We are faunivore!

[Inger]

Hello Hanna,

there are many true carnivore animals that let their food rot before they eat it, like the krokodile.

That in fact do not make them less carnivorous.
I do not understand your point?

I myself believe that human can digest some plantfood fine, like wild berries etc.
But I don`t believe we are designed to digest much plantmatter though.
This is my own experience.

Another point:
I believe we are also organs/marrow-eaters.. these you can very well eat from freshly killed animals BTW.

Inger

[miles]

I was referring to the raw, unprocessed meat of freshly slaughtered mammals, not to aged meat, dried meat, frozen meat, processed meat, smoked meat etc.
The meat we usually buy and eat is aged, i. e. predigested by enzymes and bacteria. Humans usually do not like the meat of freshly killed animals (see also http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/general-discussion/hunting-anyone/msg56611/#msg56611). But in paleo times, there were no coolers (or fans) to properly age and preserve the meat. Therefore, ageing meat was not always and not everywhere possible. A true, raw-eating carnivore should like the meat of freshly killed animals. So either we are not true carnivores or we are not designed to eat everything raw, fresh and unprocessed. I guess that both is true.

Thanks Phil for you interesting informations, also regarding squashes etc.

..... I like the taste of fresh meat, the meat I usually buy is fresh, I ate 2kg fresh and bloody beef roasting joint yesterday and loved it, just ate with my hands and mouth... I've seen plenty of snow-living people on tv eating fresh raw reindeer/caribou meat and enjoying it, people eat sashimi which is fresh meat/fish and clearly enjoy it...

[Busgrw]

..... I like the taste of fresh meat, the meat I usually buy is fresh, I ate 2kg fresh and bloody beef roasting joint yesterday and loved it, just ate with my hands and mouth... I've seen plenty of snow-living people on tv eating fresh raw reindeer/caribou meat and enjoying it, people eat sashimi which is fresh meat/fish and clearly enjoy it...

I would love to have access to more fresh meat as would prefer to eat it over aged meat even if the taste isn't as nice. Mainly because I believe that a lot of the goodness is lost when we eat aged meats. I eat more lamb than beef these days due to the fact lamb isn't aged (or atleast I dont believe it is  )

What meat do you usually buy fresh Miles as seeing as you're in the UK I should be able to get the same?

[miles]

What meat do you usually buy fresh Miles as seeing as you're in the UK I should be able to get the same?

Go to Morrisons butcher now and they have vacuum-packed beef roasting joints £4/kilo. Otherwise they always have fresh meat anyway.

[Busgrw]

Go to Morrisons butcher now and they have vacuum-packed beef roasting joints £4/kilo. Otherwise they always have fresh meat anyway.

But I always thought that UK beef was hung for around 3 weeks regardless of the cut? Hmm. May have to have a look at Morrisons then. Thanks.

[TylerDurden]

But I always thought that UK beef was hung for around 3 weeks regardless of the cut? Hmm. May have to have a look at Morrisons then. Thanks.

  Avoid ALL supermarkets. They always provide low-quality foods and supporting them reduces the availability of high-quality raw foods, over time, as they get more money to squeeze out competitors.

[Busgrw]

  Avoid ALL supermarkets. They always provide low-quality foods and supporting them reduces the availability of high-quality raw foods, over time, as they get more money to squeeze out competitors.

I agree Tyler. At the moment I buy all my meat from the local butcher and the only reason I was going to look into Morrisons is because I think I misinterpreted miles' comments in that I thought 'fresh' meat in his posts was meat that hadn't been hung for 3 weeks and had pretty much come straight off the animal and hence had more nutrition in it due to it not being bled out. 

[miles]

UK beef was(is) hung for around 3 weeks regardless of the cut?

I don't think that's true(though I don't know). Where did you get this from? What is hung? the whole carcass or what? If it was hung long how would it still be so bloody, strong and red?

"And when we prepare the meat, we know how to get the best flavour. We hang it in our butchery for the time it needs to make it tender, and to ‘taste like meat used to’. That’s one week for lamb, pork and poultry, and three weeks for beef. Then we butcher our meat by hand, using traditional skills and tools, producing a variety of interesting and useful cuts. You can tell the quality just by looking at them."

This is from the 'Well Hung Meat Company'.

And... I don't think Morrisons beef and lamb is poor quality at all..

