John Hawks on Paleo in NY

I was looking for this report by scrolling back through John Hawks' weblog (it wasn't there, it was in Thinking Meat).

It had come to mind because I had made a bolognaise sauce for tonight's supper and had seared the mince and onions, quite deliberately, because I like the taste of seared meat. I guess like sweetness because it was rare before sucrose became widely available. But burned meat? AGEs and ALEs? Why? And is it bad for me? With quite well defined hearth use at 750,000 years ago I think I'm OK to eat seared meat. I'm not sure why I like it. It's not quite the same as feeding gamma irradiated "food" to cats (their brains fall to pieces) and I suspect it's something humans have been doing for a long time. A lot longer than the 10,000 years of growing grains, which Hawks rightly suggests some of us may be better adapted to than others, even on this brief time scale.

So AGEs and ALEs, yes. Unless, of course, those out-of-Africa-a long-time-ago people had stainless steel cooking pots for boiling meat in, which we've just not found yet...

Scrolling back through Arrested Adaptation, in a vain effort to find what wasn't there, I stumbled on his take about the Paleo in NY article which was discussed in "our" zone of the bloggosphere when it came out. I enjoyed it a lot. Though he has some gripes and beefs about "modern paleo" (with a particular BIG down on Crossfit), his article was generally enjoyable and informed. Being one of those weirdo's with strange dietary habits, even if not paleo, it's a good to get a bit of fun poked at me occasionally, provided it's not malicious...

You do tend to forget how strange you are.

Well, I do anyway.

Peter