In this article I’m going to highlight some changes to food that we could see in the coming decades, and how they could affect you and I as paleolithic lifestylers. I don’t have a crystal ball but everything here is theoretically possible or being prototyped somewhere…
So. What the hell happened to food?
You probably agree that, on the whole, business makes the decisions in how most feed themselves today. Mainstream science, beholden to its commercial funding, often presents research that’s not exactly objective. There are labs where people design food, putting together food products for maximum palatability and largest profit margins.
It’s not all bad of course, we’ve had all kinds of innovation out of these mega corporations’ research dollars. And paleo itself is built on findings in the nutritional and social sciences. The thought leaders in our field often have scientific backgrounds. So it’s not like we’re opposed to science.
In many ways, paleo is a backlash to the frankly disastrous standard of health in the modern world. We’ve opted out of the SAD and taken back our wellness. To some extent we’ve also reclaimed our food supply. But, in this big business, high tech food world, where do us paleolithic eaters stand? Are we, along with the vegans, and other ‘extreme’ dietary groups, destined to be the last of the natural food holdouts resisting the tendrils and developments in the mainstream food industry? Do we choose to resist forever, or will we one day see authentic ‘paleo products’ on supermarket shelves?
Image credit: Simon Shek
To many of us, paleo is a way of life, one built on living with the healthiest and most sustainable principles. And with the work of people like Robb, the movement, which lacks huge corporate interest and funding, grows stronger every year. Grass fed is grass roots, and long may it continue.
But in spite of our progress there’s an awkward question that nobody’s really asking.
Can the foods that science ‘designs’ ever be made ‘better’ than our staples of leafy greens, wild caught fish, grassfed meats, and so on? By ‘better’ I mean providing higher quality nutrition, and costing less in resources to bring to market?
Or bluntly, can ‘Big Agri’, ‘Big Pharma’, and food technology make paleo obsolete?
Clearly not at the moment, but what about in the future? Consider foods precisely tailored to our individual genetic profile, and perfectly reproduced in 3d organic printers. Or even assembled at a cellular level by nanotechnology. And if these ‘printed’ meals were better for us, how many of us would choose to consume them? What if meat was made obsolete?Do you think we’d be forced to give up consuming animals, by ‘ethical groups’?
So, is paleo about optimal nutrition, or a natural way of life? Must there be a tradeoff? Perhaps we can use technology to enhance our Palaeolithic foods? For example, genetically identical grassfed beef, but grown in a vat (in vitro) from samples taken from cattle. All fine and good, but would the paleo orthodoxy accept it? Would we trust the FDA if they labelled it ‘safe’?
And what about foods with almost identical nutritional profiles to our favourites, but in strange shapes and colours (to appeal to the kids and the vegans perhaps)? Would you give your children something that in every way resembled and tasted like a chocolate bar, but had the nutritional payload of wild Alaskan salmon? I think I would.
In the nearer future we’re supposed to see the coming to market of a second generation of ‘transgenic foods‘ (another word for genetically modified). Their composition would be altered, supposedly to promote health benefits. For example, foods with ‘boosted additives’ such as antioxidising agents that are actually bred into the cellular structure of the food, not mixed in later as an additive. Just the way that antioxidants in nature work.
So to take this further, would Mr/Mrs Paleo eat a transgenic, antioxidant enriched bagel that’d been authentically stripped of the lectins, gluten, nasty carbs and whatnot? What if it tasted like chicken? What if it was good for you? What would the point of paleo be then?
Yeah, it could all get a bit weird for us.
Hell no, GMO
Image credit: John S. Quarterman
Can we ever get to the point where we have GMO without the Monsanto style consequences with soybeans and intellectual property law? Maybe…
Do you think GMO can survive this generation’s distrust? It’s done enough damage and got enough bad press already, so I don’t think it can. But suppose one day we get good at it, and by then people have forgotten all about Monsanto. What if GMO got so effective that there was no point to us eating these ‘old’ and nutritionally inferior varieties of vegetables? If GMO were to become acceptable on a wide scale, there’s no doubt we’d have the holdouts with their oldschool genetically untampered cabbage patches. Would you be among them?
