack of palatability, which will tempt dieters to binge on foods that taste good, like starches, fat, and meat, and we’re back to square one. In the future, it might be possible to take pills that mimic the effect of salivary amylase. In the meantime, as we will discuss later in the book, the only measure so far that is effective in reducing weight is to increase moderate physical activity, principally walking, and to decrease sitting time.20
Committing to carb avoidance means calories have to come from somewhere other than starches or protein; humans can only tolerate protein consumption comprising a maximum of about 40 percent of total caloric intake, due to the toxicity of nitrogen compounds stemming from protein digestion. (During his yearlong meat-only experiment, Stefansson insisted that he be allowed to eat meat with a lot of fat on it, to counteract the effects of eating a lot of protein.) This leaves saturated fat as a major source of Paleo energy, because there’s only so much olive, avocado, or fish oil a person would want to consume. Rather than starve, some Paleo enthusiasts plow into fatty meat. The problem is the supermarket version of Paleolithic diets: A day’s worth of stalking wild game and snacking on bugs is replaced by beef steaks, sausages, pork chops, and fried eggs, fatty rich fare beyond the dreams of most hunter-gatherers. Few if any nutritionists would object to a historical hunter-gatherer diet, whether it be based on deer or nuts and grasses.
Paleo and low-carb enthusiasts, however, are apt to characterize these kinds of criticisms as nitpicking, countering with a legitimate observation: They simply feel and perform better—at the office, in the bedroom, at the gym—eating a lot of meat, fat, and cholesterol; so take that, you lousy politically correct pudgy carb-eaters. As it turns out, there is some scientific justification behind the connection between meat, mood, and sex. One key aspect in this connection is cholesterol. Our livers and intestines synthesize most of our cholesterol, but in Western diets, 12 percent to 15 percent of serum cholesterol comes from dietary sources such as eggs, oysters, whole milk, and meat.21 Humans use cholesterol in a wide array of body tissues and to manufacture hormones like cortisol, estrogen, and testosterone. Women have far lower levels of testosterone than men, but the hormone is still critical for sex drive in women. Flagging libido can be treated using testosterone patches, creams, or injections, but pundits throughout history have advised using cholesterol-rich foods to spice up your love life. Brains, crustaceans, mollusks, cuttlefish, octopus, and oysters were used as aphrodisiacs in ancient Greece, imperial Rome, and medieval Europe.22 Oysters were potent symbols of eroticism in seventeenth-century Flemish allegorical paintings.23 T. S. Eliot made reference to the association between oysters and lust in his gritty poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Writing in the eleventh century, Constantinus Africanus described the following cholesterol-rich aphrodisiac:
Another medicine which is taken before intercourse because it is amazingly stimulating: take the brains of thirty male sparrows and steep them for a very long time in a glass pot; take an equal amount of the grease surrounding the kidneys of a freshly-killed billy-goat, dissolve it on the fire, add the brains and as much honey as needed, mix it in the dish and cook until it becomes hard; make it into pills like filberts and give one before intercourse.24
The sexual powers of lobster were acknowledged in a poem written in 1713:
The Lusty Food helps Female Neighbours,
Promotes their Husband’s, and their Labours;
And in return much Work supplies
For that Bright Midwife of the Skies.
Lobster with Cavear in fit Places,
Gives won’drous Help in barren Cases;
It warms the chiller Veins, and proves
A kind Incentive to our Loves;
It is a Philter, and High Diet,
That lets no Lady sleep in Quiet.25
Consumption of cholesterol and fats of all kinds (except trans fats, which are found mostly in industrially produced foods and red meats) also props up high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels.26 When HDL cholesterol tanks, men are at greater risk of impotence and erectile dysfunction. Nuts, employed as aphrodisiacs by ancient Greeks, also boost HDL cholesterol levels.27 Widely used cholesterol-lowering statin drugs inadvertently suppress testosterone and increase the risks of erectile dysfunction and diminished libido.28 People with low cholesterol levels are also more likely to be irritable or depressed, get suspended or expelled from school, and perish from violent deaths, including accidents, homicides, and suicide.29
Thus there is considerable scientific evidence that eating generous portions of animal foods is likely to put one in a good mood. On the other hand, eating a lot of meat likely predisposes girls to reach sexual maturity at an earlier age and thereby die sooner as well.30 By the cold calculus of natural selection, that’s an acceptable compromise, because it would have meant more babies starting out life earlier. Evolution doesn’t necessarily favor animals that live longer; all else being equal, evolution favors animals that have more compact life spans, reproducing and dying sooner, for the same reason that a nimble company that produces stylish but cheap gadgets or clothing can outcompete brands that take longer to adapt and reach the market.
