Nick swears that if you have to lose weight, “paleo” is one of the least bad way to go. However, he’s developed a kind of snarky take on paleo that helps combat those people who point out that your 3 ozs of quinoa or your baked potato is nothing a caveman would have ever had available which makes me want to go right for a giant topping of sour cream just to spite them. God, I HATE judge-y eaters. I mean, they chastise you for your potato but it’s not like they are wearing a loin cloth and most of them would recoil if you invited them to join you for a day of bow hunting in the NH woods. So, Nick’s take on paleo is that you want to eat like a later-era hunter gatherer – you know, the ones who happened to be lucky enough to live in proximity to a neighboring community that was just figuring out the whole farming angle. Your standard fare would be of course be the meat, roots, shoots and fruits/berries diet, but it would jazzed up whenever possible with the occasional violent and exhilarating raid of your neighbors, these nascent carb producers. You can see it right there in the picture above – hunter gatherer spear guy is morphing into farming rake guy – Nick and I call this stage of eating, “opportunistic late-stage paleo” or OLPALEO. I’m thinking it might really enhance my enjoyment of these carb binges if I dressed in skins and feathers, pulled into the Seven-Eleven at about 80 mph, came to a screeching halt, jumped out of the car, ran in and gave a war cry on my way to the cash register with my 32 oz Big Gulp.
Speaking of Big Gulps, I continue to ponder the whole Mayor Bloomberg logic of banning these mega-sized drinks. Truth told, I’m a libertarian at heart – paint your cave with whatever color animal drawings meet your fancy. Build the biggest bonfire you want in back of your cave. Just don’t tell me I can’t wander around naked if I want to. So, going back to Bloomberg and his very anti-libertarian stance, I mean, if that rule had passed, wouldn’t people who wanted a 32 oz drink with 91 grams of sugar (yes, you read that right, 91 grams) just purchase two 16 oz versions of the same drink? But, I digress…
So yes, paleo. In my mind, it is kind of a fetishy, nonsensical, trendy idea that heroicizes manipulating your eating patterns in a public fashion that serves to make you feel great in part by tacitly making others feel worthless and weak. I still don’t think that most paleo eaters have any true idea how actual living, breathing cows or steers become pre-packaged styrofoam trays of hamburger (they probably don’t know how a bull becomes a steer either, but that’s for another day). If they did know, they might very well have chosen veganism instead. But, I do think most of us collectively worry about What The Heck is in most things we call “food,” and we are desperate to pursue another path. So, no, I’m never going to be a paleo “purist.” That being said, paleo with a healthy dose of opportunistic carb binging seems like a great way to go into one’s 50s – particularly since I think I rank as a paleo eater because I AM someone who has actually witnessed the entire process of a bull becoming a steer and finally becoming the burger on my plate.
dispatchfromthecave 