[.ca] The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love (ISBN 0595271316)

Psychology, anthropology, nutrition and evolution. WOW!:
Susan Allport combines facts, theory and speculation from many fields of research to present an entirely unique view on the evolution of mankind. I could not put this book down and have since gotten my mate to start reading it as well. It has so much information that it will provide topics for conversation for weeks. I highly recommend this book.

Noteworthy:
Amazing! In just 245 pages,Ms. Allport manages to go from exploring the complex subject of food and foraging to making us re-think our relationship to the environment. And she does this in a style that manages to be both charmingly anecdotal and profoundly thoughtful.

Down the Hatch, or Watch What You Eat:
For anyone who ever wondered wherefrom comes our overwhelming need and urge to eat, this carefully researched and interestingly written volume will provide the answer.

A multi-dimensional look at food and how it has shaped us:
Allport sees herself as a forager, a creature with a drive to look for food. She attributes this drive to her ancestors who spent much of their time searching the forests and savannas for food. From this personal observation, keenly felt, Allport branches out to thoughts about food and eating, from the habits of the deer and squirrels near her home to the proclivities of the chimpanzees of Africa. Primary among her concerns is how these behaviors relate to human food consumption, and how the search for food and what we eat has shaped our social structure and psychology. This is a very interesting read, graceful written and full of intriguing bits of information. Did you know, for example, that virtually all common spices, oregano, thyme, cinnamon, rosemary, etc. have "powerful antibacterial and antifungal effects" (p. 118)? Or that there is a beeswax-eating bird used by the Hadza people of Tanzania that leads them to bee hives? The bird loves beeswax but is unable to open a hive, but is rewarded when people do. This "honey guide" is thought to be human kind's "oldest surviving partner in predation, much older than the dog or the falcon" (p. 148). Or that corn treated with an alkali (tortillas are made with lime) frees the otherwise unavailable essential amino acid tryptophan from the corn so that those who depend heavily upon corn in their diet will not develop pellagra, an often-fatal dietary disease? This is just one example of an eating technique developed through trial and error and happenstance that allows a people to live on an otherwise incomplete diet--a "cuisine" altered only at considerable risk. Allport also goes from observation to speculate on such things as the origins of tool use, the sexual differentiation of hunting and gathering, and the use of food for social and sexual advantage. Generally she follows the well-documented and successful path of evolutionary biology and psychology, noting along the way where earlier ideas have proven wrong or incomplete (Raymond Dart's mistaken belief that Australopithecus was largely a meat-eater (p. 157) is a case in point.) She is insightful and presents her arguments well so that we tend to agree with what she says. Her idea that tool use began with females and then later spread to males, as presented in Chapter Twelve "The Nature of Food," is persuasive. Particularly interesting to me is the material on the nature of omnivores and how food choices dictate physiology and vice versa. For example, primates with their big brains that require large amounts of energy rich foods cannot subsist on leaves and other foods requiring long intestinal tracts and a slow-motion life style. Or, reverse that and observe that creatures that have the ability to find and consume energy rich foods can grow big, energy-demanding brains, while those who eat leaves and other foods that require a lot of digestion can't afford to grow a big brain. Also interesting is the chapter on food and cooking aptly entitled, "The Only Cooks on the Planet." Cooking and other processing techniques such as leeching and preserving freed up many foods for our consumption not available to other creatures. In this connection, Allport makes the astute observation that the technique of cultivation, that of agriculturally engineering energy-rich and less toxic foods, made these plants edible to other animals creating a new ecology of vermin (p. 124). On the other hand the technique of cooking makes foods available only to humans. One of the more startling observations made by Allport, who really has a keen eye for connections, is this on page 60. She is discussing the differentiation of sex cells, the female stationary and energy-rich, the male mobile and without nutritive value. She quotes biologist Robert Trivers as saying, "An undifferentiated system of sex cells seems highly unstable." She concludes, "So as soon as selection favored those that invested their sex cells with nutritious substances, it also favored those that cheated the system and became adept at numbers and mobility instead. As soon as selection favored eggs, it also favored sperm. And there you have it: the origin of the sexes." This is startling because biologists are still in a quandary about how sex began. The main and latest idea has been that sexuality developed as a result of the arms race between the organism and its microbial predators (see Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (1991) or Matt Ridley's The Red Queen (1993) for examples of this argument). Here however Allport suggests that one of those predators may have been another cell bent not on consumption, per se, but on reproduction! And so they formed a symbiosis... I am pleased to note that although Allport doesn't mince words when it comes to pointing out male maleficence--apt and hard-hitting is her discussion of how in many cultures males manufacture food taboos that limit the foods females can eat, saving the biggest and best portions for themselves--she plays fair throughout, and at no time gets bogged down in the sexism that preoccupies some writers. On page 190, for example, she states quite directly that females shape male behavior by their reproductive choices, thereby implying that females are also responsible for the male violence that we post-moderns so wisely abhor. Allport appropriately ends the book with a plea that we not turn the planet into "a giant McDonald's dispensing Happy Meals" to "Homo Sapiens alone," and that we not overuse the world's resources. Amen to that, and kudos to Susan Allport for writing such an interesting and wisdom-filled book.

A delicious new book:
Susan Allport's fascinating new book impeccably intertwines personal anecdotes with scientific knowledge to create a delightful read.