This is the “life-history” view of diet and health: More robust health at an early age comes at the expense of longevity. Prostate cancer also has the hallmarks of a life-history disease. The nutrients that tend to put men at higher risk of getting prostate cancer—calcium, zinc, fat—were scarce in ancestral diets, but a diet rich in them, along with higher calorie intake in general, would make a man taller, more buff, and richer in sperm count, and thus a stronger contender in the mating market.31
In other words, the robustness of meat-eaters and the long lives of meat-abstainers are two sides of the same biological coin. It all depends on how you define healthy. Does healthy mean being in a great mood and being fertile and stronger at a younger age, or does healthy mean delaying cancer for a couple of years and hanging out with your great-grandchildren? This is a question that each of us—and especially parents—needs to carefully consider when thinking about the Paleo diet and other meat-heavy regimes.
*
Ah, there’s someone else knocking on the door.… Everyone, please make room, and I mean a lot of room, because I’d like to introduce a final guest at history’s meat-eating table: your cannibal cousin.
The evidence for cannibalism is omnipresent throughout the animal kingdom. Insects, spiders, leeches, octopus, fish, salamanders, frogs, and birds do it; so do mammals ranging from mice to polar bears, gorillas, and chimpanzees; so did our hominin ancestors, in places like Spain and Iran and China, judging from cut-marks on bones, telltale traces in feces, and cooking residues; and so did modern humans, all around the world. Like most animal cannibals, hominins usually ate infants and juveniles because they put up less of a fight, though fallen enemies were fine dining (or treated like garbage) and deceased relatives were honored.32 Everything was gobbled, including muscle, marrow, and brain, except perhaps the gallbladder, reported to be bitter.33 The cannibalistic habit was so widespread that it may have even left a genetic signature in our DNA, a gene variant that confers resistance to a disease from eating prion-infected brains.34 When viewed in broad perspective, what’s most notable about human cannibalism is how squeamish we’ve become about it.35 As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, in part that’s because humans view flesh as more than just food—it’s a cultural hydra writhing with taboos and scandal.
THE PARADOX OF FISH
Xin dung che mam tanh hoi.
Co mam co ruoc moi roi bua an.
Please don’t turn up your nose at smelly fish sauce.
Only with fish sauce and pickled shrimp do you get a real meal.
—Vietnamese saying
My mother never returned to visit Vietnam after she emigrated to Canada, but half of my genes are from her, and so as my plane lands in Saigon, it is as if she has come back to the homeland, the ghost of her DNA expressed in my features—the same dry skin prone to eczema, the same thin hair—and behavioral tendencies, like an aversion to noise, crowds, and being rushed. I’ve booked a windowless third-story hotel room in gringo-grunge Pham Ngu Lao. The hotel driver who picks me up at the airport is initially taciturn, but when I tell him that I am writing a book about traditional food, he becomes animated in describing his Mekong Delta hometown specialty, banh xeo, a kind of pancake that features bean sprouts, assorted greens, and shrimp in a quick-fried rice-paper wrap.
“You say you’re Vietnamese and you don’t know banh xeo?” he exclaims.
It’s been five years since I last passed through Saigon, and I struggle to decipher the driver’s slippery southern Vietnamese patter, with its emasculated consonants. The streets in Saigon seem more vivid, more fluorescent, denser, busier, cleaner. They sprout at angles and places that I don’t recognize.
