“Eat here… diet home” –Earl Abel, restaurateur, 1938

Ah… that one little word, “diet”. So rich with layers of meaning and controversy, like a linguistic Rorschach Test. So much hated and so much desired in those four letters.

In this age of miracles and wonders and upside-down values where bottled water is more expensive than gasoline and gasoline is more expensive than milk, confusion reigns supreme, especially on the subject of diet.

More has been written, spoken, blogged, and debated about what constitutes the optimum human diet than practically any other subject remotely related to the human body.

What follows is my personal take on the subject, and ten thousand people will agree and just as many will disagree. I’ll just try to cut through the hype and hogwash and leave it to the reader to make their own decisions, as it should be.

The Past

One doesn’t need to look too far into human history to realize the entire subject of “diet” as something to debate or ponder in any seriousness, is a relatively modern invention. Sort of like the cultural creation we call “teenagers”. A hundred years ago there was no such thing. A person was either a child or an adult, with no in-between.

Countless cultural rituals existed and still exist that celebrate the abrupt transition from childhood to adulthood in non-modern cultures. The Industrial Age of relative prosperity and complexity extended the number of years needed by a young person to acquire the maturity, education, and skills needed to function in modern society. Thus was born the “teenager”.

So too has our modern global economy and prosperity, enjoyed by most of the civilized world, brought enough quantity and variety of food to our tables, such that the concept of “diet” has emerged. Only in a world where food exists in abundance, does the word “diet” have any real meaning.

Be that as it may, here it sits, the question, “What should I eat?” or more precisely, “What should I eat to… stay slim, or feel better, or gain muscle or help my diabetes or keep my heart healthy or (just fill in the blank)?”

There are good answers to these questions but perhaps it is best if we first look at what our ancestors ate. We’ve all heard, “You are what you eat.” Perhaps just as accurate is the phrase. “You are what your ancestors ate.”

I can see those eyes rolling now… “He’s going to start talking about Paleo-Nutrition and have me eating twigs, bugs and berries I just know it.”

Nay, fear not. Not a single twig or bug has passed my lips. But, just for curiosity’s sake let’s look at what indigenous peoples ate in various regions of the globe for countless eons. My favorites were the local people of the Coahuiltecan tribes (encompassing dozens of distinct cultures) who lived for many thousands of years in the cactus and brush-lands of South Texas.

Talk about tough… this is an area almost wholly inhospitable to human occupation. Open desert is more hospitable. The “brush country” of South Texas is a vast region of rolling plains filled nearly edge to edge with hostility in the form of cacti, thorny shrubs, rattlesnakes, scorpions and everything else you can think of that sticks, stings or stinks. Even other tribes shunned the area, leaving it to the Coahuiltecans.

Here, people practiced what they called the “second harvest”… and it’s exactly what you think it is. Much of the diet consisted of seeds from various desert plants and, as with most seeds, digestion makes an incomplete job of things. So the feces was collected, the remaining seeds screened and washed and re-cooked to be eaten a second time. Of course the occasional lizard, snake or tarantula was tossed into the pot to fortify the soup, as it were. One wonders what these people would think of our modern world of supermarkets and restaurants on every corner.