I know better than to listen to a particular kind of podcast, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Experts tell the rest us of what and when we should eat, the rules and restrictions to be observed to be good and stay healthy and live many years without bothering the doctor. Recently, the celebrity scientists have begun to add that we shouldn’t take their regulations too seriously, that there are silly women out there who become neurotic and obsessive, which is almost as bad as not paying attention to the rules in the first place.
We are allowed, apparently, “an occasional biscuit as a rare treat”. On good days, it all enrages me. On bad days, it makes me feel inadequate, which is of course precisely what keeps us coming back for more, hoping for a set of rules that will allow us to feel okay about inhabiting ordinary bodies in a culture and society committed to anxiety and hierarchy.
This particular expert begins from the conviction that “our ancestors” did not eat between dusk and dawn, and did not suffer metabolic disease. (Most of them, I want to point out, died of malnutrition, contagion and infection before they were old enough for any such symptoms to appear.) I am running while I listen. It is 8am and still dark, and it will be dark again before I get back from work, when I will cook dinner for my family.
When we want to know about ancestors and prehistory, we’d do better to consult an archaeologist than someone trying to sell a diet
The expert’s ancestors, he tell us, were farmers in southern India. They ate only what was grown locally, rose and went to bed with the sun and lived long and healthy lives. Hurray for them, and also interesting that he himself is a science professor in an Ivy League university, having apparently torn himself away from a life of healthy manual labour and limited food. I have mostly lived on North Atlantic islands, including a year in Iceland where museums and history books vividly depicted winters spent inside stone-and-turf houses shared with the animals for warmth, hoping the supply of barley and dried fish would hold out until spring.
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Eating only by daylight would have mandated a form of intermittent fasting so rigorous that only the strongest would survive: for weeks they’d have had barely one hour in 24 to get down food that was not nutritionally dense in the first place. Go further north – top end of Norway, Sweden, Russia, Canada, where people have lived for tens of thousands of years – and you’d be fasting for weeks. Even here in temperate northwest Europe, there was a reason premodern death rates peaked every spring. People were malnourished after surviving the winter on what was locally grown.
Our ancestors, the expert says, weren’t sitting up late disrupting their biorhythms with electric light. They were in bed and certainly not snacking after sunset. I remember all the European paintings of the Last Supper, most of which imagine a late night, candles, firelight. I remember all the accounts of late night parties in Roman, medieval and early modern literature. Whose ancestors, exactly? When and where? Does he think women rising to care for children at night never lit a candle, that breastfeeding mothers never felt hungry in the dark?
Since the ability to conjure and control fire is one of the defining differences between humans and animals, claiming that people used to live without artificial light is patent nonsense. Before fire, apes; with fire, humans. With fire, light in the darkness, and cooking. (Of course it’s not that simple, of course there’s a fascinating grey era of early hominids.)
One of many problems with such invocations of “prehistoric people” is that prehistory is much, much longer than history, and includes people living in a wider range of terrains and climates with a wider range of technologies, trading practices, forms of knowledge, culture and art than exist now.
It makes even less sense to generalise about past millennia than present time, and often when people do generalise it’s for ideological reasons; the obvious example of this is the claim that in “prehistoric times” men chased and stabbed big fierce animals while women stayed in the cave doing housework and childcare. There’s no evidence, and “common sense” is as invariably political as “the olden days”. The simple solution is always appealing but usually wrong, and when we want to know about ancestors and prehistory, we’d do better to consult an archaeologist than someone trying to sell a diet.
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