It's not just inconvenient, it's a hard truth.

I've been thinking a lot about food lately and the future of humans.  I feel troubled about it all.

Very very troubled.

Today's thoughts about the environment have been brought to you by the newest diet crazes I've been seeing popping up all over the place.  The Paleo diet and the raw food diet.  It's all over the internet and among my friends as well.  Read on and see how thinking about food, one of our most basic needs, easily turns into a discussion of the inevitability of the extinction of the human race.


I think the "paleo" diet is seriously flawed.

I also think the "raw" diet is seriously flawed.

Both of them seem to be inspired by the idea of "what humans were meant to be eating" because that's what we ate before there was agriculture or before we were evolved into the species we are now.  First of all- I will never be a paleo-centric eater because I can't abide the idea of putting dead flesh in my mouth.  I don't care if anyone else does, honestly, but I don't want it in mine.  The Paleo diet consists of meat (fish, poultry, and red meat) and vegetables.  No grains.  None.  And, I assume, no dairy.  No Paleolithic person was chasing after wild buffalo to milk them. 

I believe the Paleo diet is an ecologically irresponsible way to eat unless the population of the earth decreases dramatically and land for wild animals to thrive so that man/woman can hunt them increases dramatically.  Meat raised on factory farms is not healthy to the earth, the animals, or the humans that then consume them.  So unless you buy all wild caught/pasture raised fish/meat/game then you are contributing to a failed system of feeding the human population.  With the land available to us for cultivating it is much more responsible to raise grains and vegetables than meat.  Who can afford to buy enough responsibly raised meat to sustain their energy without grains?  I'm thinking that the Paleo diet is for the rich in the world only.

Is it healthier?  I don't really look to Paleo humans for my life and health advice.  Partly because what little we know about them fails to impress me with it's alternative reality to the present.  They lived in tribes and spent a lot of their time simply hunting and gathering.  That's a radically different lifestyle to the modern day lifestyle most of us have.  Whatever diet they had (and not that much is known about it anyway) worked for their lifestyle of being on the move, hunting, gathering, living in caves...they weren't sedentary.  You can't know that a diet scrabbled together by prehistoric man is going to have a healthy effect on modern man.  A whole lotta thousands of years of evolution lay between us and them.

As for raw...oy.  Raw.  You know, I don't digest very many raw things well.  You wanna know how I know?  I have a crazy hippie mother who periodically chose to feed us things raw that were generally things you cook, like tofu, and sprouted beans with the beans still attached, broccoli, cabbage, zucchini, and cauliflower.  I notice that the whole raw food movement is rife with vegetable shakes in which you pulverize a bunch of raw vegetables into a smooth green beverage.  Is this a form of pre-digesting it all?  Gross.  This is obviously not a diet meat eaters could live on.  We might have eaten lots of our meat raw in the Paleo times but the way the meat is raised on the modern farm makes eating raw meat a health hazard.  Eating raw (vegetables) if you buy most of your produce from corporate farms gives you the same health risks as raw meat as far as I can tell.  The benefits of raw seem pretty slim to me.  Raw grains?  That seems harsh on the human system.

Still, if any of you are doing these diets and it makes you feel great- who am I to argue?  Mostly what I'm establishing here is that I am never going to fall for some kind of diet fad, not even if all my best friends follow them. 

People are omnivores.  I believe that a variety of food is the best bet for good health.  Responsibly grown food with no hormones and it should all be organic, though many of us can't afford all organic.  We should be aiming for that.

I know that many people have food allergies that are serious and seek diets that won't kill them and I would do the same.  Some people believe everyone is dairy intolerant and wheat allergic (suggesting that they just don't know it)...but if this was true I don't think people would have continued to consume both regularly for a few thousand years.  Doesn't it occur to anyone that what may be the underlying problem is the processing and the pesticides that have changed our ability to consume these things without getting sick?  I personally never feel sick when eating dairy or wheat.  I would know if I did.  I don't eat bell peppers because they make me feel gross.

I think there's a cumulative effect of of over processing grains and eating dairy and meat that's pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and that are fed their own excrement and hooves and other gross things that no being should be eating.  I think we're reaching critical mass now in our country (and other developed countries) with all the environmental and food related illnesses.  I think more and more bodies are breaking down because this crap is everywhere. 

Cancer is not a mystery to me.  Want to prevent cancer?  Maybe we should stop using so much/any plastic.  I have reduced my use of it but I still use it.  I think about that a lot.  How all those things are off-gassing in the atmosphere all the time.  The nuclear disasters that have occurred- you think that all that nasty chemical poisoning just dissipated?  Oil spills in the ocean- where do humans store the oil that gets "cleaned up"?  In tanks buried in the earth or in the sea?  I mean, all this dangerous energy we're producing doesn't just magically go away.  It's here.  All around us.  All the time.  In the soil.  In our skin.  In our bodies.  In our breast milk whether we purposely put it there or not.  So we're giving all these poisons to our babies too.  And it stays in their bodies a very long time.

Increasing rates of infertility is no mystery either.  There have been concrete connections drawn between fertility and birth defect rates in animals living in heavily polluted waterways and habitats.*

In case anyone was confused about this: we are animals too and we're breathing, eating, sleeping, walking, coughing, shitting, littering, trashing, and reproducing in the same filth the other species are.  The only difference is that humans made all this toxic waste, animals didn't.  So far no frog or deer or cat has produced nuclear power or made toxic levels of gasses or decimated miles of forest and habitats within a few short years of history.   

It's us.

People who aren't sure if global warming is the fault of humans have their heads stuck where the sun don't shine. 

Here's what needs to happen:  No more pesticides.  A negative birthrate across the globe.  No more factory farming.  No more hormones and antibiotics given to animals raised for meat.  Pasture raised only.  Stop using plastics (yikes!).  Travel by bicycle or very fuel efficient vehicles.  No more airplane travel.  No more using toxic cleaners or corrosive chemicals to unclog plumbing.  Up our recycling rate a hundred percent.  Grow our own food. 

So many more things to do.

Am I doing all of those things? 

NO.

But I know that I need to improve in a thousand ways and so do most other people.

I don't believe in Armageddon but I do believe in the demise of single species on earth.  It's not something you really have to have "faith" in.  Look at all the fossils we've found of creatures that no longer exist on earth.  They outgrew their resources.  That's what we're doing right now.  We humans have been instrumental in pushing a lot of species into extinction ourselves.  I'm not going to say that it isn't the way of nature because actually it is.  One species is always pushing another one out.  What's bad is that no one is big enough or bad enough compete with us except ourselves.

So don't worry.  If you don't want to think about any of this, don't.  The earth will find a way to decrease our numbers and possibly wipe us out if we don't do it first.  We simply can't continue on forever at the rate we're growing and trashing and consuming.  There won't be anything left to sustain us unless something environmental gets in our way.

What do you know?  It is.



*I don't have the time to go digging up specific research and articles I've read about this in the past- you don't have to trust that they exist.  If you doubt it, spend a bunch of hours doing research and you will find it's true.  Unless you truly suck at researching things.