Yet it helps to consider that the foods we consume today have already been molded by thousands of years of human selection, which is a little like old fashioned genetic engineering, albeit in slow motion and with certain constraints. Many paleolithic eaters are suspicious of fruit for this very reason, selected for thousands of years for the maximum tasty sweetness (and fructose payload!). But what about a delicious GMO apple where the fructose has been swapped out for something else? Would you try one?
And the far future…?
Obviously, biological science isn’t just tinkering with food. Everything with cells is up for grabs, or will be. That includes you and me.
So, what about that far off point where we no longer require what we define as food to survive? I’m sure you know of the life extensionists, popping 150 pills a day, holding out until they’re able to upload their minds into the mainframe, or to receive some sort of therapy that rejuvenates their body on a cellular level. Waiting to become the next level of humanity.
And If we aren’t even human anymore, then what is paleo to us? Not a problem for current readers, but perhaps we think about our children, grandchildren and descendants. Posthuman grandchildren? Could happen.
Considering what we’ve already pulled off in genetic engineering, would you discount this sort of technology arriving eventually? I wouldn’t.
Image credit: VFS Digital Design
Sure all this talk of food tech and going beyond our humanity might be too much at the moment, and maybe it is. But science moves faster than it has ever moved before, and if anything it is accelerating. Maybe paleo is just one point in our journey towards optimal wellness. Maybe science will outdo nature after all. But science has an agenda, because it’s got to get money from somewhere. Nature doesn’t have an agenda.
Will there be a time when paleo is no longer optimal? That depends on how we respond and define paleo. So, will paleo practices evolve and change alongside scientific progress? I guess that’s down to us. I think so, we’re a progressive bunch.
But what do you think?
Summary/TLDR:
- How will technological changes affect our food supply and way of life in the coming decades?
- Will there ever become a point where man-made foods are nutritionally superior and more socially/economically expedient than natural whole/paleolithic foods? What do we do then?
- Will there ever come a point where human advancement takes us beyond the consumption of food and ergo, beyond paleo. What then?
Byline: Jack Oughton is a journalist and copywriter for hire from Croydon, UK. He eats a paleo diet and most of his friends and family think his food choices are ‘insane’. The hell do they know anyway? He can be found on Twitter, masquerading as a talking owl called Koukouvaya
I dont think the body cares what is considered paleo. Inputs create outputs, just happens that most of the time paleo foods create good outputs, but not always. Much of my nutrition comes in pill form, reality is complicated.
Very provoking thoughts! I enjoy the uneasy feeling I get contemplating this.
While I have no answer, there is a further constraint on the potential for
A study found that micro-RNA in plants served to downregulate a certain receptor in humans (“Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA”). The further extension of this finding is an entire class of vitamin-like compounds that have been until now very neglected.
Here’s the link to abstract + PDF: http://www.nature.com/cr/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/cr2011158a.html
Also, the reason I made the shift from vegan to paleo was specifically because eating meat involves the death of an animal. It seems one of the most significant ways we tie ourselves into the physical world. I have no desire to lose that.
Great post,
.sean
To even think about the answers to the questions posed here, we must first presume that there will come a day when science (or humans) will be able to fully understand every aspect of a particular food like grass-fed beef or leafy greens AND how they affect the body so it can be duplicated. That will never happen. Mother nature is too complex. Just when we as humans think we have fully understood the interworkings of something, we discover a whole new aspect.
Now, that won’t stop science from trying to create genetically identical grass-fed beef in a lab or organic food printers but they will never fully understand the product to make an exact duplicate. It will never measure up to the way it’s been produced for thousands of year. Never.
