The New Yorker Magazine
Stone Soup
How the Paleolithic life style got trendy.
“The first day I put my family on a Paleolithic diet, I made my kids fried eggs and sausage for breakfast... It was like some weird, unexpected holiday - Passover in July. “
This begins Elizabeth Kolbert’s article for The Atlantic Monthly as she follows the paleo diet for one week and writes an in-depth article on her experiences and research on the subject.
She points out that while the paleo diet “turns the familiar food pyramid on its point,” it also is an environmental disaster: increased water usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and higher energy usage are all side effects of more meat consumption.
She does concede that the transition to agriculture, while it allowed civilizations to settle down, caused a decline not only in the height of the average person by more than three inches, but also caused higher rates of tooth decay and anemia.
In sum, she found that most of the paleo recipes she tried from books and the internet for baked goods were inedible. However, her kids loved the diet. When she asked them what they had learned from the week’s experiment, one of them said, “We should eat more liver.”
For the full article, see this link.
No comments:
Post a Comment