How About A Paleo Diet Based on the Local Foods of the Wild Peoples?

There is a lot of debate between paleo diet enthusiasts about what Paleolithic people ate. The most obvious reason for this is due to a lack of understanding of ancestral traditions. The most insidious reason for this is the lack of reporting of what current wild people eat or what wild people did eat.  Those in the mainstream are not doing this. Instead people not clued in to this fact are modeling their Paleo diets on the Flintstones and look for approximation in a grocery store. It's quaint to be polite and, well, cartoonish like the show.

There is a need to debunk the myths of the Paleo diet and go deep into discussing what the wild people left are eating as well as look at what wild peoples were eating in the local area a person inhabits. The rediscovers, from primitive skills practioners to scientists, can learn from those alive and base their diet on their wisdom. Those like myself in living in a city will have to approximate the best they can, but those who can move beyond the grocery store will benefit the most.

So far in the mainstream media, the group TED talks had a myth busting talk on the Paleo Diet titled, "Debunking Paleo," which was a hatchet piece to make the diet seem laughable. They certainly threw the baby out with the bathwater, when there was no discussion of a diet of native people.

Why isn't this being done so far in the mainstream? Maybe it is that our thinking has been flawed towards thinking of the beginning of agriculture as the end of the paleolithic diet for the wild people left in the world. Or maybe we live in a state of denial, too sensitive to acknowledge the merits of those living outside of a civilization.

For whatever reason during these diet wars many people do not know that many Native American's were living in a pre-agricultural state when the colonists arrive in America.

The localvores amongst paleo practioners can short out what the people were eating amongst them. Much is lost unfortunately, for people whose wisdom was ignored and died with those who can remember a time when they weren't forced on reservations. At this point, people have to discover the local foods available themselves.

Outside of the mainstream, there is few with the expertise and the charisma to report on the Paleo diet. The best video I've seen of the  Paleo Diet myths and clarification has been by Arthur Haines, a taxonomist. Being a student of the ethno-zoology of this area, (that is the study of people and their use of the land)  he introduces foods that were previous taken out of the paleo diet according to certain paleo authors that the local native American's used.

Arthur's actions and videos are an heroic contrast of what the mainstream media is failing to do in the diet wars, look at the ancestral traditions of Native people and report what to do. But to do so, we would have to respect the people we ignore.

One of the foods has been a local wild grain in his area, rice. Paleolithic people didn't eat white rice, but in the area's it was grown they definately ate wild rice along with whatever else would support them, whether it be a wild species of legume in an area of New England, which Arthur said was eliminated in recent years or the varieties of wild edibles unknown to Arthur in another climatic zone.

Below is a video of Arthur's about Wild Rice gathering and preparation.



Would grains be in an Inuit's diet? Of course not, but the point of all of this is that by learning what the local people ate in our area, we can progress towards a localized Paleo diet. For this unknown location in Maine, wild rice would be paleo. It's certainly a contrast based on heavily approximating a paleo diet based on  what's in the grocery store though that's the only choice some people have.