Christopher Cumo - Ancestral Diets and Nutrition

Christopher Cumo

First edition published 2021

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Typeset in Times

by codeMantra

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This book originated in the happy courtship of the remarkable woman who is now my wife. During this time, she shared with me her interest in food, nutrition, and health. Much of her information came from journalism and best-selling books. Because so many opinions conflicted, she found herself switching from one regimen to another without coming any closer to knowing what foods were healthiest. Such a scenario created bewilderment and dissatisfaction, sentiments common to many Americans who want the greatest vitality without knowing quite how to proceed.

The fact that diet, nutrition, and health are at the core biological matters led me to plan a book on the interrelatedness among these topics partly to combat what may be perceived as a denial of physicality that goes back to the foundations of civilization. British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whiteheads (18611947) description of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato applies to how we understand ourselves in the most fundamental ways. At the root of this understanding is the conviction that a person is not just a body because cognition produces ideas that cannot always be tied to something tangible. For example, someone might ponder the notion of infinity even though everything he experiences is finite. If ideas emanate from beyond the physical, then we must have some metaphysical facultythe intellect for our purposesthat generates these concepts and is separate from the body, itself a chemical machine and thus unambiguously physical.

Greek philosopher Plato (c. 427c. 347 BCE) emphasized the separation between body and intellectusing a term usually translated as soulforcefully enough to create duality between the two. Perhaps nowhere was his ability to engage this topic on greater display than in Phaedo (c. 360 BCE), an account of his mentor Socrates (469399 BCE) execution. Plato, stating his absence on this day, signaled that Phaedo was a literary creation because he was not present to transcribe the discussion among Socrates and his friends.

Facing his end, Socrates thoughts probably turned to death, a circumstance that Plato used to define death as the moment when body and soul parted. If the body causes error by impeding the intellect, then only intellect merits trust. The body is a danger and a detour from reality.

German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (18441900) warned against this dualism, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) contrasting Socrates excessive intellectualism with well-being, overflowing health, and abundance of existence. His perspective deserves consideration in a world where too many people retain Platos disinterest in the body without ever having thumbed through his dialogues. Technology reinforces this attitude because we no longer depend on brawn as premodern peoples did. Today the body occupies a car or elevator, which does the work of moving from one location to another. The body crouches in a chair before a computer monitor, a stance a person adopts several hours each day without any conscious attention to the body and its ceaseless chemical activities. The body has become an extension of inanimate technology rather than a source of kinetic energy and volition.

Disinterest can become distrust of the body, a wariness evident in discomfort with overt sexuality. Although less obvious, distrust may manifest in intrusiveness. Without my soliciting their opinion, neighbors and acquaintances have expressed dismay that I dig my garden with a spade every spring and autumn when the job would be much easier with a rototiller. One neighbor, settling his deceased mothers estate, offered me hers, assuring me that once I tried it, I would discard my spade. Such appeals disconcert me, especially because I should not have to justify my preference for hand tools. After all, I have never tried to dissuade someone from using gasoline, or electric, gadgets or to convince him to trade his automobile for a bicycle, as I have. Nonetheless, the academic dean at the university where I once taught labeled me weird for bicycling to campus. This comment, coming from a man otherwise progressive on economic and social issues, demonstrates the limits of tolerance for physicality in a world in which technology trumps it. These circumstances compel the inference that modernity defines exertion as abnormal.

This book rejects such nonsense, which has devolved into mental and physical atrophy. The following pages attempt to evaluate foods healthfulness in an effort to reclaim corporeality and the vitality that everyone claims to want but that many people believe eludes them in some way. This evaluation amasses data from prehistory and history by examining what past peoples ate and how healthy or ill they were. The first chapter describes this method and its limitations. treat fruits and vegetables, respectively, and the last chapter highlights this books findings in hopes that readers integrate them into the daily routine.

1. Robert S. Brumbaugh, The Philosophers of Greece (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 133.

2. Plato, Phaedo, in Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1956), 462.

3. F. M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 54-56, 75-77.

4. Plato, 467.

5. Ibid., 470.

6. Ibid., 468.

7. Ibid.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-4.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche,