Some Benefits of Hunting and Gathering

(image courtesy of Watersense.)

In a medical anthropology class at Emory, I read Jared Diamond's essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, which I've been thinking about a lot ever since. Diamond argues that agriculture brought about an increase in the incidence of disease, as it encouraged crowding (which is obvious) and as it encouraged the consumption of diet that was sub-optimal from a nutritional standpoint, dependence on a few crops, which raised the risk of starvation (a rarity in modern hunter-gatherer societies), and paved the way for class- and sex-based discrimination.

The evidence is based on archaeological findings, as well as (less directly and admittedly with some conjecture) on anthropological studies of modern hunter-gathering societies, e.g. the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

'Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.'

The essay can be found here, and is short and quite well-written. I had forgotten that George Armelagos, the Anthropology department chair for most of my time at Emory, was quoted in the essay, so that was a bonus!

I'm not advocating a sudden worldwide return to hunting and gathering; our planet's population is huge and grossly dependent, both nutritionally and economically, on the growing, buying, and selling of staple crops, such as rice. It does, however, make me wonder what would happen if I stopped eating rice, wheat, and other foods I would only find in agricultural societies, as my body, like that of all humans, is adapted for eating stuff I find or kill. I started looking into this with greater interest after running across Mark's Daily Apple, where Mark and his minions write about their modern "primal" lifestyle (which is, of course, closely related to the paleo diet, for those who have seen mention of that in recent years). This has led to my beginning to experiment more with cooking greens and baking with almond flour (the cookies were good, the bread is stellar, the pie was a disappointment) and I'm looking forward to trying and learning more; and who knows? Maybe I will see results.

Reflections on Haiti: A month later.

I’ve been home from Haiti for about a month now, and I have had a lot of time to reflect on my time there. I still haven’t completed my intended project of transcribing all of my written journal entries to the computer so I can shared edited portions. I have, however, come to a couple of conclusions:

I’m tired of hearing, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that!” I’m also tired of hearing that I’m a good person for going. It was pretty much pure “voluntourism”: let’s go somewhere exotic and poor and help out on our time off! Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, as it gets work done and educates people about places that are radically different worlds from their own. I went because I needed to feel like I was doing something, I had time, and I had some money available to me. I am glad that I went, but I went for me, to satisfy this urge I had to do something. And anyone can do it, given some time and some money. Many volunteers use their vacation days to do this kind of work; many people who are between jobs take that time to volunteer.

I can’t go back. I thought I would; I wanted to go back, desperately, after I got home. I still wish I could go back. But my responsibilities to commitments at home, to my friends and families, to myself, as I move to a new city and begin graduate school: those stand in my path, in an immediate way. On a deeper level, however, there remains this conviction that anything I can give or do can’t be enough, that it’s like trying to desalinize an ocean with an eyedropper of fresh water. And it isn’t because Haiti needs so much (although it does) or because I feel that my efforts are meaningless (although there are days when it felt and still feels that way).

I feel that Haiti is ill, and its symptoms of poverty and corruption are the effects of psychological scarring left over from the days of slavery: after the rebellion that transformed it from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, it was forced to pay reparations back to France and the United States and rest of Europe refused to trade with it, out of fear of war with France. Like so many struggling former colonies, when it gained its freedom, it was like a teenager, with an idea of how adulthood should look, but with not enough experience to self-govern and achieve that maturity. I think that Haiti’s development has been so stunted economically and its dependence on foreign aid become so strong, that it may not ever gain safe footing, particularly if it continues in the same pattern it has been for years now.

That sounds cold and callous, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to sound so hopeless, so negative, and perhaps part of this is me trying to distance myself from Haiti. It is, however, based on my observations and the observations I have compared with many others, not only volunteers in my group, but friends who have worked there with the military or visited at other times. There’s a sense among many Haitians that I met that one must work hard- but only hard enough to make it to tomorrow. And then one repeats it the next day, every day, until one dies. Not all people, of course, subscribe to that philosophy, and I am not saying it is unrealistic in the conditions in which many Haitians have grown to adulthood. It is simply the way to make it through the day without going insane: its own protective insanity. Jessica Leeder a writer for The Globe and Mail living in Jacmel wrote that she had hired a housekeeper, who quit after day one, believing that she wouldn’t make more money that the 38 dollars Canadian that she stole from Leeder the first day.

Why invest in the future, though, if you live without the certainty that there will be a future for you at all? In my last journal entry, as we left Jacmel, I wrote that Haiti constantly undergoes crises that seem to undo the work previously completed. It’s a recurring cycle of renewal, but it isn’t healing. It only returns Haiti to square one, or even square zero. The cause of the setback can be anything- whether man-made or natural disaster- but the average Haitian seems equally powerless in contrast, no matter the cause, as they are economically (and therefore politically) disenfranchised, to the point that creating something permanent looks, at least to my Westernized eyes, to be a pipe dream.

