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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Would your typical hunter-gatherer have more than 25 edible items regularly around them? I'm not so sure.

The idea that there is a "typical hunter-gatherer" across all of human history and geography, and that we know what that is -- is I think a fundamental problem with a lot of these theories.

Someone studies one group of people at one (modern) time and place -- a group of people who probably don't even exclusively "forage" for their food and other economic activity now as encountered -- and then they, or their readers, assume that what they found is somehow typical of everyone they assign to the category "hunter gatherer", and further assume what people at what other times and places are "correctly" assigned to that category too.

There needs not be a typical hunter gatherer lifestyle. The distinction is between gray cubicle sedentary junk-eating modern lifestyle and the general hunter gatherer lifestyle, it’s distinct enough.

They'd probably eat more than 25 different edible roots/tubors alone regularly, plus berries, fruits, leaves, and honey and meat/animal products it would run into hundreds, its surprising how much around us is edible that we no longer see as food.

https://apps.worldagroforestry.org/downloads/Publications/PD...

> hunter-gatherer

You don't even need to go that far - my Italian grandma who was born in a farming village in the early 1900s, knew dozens of herbs, how you would go about finding them, and how could you use them for this or that other purpose. You can't find any of those herbs in a modern supermarket except maybe for a couple of them.

Imagine the biodiversity on the peninsula before all those humans moved in too. It must have been like a garden of eden to the first migrants of humans. There are islands in the Mediterranean today that are still barren of trees due to Venetian shipbuilding.

I have an Italian mother in law. One of the things that impressed me is how so many of the methods of cooking feed into each other. The leftover milk that's nearly spoiled can go into making cheese and there were many similar techniques like this that I don't remember.

I feel like we've lost some of our food cultures at some point and we're only starting to realize what we're missing.

To be entirely fair, herbs in the quantities we consume aren't very nutritious.

my specific examples was about herbs but it's valid for almost every food category:

* meat: my family is from a village near Rome, Roman traditional cuisine is famously full of recipes that use all sorts of weird meat cuts (pork jowl, internal organs of various animals...) - you won't find most of those in an average supermarket. When it comes to meat, the problem is not just cuts, but also breeds: I live in Australia and it has been extremely hard to find chicken which is not Cornish Cross. In Sydney, you can find heirloom breeds chicken at only a handful of speciality butchers, and prices are very high.

* grains: this is a well known problem, most grain-based products are based on just a handful of varietals. I have to say that the situation is starting to improve: recently, in some upmarket stores, it has become possible again to get products based on some heirloom grains, however they are pricey (example: Pasta Monongrano made from Matt or Kamut flour)

* fish: it is a known problem that fishing boats are forced to throw away certain catch, because certain fish varieties are not "marketable"

the list could continue...

Fair enough. I'm not sure if those foods were any better or worse, but there's definitely an argument to make for the poverty of variety of modern cuisine.

yes, exactly, the problem is not whether those are more or less nutritious, the issue is the lack of variety. It seems that gut bacteria only improves if your diet is very diverse. But modern industrially produced food is made from just a small list of commodity ingredients. If you are curious about these topics, you could check out "The omnivore's dilemma", a book by Micheal Pollan, or the video documentary "Food Inc." that is also narrated by Pollan

I'm not sure if the gut microbiota "improves" in adults at all. It's largely established by the time you're past 3 years old, and even radical dietary changes mainly just shift the relative abundances around.

There's probably still an effect in there, but it seems more likely that it's mainly antibiotics that are killing off gut microbiota variety, with an argument to be made for a role of highly processed foods.

That's true for all of Europe. We just don't care about endemic herbs anymore.

Yes. I can't cite it, but I remember seeing a study that said hunter gatherers in warmer climates can have up to 200 different food sources.

Of course I'm sure it's highly dependent on season and region.

The world your typical hunter gatherer lived in was remarkably different than today. So much more flora and fauna. Actual functioning ecosystems versus disrupted ones. The world today is so bizarrely different than even the world 500 years ago all thanks to our farming, hunting, and resource gathering over the years.

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