You’ve raised some very good questions. I am deathly scared of genetic modification of any food; plant and animal alike. Your submission regarding chocolate bars that yield the nutritional value of salmon to appeal to children is one scary image. (vegans on the other hand, are on their own on that one…)
Recently we were at a party where the children were served chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs. My 2 year old son who is all paleo at home, part time paleo in the social world had never seen such a thing before. So he played with his dino-nugget for a good 5 minutes, made it climb a chair, made it roar and chase another dino-nugget, then took a small bite of it, spit it out and then rushed to me and asked for food.
My conclusion from this is: a 2 year old can distinguish between food and not food. Children eat when they are hungry and they eat what you provide them. Children and adults alike who have eaten real food all their lives don’t need to be coaxed into modified foods. On a somewhat related note, molecular gastronomy (modifying foods with chemical processes to make them look like something other than what they are) is a messed up concept…
😀 love your anecdote about your son!
Anyone else here read Ray Kurzweil’s stuff?
I think some people approach GMO foods as having the best of all worlds, but ultimately we have no idea what else we’re messing with if, say, we manufacture a potato to be loaded with vitamin D. What about all the cofactors that we know have an important part to play in our own health. What about all the things we don’t know about yet? I agree that human selection has modified organisms, but within the limits of the food’s own genome. As with the basic tenets of evolutionary theory, we changed what was already there, versus adding things that were not even remotely likely to arise. That, to me seems to be a much safer process than making glow in the dark seeds or stripping gluten from wheat. God knows what will take its place.
I agree completely. Very astute observations, Tom.
I thought of Kurzweil too. Food will become obsolete. In the meantime, I don’t trust the FDA or any other Big Brother agency to tell me what is safe. They can’t even get the food pyramid right.
Great post, glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks about this kinda wacky shit all the time.
I love Paleo, and will continue to live my life this way until it is no longer the best solution for overall health. Do I think we will eventually figure out the human body and food in their entirety so that we will be given some sort of a lab-created diet specifically tailored to our genetic code…yes
But until then, I’m sticking with Paleo.
When I think back and see myself as a little kid running wild and happy on the Pacific coast, I feel glad that I lived for a time without a future that looked like this. I’m also glad that at this point I’m mortal, and won’t live to see this shitty future unfold.
is anybody else here old enough to remember “you can’t fool mother nature”…? i think it’s far more likely that overzealous innovators (corporate scientists) will destroy the human race than improve it — their record to date is abysmal.
true, you can’t come up with great new ideas without speculating wildly on what might ideally be possible, but usually the “what if” game is a waste of time. we shall see what we shall see — and cope with it when we have to.
While I do feel it is worthwhile to contemplate these types of issues, my opinion remains the same. Just as we we have evolved to thrive in our planet’s gravitational pull, we also realize maximum phenotypic expression when we consume foods that we were designed over millions of years to consume. Any deviation from that will create a less than perfect expression of our genes; whether that deviation be a candy bar or some supposed superfood derived from genetic modification.
You simply cannot improve upon what we are already optimized for. The only improvement we will be able to achieve is with our own genome. Henceforth it is within the realms of possibility to achieve greater health, athletic performance, intelligence, etc. through the application of engineered food.
I’ve always wondered what the future holds for those that DON’T eat Paleo. Are they going to all get obese, sick, and die? Or will their genetic code mutate and modify to thrive on the crap that they’re eating?
Hmmm….
Warning: extreme political INcorrectness to follow!
It’s interesting, because everyone talks about the “epidemic of infertility” in this country right now. If you ask me, we actually have an epidemic of *fertility.* When you really think about the way we’re eating and living (rancid garbage vegetable oils, endless sugar and fructose, chronic stress, lack of sleep, living in a chemical soup), it’s a mystery how anyone *does* get pregnant, not that they don’t.