[Haai]

Is morrisons beef and lamb grass-fed? And if it isn't organic it will have been treated with antibiotics surely?

[miles]

No antibiotics afaik. The lamb is grass-fed freerange, and the beef is grass-fed but with grain in the winter. It's not officially organic. I did ask all these questions a while ago and find out exactly, including the actual farms the animals comes from and I remember I was satisfied, and spoke to the Morrisons buyers.

[Hanna]

AFAIK meat is usually wet-aged.

Wet aging occurs when meat and its own juices are vacuum packed in plastic and boxed for distribution. Because the plastic packaging does not allow loss of moisture, the meat may absorb more moisture which results in an increase in juiciness and tenderness.

http://ag.ansc.purdue.edu/meat_quality/aging_meat.html

[Busgrw]

I don't think that's true(though I don't know). Where did you get this from? What is hung? the whole carcass or what? If it was hung long how would it still be so bloody, strong and red?

I'm not 100% if its true either but it was my butcher that mentioned it when I first started enquiring about raw beef mince to make steak tartare as I was heading in the raw food direction. He said that they hang it (the whole carcass) for a period of between 21 and 28 days as the longer its hung the more tender the meat becomes as it ages.

I also understand that the beef in France that is used for steak tartare is usually only hung for 7-10 days to keep its freshness but again i'm not 100% on this. Maybe Francois might know more.

I'll ask my butcher next time I speak to him.

The last thing I did hear on the grapevine was that supermarket meat tended to be fresher (hung for less time) as it was more cost effective for them to get the meat into packets and on to the shelves rather than taking up storage space and adding to their costs. Seems to make sense I suppose but still not convinced on the quality of supermarket meats over high quality butchers.

[TylerDurden]

Supermarkets always focus on quantity rather than quality, so it's hardly likely that their products are as they state.  Waitrose is a bit better as they focus more on the organic side of things, but they're still pretty bad.

[Hanna]

I just searched and found this about the Eskimos:

Stefansson's book "The Fat of the Land" (...)

He gets into the Eskimos and raw food on pages 104-05 and elsewhere.  
"It was not true, as implied by the usual northern movie and by some writers, that Eskimos preferred to eat their food raw. A few things were preferred raw, among them seal liver;
but most were preferred boiled or roasted, and if they were
eaten raw it was usually for convenience. Still it is true that
the Eskimos ate wholly uncooked meats more frequently
 than we do."

http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/carnivorous-zero-carb-approach/stefansson's-book-online-t925/?wap2

And this about the Nenets:

The women’s role primarily is to prepare and cook the staples of meat and fish (...) Women’s work, connected to heating and cooking, takes place mostly at the stove.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/tribes/nenets/index.shtml

From what I have read,  all snow people cooked quite a bit and there must be a reason for that. A reason could be, for example, that we are not designed to eat large amounts of raw, fresh, unprocessed red muscle meat.   Fish can be eaten fresher than red muscle meat; it has less connective tissue and is more easily digestible. BTW, doesn´t meat freeze very quickly in the arctis? Thawed meat ages faster than meat that has not been frozen and even frozen meat ages, although slowly, of course.

[TylerDurden]

The above is, of course, biased nonsense from Stefansson. He was trying at the time to promote his all-meat-and-dairy diet and realised that if he used the only example he could think of, namely the Inuit, he would thereby be inadvertently suggesting that a raw-meat diet was healthy - he realised that, given millenia of social conditioning re raw-meat-phobias,people would be much less likely to adopt his diet if they thought that raw meat was part of the diet, so he lied when he claimed that the Inuit didn't eat much of their meats raw. Other people who visited the Eskimoes, such as Weston-Price and other anthropologists, all noted a high intake of raw meats in the Inuit, thus debunking Stefansson's claims.

(Stefansson, by the way, was notorious for his promotion of the "Blond Eskimo" theory, which prompted a number of scientists to accuse him of outright fraud, due to the dodgy evidence presented by him).

As for frozen meats, the Inuit are known to have loved eating frozen "high"-fish - it was their favourite dish, apparently.

