Broken Area - Episode 5, Hearts and Minds

We sat down to talk about various things last night.  Everything from how wikipedia editing works to the importance of food to health.  

We hope you enjoy episode 5.

Comments

[Rachel]

An interesting note about food variety: We now have the ability to preserve food for long periods of time, and to have food regardless of where it grows, which ancient people obviously did not, but it is not so clear that we eat a greater variety of foods than ancient peoples did. To quote Bill Bryson (At Home, p. 37): "A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamic C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well--and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies." (His source: Fernández-Armesto, Food: A History, p. 71.)

If true--well, it does make sense that early farmers would focus their efforts on a limited range of things to plant and animals to domesticate, but I wonder why we never branched out more...something to wonder about, no?

[Dave Brodbeck]

Excellent pint Rachel. I think people back then just concentrated on what worked, and through their own selection, they ended up making cows and pigs and wheat and corn that worked really well in their little areas. Of course that is a guess. We coudl figure this out though, and I imagine someone has, by looking at records from say ancient Egypt and looking at excavations of early settlements.