Wishing to learn about Vietnam’s famous fermented fish sauce, I surf the Internet at my hotel and come across an article about a fish sauce entrepreneur, Hang Thi Dao. As bratty boys growing up in Canada, when my brothers and I caught the stink of Vietnamese fermented fish sauce wafting from a pot bubbling on the stove, we would shriek like monkeys and flee to the basement. (Fermented soybean paste, brought out onto the table to season boiled pork and shrimp, was found even more repellant.) But that was more than thirty years ago; a lot can change in thirty years. I look up Hang on Facebook. It turns out that we have a mutual friend, so I send her an introductory message.
A few days later I board an airplane to Da Nang on the southern coast. From there, I catch a bus with Hang’s earnest and polite younger brother. I buy him and myself a Vietnamese banh mi (submarine sandwich), oily processed meats set in cilantro, butter, pickled radish and carrots, in a paper-crisp baguette that shatters upon biting. The seating on the bus is cramped, and there’s no air-conditioning on a humid July morning, but since Hang’s brother peppers me with questions about society and economics, the time flies by.
We arrive at Hang’s family home, where the low house faces the trucks and long-distance buses hurtling along Highway 1. Hang welcomes me with a broad, smiling, guileless face, as if we’ve been friends for decades. She proudly shows me a papaya tree in the backyard just starting to bear fruit. A sow grunts from the family pigsty while I wash off grime from the journey. Behind the house are the remnants of a long, crumbling runway, interspersed with patches of tough weeds. Located next to the demilitarized zone, the province of Quang Tri was bombed with the greatest proportion of ordnance during the Vietnam War, much of it still unexploded and a menace to the local populace.
Hang and her brother take me to a river where their father used to work as a fisherman. The fish, however, are mostly gone. Sand dredging destroyed their habitat, Hang explains. To satisfy the demands of construction work, machines were brought down to the river to extract sand. As a result, there were landslides, houses collapsed, and families were forced to migrate. Moreover, the riverbeds here used to be rich habitats for shrimp, mussels, and fish. Hang says that now all that remains in this river is water and sand. To compound difficulties, Central Vietnam is known as the poorest area of the country due to geographical bad luck: The summers are searing, while during the monsoon months, rains flood the land and cause havoc. The eldest of eight children, Hang remembers walking to school while other students rode by on bicycles, unwilling to associate with her because of her family’s poverty. “My family didn’t have a clock. I just got up when it was dark. Sometimes I arrived at school when no one was there,” she recalls. From the age of twelve, she helped her father fish on the river or sold the catch to farmers in the mountains. When farmers lacked cash, she bartered the fish and prawns for cassava, rice, sweet potatoes, and other produce. A hardworking student, Hang earned a scholarship to study agriculture in Hue and then another one for a master’s degree in Australia in sustainable development. Inspired by a mentor who pointed out to her the value of Vietnamese traditional cuisine, Hang returned to Quang Tri to set up a new brand of fish sauce. Produced by the farmers and fishermen in her area without the use of artificial chemicals, it is bottled under the brand name of Bamboo Boat (Thuyen Nan), a reference to her humble past.
As the sun sets over the old runway, the sky transforms from vivid blue to searing violet, an intense pureness of color rarely witnessed in smog-wreathed East Asia. When we return from the river, Hang, her mother, and three of her brothers sit down to eat around a table set up in front of the house and the highway traffic rushing by. Arrayed about the table are the elements of a Central Vietnamese rural feast: fried fish, caramelized pork, squash soup with minnows, spicy pickled prawns, two kinds of pickled fish, a dish of tart greens, cucumbers, rice noodles, and the most extraordinary fish sauce I have had the pleasure of dipping my chopsticks into: thick, almost creamy, oozing with velvety flavors.
When the meal is over, the children hover at the edge of the highway, watching the trucks and buses, calling out to friends and neighbors. I settle down on one half of a wooden bed, Hang’s oldest brother climbs onto the other side, and the mosquito net is secured for the night.
