In a parenting group to which I belong, there is currently a discussion about the merits of eating like our ancestors. The idea is that human beings evolved eating a certain kind of diet and that optimum nutrition can be attained by eating the diet that our bodies have evolved to eat. Proponents of this philosophy believe in eating diets based on whole foods, rather than the junk that so often passes as food.
I agree that there is a certain amount of sense and logic to this. Of course, eating foods that our great-great-grandparents would recognize is healthier than eating cheese puffs and fruit snacks.
However, I think people romanticize the diets of yester-year. I would wager a guess that most of us descend from common people who toiled day in and day out to eat an extremely limited diet. Exotic foods, and even many common foods out-of-season, were likely not available to our forbears. Food storage and safety were nowhere near our modern standards. Grains and meat might be infested with insects, unrefrigerated dairy products swimming with bacteria, fruits and vegetables rotten. Hunger was not an unusual occurence for hundreds of millions of people throughout world history (and for hundreds of millions of people today, for that matter).
I, for one, would rather not go back to those “good old days.” While modern supermarkets offer a plethora of nutritionally deficient products, they can also be used to eat a diet that is far superior to that of most of our ancestors.
Credit goes to my father; his opinions on this topic have influenced mine.