And here’s the very politically incorrect part: As for the genetic code, thanks to modern medicine, we have babies being born to couples whose bodies otherwise aren’t suited/fit to reproduce. We have an entire generation of women who grew up terrified of eating animal fats (or any fat, for that matter) and cholesterol. No wonder our hormones are so out of whack. (Not to mention out super estrogenic world with the plastics, pthalates, etc.) Combine that with the general lack of nutrients from overly processed, dead, manufactured “food products” and a lack of REAL, fresh veggies and cleanly raised meats, and a woman’s body interprets it as though there’s a famine in the environment, because she’s getting no nutrition. Nature, in its wisdom, knows it would be a bad idea to bring a baby into an environment when there’s no food around. (Or when mom is chronically stressed…the bills, the crappy job, the traffic every day. There’s no pack of lions attacking the village, but mom’s body feels like there is.)
So I feel like the genetic code is *already* getting wacky, because we have people who’s diets and lifestyles have made them infertile, but with the help of shots, meds, etc., they *push* themselves into conception. Is that doing that baby any favors? I dunno. And please, *please* don’t interpret this as eugenics or anything like that. I’m not talking about crazy stuff like a master race or anyone’s superiority over anyone else. I’m just pointing out how we’re already messing with the future, and probably not in a good way. (I don’t know the statistics, but all these conditions like ADD, autism, and other neuro-sensory conditions don’t seem to have been anywhere near as prevalent before we started messing with the food supply and following misguided government recommendations about what we should eat. Somehow I don’t think it’s the beef tallow, lard, or eggs that people have been eating for hundreds of years that are causing those. But fat-free, artificially colored yogurt, FiberOne bars and soy “sausage?” Hmmm…)
Sally Fallon (from the WAPF) talks about “the natural selection of the wise.” That is, the people who learn about traditional foods, healthy animal fats, living in sync with the seasons, getting sunlight and proper exercise, will be the ones who, in the long term, have success reproducing and passing on their hardy genetics.
Natural selection of the wise sounds like a good idea, except the evolution game is being manipulated now as you say above re: fertility treatments, medicines, etc. “Natural” selection requires a “natural” environment…we’re past that. While I agree that we in this movement are starting to get it and could be considered ‘wise’, we are living in the modern world w/ the resources to live this way. Look at the birth rates in the modern world vs the developing world; we’re being out-bred.
Great post. With regards to the idea of GM crops becoming more nutritious than paleo foods, I think that could possibly happen but it increases dependence on centralized production and distribution methods, and all the risks that are associated with that. For one if something disrupts that system, such as a natural disaster or world war, people will starve because they’ll likely be even more lacking in the skills that they need to survive without that system than they are now. Why grow your food, or get your hands dirty or get your hands dirty at all when you can just go to the store and buy your wild alaskan salmon chocolate bar? Then you have the vicissitudes of the economy, let’s say the economy implodes and everyone is dependent on this hyper-nutritious GM food. Again, people would starve.
As for the next question, that is the one that is truly fascinating, and one that would make the premise of a fantastic piece of science fiction. I would envision the culture at large embracing this trans-humanist reality, turning themselves into cyborgs piece by piece and uploading themselves into “the mainframe”. Meanwhile, there’d be this subset of humanity, perhaps they’d be called the “Paleos” who embrace paleo living on an ever higher level and refuse to give up their humanity. They’d embrace paleo culture wholeheartedly, possibly to the point of becoming hunter gatherers. They’d stop using technology that isn’t paleolithic, live in the wild, and treasure their fleshy, finite existence in whole new ways.
As for myself, I’d be torn as to which group to join, the trans-humanists, or the paleos. But for now, I agree I don’t see anything like that happening in our lifetime, so I still think that tons of vegetables and fatty meats grown naturally and doing exercise are going to give us the best results physically, and building community and developing resilience are still going to give us the best psychological benefits. So for now, and the foreseeable future, paleo is still ftw.
It a hypothetical idea. So for the sake of it lets assume there will be an artificial diet that is superior in supporting health, performance and longevity. (thought i am skeptical of the idea of food that is oh so nutritious but tastes like sweets and looks like a dino as a staple food. the taste, perception etc. of food has a big influence on the mind and that has a big influence on the body. To make this kind of food probably takes a lot of serious mindfuck.)