[PaleoPhil]

Tyler is correct about the facts (whether he's correct about what Stefansson's thoughts and motivations were, there's no way of knowing, though they are at least plausible guesses). The vast majority of observers have reported that the Inuit and other Arctic cultures ate more raw foods (and organs and plant foods) than Stefansson reported. More importantly, the Inuit and other Arctic peoples themselves tell a different story and demonstrate a different experience than what Stefansson reported. Even today many Inuit still eat raw red meats/organs/fats, such as these Inuit that ate nearly an entire seal raw with Anthony Bourdain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGVdYiM5IXw

Stefansson's reports were an interesting and valuable contribution overall, but imperfect. They should be taken in the context of the whole of the information on Arctic cultures and now that we have good contact with most of them (especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain opened Siberia to the world), I think it's particularly important to listen to what the Arctic people themselves have to say, as they have been frequently misrepresented and misunderstood for many years.

A side note: the downplaying and even ridiculing of the importance of organ meats like liver and eating animal foods raw or low-cooked by some of the ZIOH folks is particularly bizarre given that one of their most frequently cited sources, Stefansson, acknowledged that Eskimos not only ate seal liver (and fish liver), but preferred it raw. It seems to require a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to not see the contradictions.

[miles]

Eskimo people eat nowhere near as much fat as many people here seem to think.

[PaleoPhil]

Eskimo people eat nowhere near as much fat as many people here seem to think.

What caused you to bring that up, Miles--just the mention of Inuit and their consumption of raw animal foods? Are there any specific posts where claims were made about Eskimo fat consumption that you had in mind? I recall William (a former member who was banned) claiming that they ate a certain percentage of fat, but I don't recall anyone else making the claim. I think Lex has even repeatedly said that Stefansson miscalculated the Eskimo macronutrient ratio he used in making his pemmican and that he doesn't think there's any specific magical macronutrient ratio that applies to everyone (which I agree with). How much fat do you think some or all of the Eskimo cultures consumed?

[TylerDurden]

The Eskimoes did eat a lot of raw blubber - on the other hand, I think I read somewhere that the actual seal meats have far less fat-content in them than is usual, as the fat goes instead to the blubber(?).

[PaleoPhil]

I was referring to the raw, unprocessed meat of freshly slaughtered mammals, not to aged meat, dried meat, frozen meat, processed meat, smoked meat etc.
The meat we usually buy and eat is aged, i. e. predigested by enzymes and bacteria. Humans usually do not like the meat of freshly killed animals ....

Thanks Phil for you interesting informations, also regarding squashes etc.

You're welcome, Hannah. I prefer aged meat myself but I also like fresh meat. Lions seem to prefer aged meat to fresh too and they are obligate carnivores, so liking aged meats wouldn't prove that anyone wasn't a facultative carnivore. I've seen a video of two lions guarding a maggot-ridden rotting zebra corpse, with the lions frequently roaring to keep away other animals from their precious prize. I wish I could find that again.

[PaleoPhil]

I found the video in which two lions loudly and repeatedly announce ownership of a carcass steaming with maggots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiJBjsHEi1w.

Carcasses apparently eventually rot to a point where they're no longer desired by most large predators. This video shows that all the large predators except the civet lost interest in a carcass once it became thoroughly rotted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOln4WCotuk. The civet eats some of the maggots and even the rotten meat broth the maggots create.

[Techydude]

I'm confused after reading the topic.

What are we supposed to eat?
1) 100% fauna aka animals and no plants or fruits?
2) 50%+ fauna aka animals and no plants and some fruit
3) Or 50%+ fauna aka animals no fruit and some plants
4) Plants and fruit and animals?
etc?

[PaleoPhil]

Confusion may be the right state, as nature is pretty complex and there seems to be fairly wide variation between individuals. It seems like most carnivores/faunivores are facultative and eat at least a little plant food now and then. For example, coyotes will eat berries and fruit drops and there's even a video of wolves eating berries. The difference between facultative carnivore and true omnivore is fuzzy, as omnivore has never been defined in precise scientific terms. Most people are more familiar with the term omnivore, so that may be the more understandable and therefore practical term, even if it's not particularly scientific.

The ethnographic atlas shows a wide range in plant intakes among hunter gatherers. My guess is that Stone Agers ate higher levels of animal foods before the mass megafauna extinctions. How much more, I don't know.

With all the individual variation, figuring out the right ratio for you probably comes down largely to self experimentation. One thing that is clear is that 100% of animal or plant foods has no historical precedent. However, Lex has done fairly well on a near-100% animal food diet. I suspect it's important that he includes organ meats as staple foods.