I really like your thought about the real issue being monoculture. I see the problem the exact same way. The issue with modern agriculture looks to me to be our insistence in growing one crop (say, corn), time after time, destroying the land and soil in an attempt to meet the demand of people. When I traveled Nicaragua last year, we visited a permaculture farm, where the thought is to model agricultural methods on natural growth tendencies. They had a large variety of species that were naturally prone to the area, and as a result had a very successful growing operation. This requires humans to change their preferences and essentially take whatever happens to be growing at the time instead of trying to force nature to change to our desires. Definitely something to consider.

This is what I mean though when I say you cannot seperate us from the technology too much. In the scenario where we’re wholly dependent on the technology to think and act for us, we are it, or it is us. There is some very interesting sci fi around this topic, Learning to be Me is a good short story about technology and identity.

Definitely an interesting topic. Makes me wonder if this unloading of our cognitive processes onto automated technologies and clouds will eventually leave us mindless, living blissfully in a world that does everything for us.

What a great post! There’s so much here to talk about – including the ways in which we (still/always) want to invoke “harmony” and “natural” as positive descriptors of an ideal and idealized past, when it stand to reason that if things are not perfect now, they likely weren’t then either! Tanner’s point is a good one as well – people probably did experiment with seeds or become “accidental farmers” just for the heck of it – sometimes. But at other times, and probably lots of other times, it seems quite plausible that cultivating / domesticating had overtones of desperation. And of course what we most easily forget (with our focus on “western civilization” that began in the middle east), is that the vast majority of early people were nomadic pastoralists rather than agriculturalists.

Don’t fret the werms. Let’s talk cows in class.

As fascinating as gene therapy for weight loss is, I hope we can take up the issue Megan raises in her comment about milk. Corinne highlights the obvious when she considers what prompted humans to start drinking the milk of other animals (awkward!), and the article Megan cites offers good insight about the importance of fermentation and dairying to making milk palatable and digestible for humans. Fermented mare’s milk helped sustain the armies of Ghengis Khan and is (still) an important food in central Asia. (https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/freerangedomesticate/2013/02/12/drink-your-kumis-or-fermentation-as-humanitys-best-friend/)

Like I mentioned briefly, he discusses how humans evolved the enzyme to digest milk as a result of agriculture, but he also seems to attribute our current obesity epidemic to the rise of monoculture. He states we tend to “stick to the few species that grow best,” leaving us with a massive consumption of dairy, cereal, and sugar, (also booze in his opinion). Furthermore, he describes our relationship with cows as mutualistic, rather than simply us domesticating them- they give us dairy and beef, we ensure them grass. However, Dunn sees that now, do to advances in the food industry, we are moving further and further away from our historical means of food, and he thinks it takes people away from their culture and their sense of identity.

I acknowledged in my post that the Paleo diet does pose some benefits because it forces the dieter to choose more whole foods and lean proteins over processed and fatty foods/meats, which can definitely induce significant weight loss. I agree with you in the sense that I do not believe that it would benefit the human population to make a complete 180 back to our primitive eating styles. That species of human died, while we survived, so clearly we have at least some nutritional knowledge that benefits us more than our historical diet. The issue with dieting overall is that most are too extreme to maintain, and we can never be sure exactly what our body needs to find optimal health, so we should aim for balance, not primitive.

In response to your musings on milk specifically, I too have often wondered what prompted someone to drink milk in the first place, maybe they figured if it’s good for babies, why not get it somewhere else for adults. This theory clearly has no backing, but it’s difficult to find many possibilities, like you stated. I wonder then, after milk was first introduced, how we had so much of it that we eventually evolved the enzyme necessary to digest it, especially given that apparently we could not even properly digest it. Why did we continue to consume it? Did our bodies become dependent on it? Is this what “made us fat?”

I found this article on the history of milk:
http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1.13471

“During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.”

This excerpt at least explains how we began to develop the ability to digest it, and according to this article, our bodies did not necessarily make the whole change; rather, the way we began processing milk made it easier to digest. It also gives brief insight into why milk became a prominent nutrient source

So basically we used to only have that enzyme as babies, but now we have evolved to have that enzyme throughout our whole life? If so, that clarifies Dunn’s argument a lot; thank you for the insight.