But lets go all Ray Kurzweil and transcend on a diet of pills and immortality.
I am rather young (25 that is) and grew up as most without much of a relationship to the sources of my food and with little knowledge of how people lived before today.
Learning about eating, working on a farm (for a week), searching for local farms to buy eggs and meat, exploring the shelfs in health food, organics or even ordinary grocery stores is a big learning experience to me.
Connecting me to the surrounding world and opening my eyes.
All that would be lost with a perfect diet of pills.
Also i try to build up a lifestyle that gives me some independence. I hope one day to have a garden big enough to grow some food and keep some animals. Even if not enough to support me at least to learn and to understand how to support yourself independent from food supply. Maybe learning how to hunt and fish.
I am not wishing for a world that makes this even hard than it is today, with every place on earth governed by some government that restricts your choices and independence in some way and no place left to go to make your on way of living.
So would i approve a magic diet as a means of healthy living.
Sure.
But i would not want to miss the enriching and liberating learning experience that is eating and food can be.
Reducing food to health, performance and longevity would be ignorant of its social and cultural importance throughout history, until today.
It’s kind of sad that eating today gets reduced to a means of loosing and gaining wait in most of today’s discourse.
The most important issue in my mind is changing our genome to fit our desires. We are always taking risks every time we adopt a new tool. Maybe the real question is what should be our desires and then what tools do we risk with to fulfill them. That begs the question “How many kinds of ‘we’ are there?” and what is the potential for dire conflict of multiple directions. Such new territory gives one pause!
Mainstream science, beholden to its commercial funding, often presents research that’s not exactly objective. There are labs where people design food, putting together food products for maximum palatability and largest profit margins.
Mainstream science is typically NIH/NSF/DARPA funded, not commercially funded. Flip through a bunch of journals with high impact factor and see where people are getting their funding. Designing food in a lab would be considered engineering or technology, not science.
Why is mr Oughton’s pic at the bottom? ?
With a few performance tweaks, paleo seems fairly close to the optimal diet depending upon your objectives (long-term health vs. short-term optimal performance). One factor that needs more consideration is the psychological and hormonal effect of a consistent, plentiful, nourishing, and highly palatable diet. Although well planned Intermittent Fasting does add a degree of eustress, for the greater part of the past 100,000 years one of our primary goals has been obtaining sustenance; starvation is still very common in developing countries and I think that a 24 hour fast once a week does not mimic optimal meal timing for health (but not necessarily performance). Since food reward (perceived or real) plays a large part in hormone signalling and the eventual utilization of the nutrients we consume, then it seems like meal timing plays a considerable role in overall health.
I’ve lived and worked in quite a few “developing countries” that still consider bread and rice a staple, and I’ve noticed that despite their reliance on wheat and lack of protein, many of these individuals are still pound-for-pound in better shape than a moderately-trained crossfit athlete. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that they “work out” 12 hours a day doing manual labor and operate at a caloric deficit for a majority of the week. It’s not uncommon for them to eat a few pieces of chicken along with a mountain of rice as their only protein sources for two meals out of the week. While this isn’t reasonable or practical for most of us, I think we are really underestimating the psychological factor of the deficit-reward feeling that results from having to really fight or labour for our food. Everyone’s capable of starving themselves for a few days out of the week, but I think one of the keys to optimal health is learning to operate further outside of our comfort zone and tracking what this does to our hormones and body composition. Many people have made great progress with IF alone, but from the little I know about it it’s still far from the exact science that nutrition is.
So… yeah, what I’m saying is that some form of an IF, protein cycling, or hormone signalling diet will be the next big thing after people figure out that a basic paleo diet is nutritionally ideal.
Fruit is actually pretty much the same sugar content as it used to have. You must have missed this nice post by Denise Minger at RawFood SOS
http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/
Oooh, some very thought-provoking questions. I will definitely be pondering these as I plan my meals for the weekend and the upcoming week….. 🙂
Soylent Green…..is…….people!!!!!