Best way to sum up how I felt upon returning home.

From Philip Ngiau's journal:

"I ‘m on my way to Kennedy Space center…and i just keep thinking about something i read. It was about one of the first lunar astronauts, and how the first night back from the moon there was a BBQ in his backyard. There he stood, beer in hand, looking up at the moon. Nothing had changed around him, everything and everyone was the same…the only difference was that this time he had “the opposite point of view” he was having right now…standing on the moon looking up at earth, and to him, it made all the bbq’s before all feel a little different than the bbq’s after…i didnt really get it, but its been running thru my mind after entering that supermarket. I cant help but remember standing in Pinochiot camp, or just haiti in general. The size, the rows of food and much much more i could use or need…it felt surreal…like one or the other must be fake, these two “places” cant exisit in the same “good” world we live in right…it makes me “crunch” up my brow in a bewildered and slightly lost feeling at the difference…but that is why i had to go to haiti…every time before, it was just a CNN report on TV, and no matter how much i watched it, it remained something i…well, watched on TV. Now its not…"

Close encounters of the slithery kind.

I went for a run this afternoon, on the back trails of Cochran Shoals. I like to go into the woods, instead of staying along the main path, which is wide and gravely and often full of people. It reminds me of playing in our woodsy backyard, growing up in Louisiana, but with even more space and less siblings. I get to run through mud and jump over logs and, in this case, go off the path and climb down into a creek that flows into the Hooch, and pretend that I look like a capable explorer. I was making my way down the creek, hopping from rock to rock, when I climbed onto a fallen tree. Suddenly a flash of movement caught my eye- it was a snake dropping from another branch into the water. I've never seen that before, but it startled me. I looked around to make sure there were no other snakes I was in immediate danger of stepping on and started to move toward the trail. I have heard so many stories about how cottonmouths get angry and will come after you if you surprise them, and since I didn't know what snake I had startled, I looked down into the water for it again. We made eye contact and it went gyrating downstream and I went crashing through leaves and branches to get back to the path. I just looked it up, and I think I found a brown water snake- not a water moccasin, not venemous, but still not something I want to get real cuddly with.

About twenty minutes later, on my way back along the main path, I saw a gleaming black snake slithering toward the woods, away from one of the rectangular bench/planters that can be found along the path. I approached it, because I wanted to know what kind of snake it was. And because I am an idiot. It wasn't in a huge hurry, but it was making good time for the brush, and I gave it a lot of space. I figured it was a black rat snake (which with I've already had a close encounter) but I think now it was a black racer.

I've never seen snakes down there before; I knew they were there, but this was so surprising to actually see, particularly on the main path, since there is so much foot traffic there in late afternoon and early evening.

Running

I'm trying to get back into running since I didn't run much in Haiti, except at recreation, when it was chasing down frisbees or giving a million piggy back rides ("NON! I can only carry one of you at a time, you have no idea what I am saying, un! Un! Seulement! Pas deux! Pas trois! Okay?!"), and it's... well, it's going.

It was going pretty well, but yesterday my calves were sore before and after my morning run, so when I went to the Hooch for a walk, I planned to take it easy. Once I got off the main bike trail, though, and into the muddy, hillier areas, I suddenly found myself running. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been wearing my light hikers, instead of my nikes or VFFs. So of course, I went back to the river this morning- this weekend, it's freeeeee!- and ran in my VFFs, so the run was easier at first and then my calves hurt so badly I had to keep stopping and stretching.

The only thing that got me through it was the Stuff You Should Know podcast, which is pretty magical AND available on iTunes.

Oh, and...

One of the volunteers from rotation 4 has been maintaining his blog much more faithfully than I have. I think he's a pretty cool guy, as long as you don't ask him for scary stories about his job! (He's a pilot!) Check out Philip's journal for current news and reflections about the compound (soon to be plural!!) in Jacmel.

Oh, and another blog, from Frank: This is Haiti. Very well written, very disturbing.

A video--

Dreamed I was driving along the coast and suddenly I was in Jacmel again, along the road to the beach. I woke up and one of the girls in my rotation, who was at Croix-de-Bouquet, just outside of Port au Prince, had posted this video of her time in CdB. Their compound was different as it was actively a school and there were several volunteers working in a medical clinic. Around 3:30 you meet a nurse who is talking about an 8 month old who came to them dehydrated and is now thriving. She doesn't mention this, but the mother was feeding the baby soup instead of breastfeeding because she believed that her milk was bad after the earthquake. The woman had carried five kids to term and they had all died except this one. The lack of education is just... unconscionable. ANYWAY, here is Hannah's awesome video.



Sorry for the lack of real update; life has been busy since I returned, as my boyfriend came back to Atlanta for a week!