Thought for food
Detoxing from sugar is hard.
The little white crystals are addictive. Depending on whom you ask, that’s on a level comparable to harsher substances like heroin or cocaine.
No wonder I’ve been side-eyeing the holiday leftovers with canine whines desperate enough to scare the cats.
This is no new year’s resolution. It’s not an exercise in self-control either. If anything, it’s emergency preventative measures thanks to holiday sugar overloads. I can’t hold a cup of coffee without quaking – before the caffeine hits. No coffee means no writee. And no writee means no lukewarm comedic sentences to grunt at as you sip your Saturday morning cuppa.
A break is also warranted if I ever want to think about sugar cookies without barfing again, and I do.
In order to silence the siren call of holiday goodies on the counter and drown out my own dog-like whimpers, I turned to reading for distraction. Like a good nerd.
But in a Looney Tunes twist of luck, I opened the door to find wallpaper, over dry rock, over a hefty layer of brick wall. I couldn’t escape the food talk.
Human diets and health come up a lot in Sapiens, the anthropological history of humankind book your kid’s science teacher had on their reading list five years ago. There’s still no word on the efficacy of the Paleo diet one-quarter in, but there’s some other tasty tidbits on human food habits, as well as a few to swallow with bitterness to rival kale. (It’s a good thing garlic is a superfood, because somehow many of the other super-options never make it into my cooking.)
Take this as a comfort or a convenient excuse not to blame yourself: Depending on how you look at it, humankind has a history of bad food choices, at least since farming was invented. In fact, according to author and anthropologist Yuval Noah Harrari, the Agricultural Revolution, was just all around a bad “decision” on our part. As much as long-term societal evolution can be considered a decision, that is.
Apparently that nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle didn’t just work, it was pretty great for nutrition. Traveling brought our ancestors to a variety of foods and food groups, giving them a naturally more balanced diet as they crossed miles daily.
Drought and flooding are also less of a concern when you don’t have crops, and when you can pick up and move to greener pastures – which you didn’t necessarily have to share with your sheep yet.
Roaming around was even better for our spines, which are apparently built for walking and chasing gazelles (so I guess we can’t call avid runners like Bill Buley unnatural anymore…). Staying in place and doing the hard labor of agriculture and taking care of the village hasn’t always been easy on our backs and bodies. But I’m guessing that excuse won’t get any of us out of the office come Monday.
And if you want some truly bad news, even bread isn’t the great nursemaid of civilization we thought it was. In addition to keeping us home and dependent on fair weather conditions, grain production kept us working longer hours. By comparison, cave people had it pretty good.
But if you want to console yourself for probably eating worse than a cave dweller and working at least as hard, you can blame our ancestors instead for picking farming and getting us stuck on this whole “guaranteed food source” fad. Schmucks.
It’s the kind of sick twisted joke that really eats at you, knowing that all human progress has not led to better, healthier lives.
It’s the kind of crap to give you a nihilistic headache, or a seriously peeved mood.
It’s also a good reason to crack out the BBQ potato chips, turn on the TV, and smirk. ‘Cause you didn’t have to forage in January.