Same to you, and many happy returns!
Thank you!
Well, I still have
your former post (which is now 3 pages back
) to answer… but let’s talk about your last one first.
I don’t know how animals would use their intellect to choose their food and I wonder if they do it at all. When you carefully observe mammals, you see that they very much rely on their smell sense. Sure,
“they also learn by experience and observation and pass on what they learn to others or mimic what others do.” My cat observes me when I eat, he’s curious and apparently he likes to know what I’m eating. Sometimes I put it front of his nose and then he turns away, seemingly to say:
“ah, that’s not for me!”Unless I happen to be extremely hungry, I would never have instinctively found out that liver, a crab, shellfish or even pine nuts are palatable. So, by observing what others eat, I learned. I agree that knowledge of what can be edible is, at least in part, transmitted from generation to generation. But it must have originated from a first, probably some individual who was extremely hungry, tasted something never eaten before by its specie and found it pleasant. Such passed on knowledge shouldn’t usually be in conflict with our instinct since we are of the same specie and should have the same needs and same senses of taste.
But, if I’m repealed by the smell and taste of some stuff someone else is eating, then I won’t eat it. Since we, modern humans, had an extremely different environmental, nutritional, health and even genetic history, our needs may wildly diverge and that’s where conventional dietary way of thinking becomes ineffective.
But it’s remarkable that instinctive findings and raw paleo dietary principles converge on the basic points. That we should eat raw animal food was discovered instinctively, for fish by the eldest son of GCB who was 4 or 5 years old at the time and for meat a bit latter by GCB himself: at the market and passing by the fishmonger stall, the son told his father:
“dad, I wanna eat a fish, buy me a fish!”The whole family had been eating raw for sometimes, but it had not come to their mind that we can and must eat raw fish and raw meat. So the father was rather surprised. Anyway, he bought a fish, gave it to his son who instantly gobbled it raw in front of the flabbergasted fishmonger! Sometime latter, the father passed by a butcher stall and was bewildered to be attracted by the smell of raw meat. He then introduced it raw on the family table and everyone found it appetizing.
I don’t feel we ever pretended that instincts and senses are the sole tool used in nature. Of course, there are others. But our instinct is far superior to any diet expert or ideology in precisely choosing the right food in the right amount for each specific individual at each given moment.
No problem, I understood that we used the word “brain” instead of a more appropriate word such as “mind”. My sentence about using instinct not implying idiocy was a caricature, sorry about that.
I’m glad that you did read at least some parts of GCB’s book, so that we can have a better targeted and more constructive dialogue.
There's also different levels of instinct, like short/medium/long-term. It was by instinct that I originally started trying to stop eating fruits, and then plants in general, and then by instinct that I felt I should then try having raw meat. It's not only the short-term of thinking what you want at that moment from what you have available which is instinct.
All our senses can influence our instinct, not just taste/smell, but also how we feel.
Yes, I agree.
Best wishes for 2011
François
