Paleolicious 0
Writing at the Guardian, Jason Williams examines the “paleo diet” and finds it paleolithic in unexpected ways. A snippet:
In my view, the answer to that has little to do with food. The paleolithic is a favoured era because of the way it answers to a desire to justify or reimpose certain social hierarchies, especially those concerning gender.
For John Durant, a paleo thought leader, feminism is a particular bête noire. He spends pages of his cash-in book, The Paleo Manifesto, railing against the feminist Carol Adams, who connected feminism with vegetarianism. At one point he writes that “Adams’s meat-hating, man-hating mantra – ‘Eat Rice Have Faith in Women’ – is intended to undermine the male culture of meat-eating, thus undermining male power, thus reducing rape”.
Missing from his analysis, but also noteworthy, is that the “Paleo Diet” is based on the imagined diet of paleolithic Europeans. THe “Paleo Diets” of persons in the various regions of the Americas (if there were any at the time), Africa, and Asia would have been much different, as they would have eaten foods native to their regions and their varying climates.
It is, ultimately, not only Euro-centric, but also an intellectually dishonest construction promoted by charlatans, as fad diets are wont to be.
