From Foraging to Food Shopping

0:10[Music] [Music] What kind of foods do you like and what kind of foods do you end up eating? Are there nutritional and biological factors that you think about when you make your decisions? And how do hunter gatherers choose what to eat? It just so happens that a lot of the decisions we make about food extend far back into human prehistory. Studies of current foraging societies clearly show that hunter gatherers make choices about what to eat based on some very fundamental economic principles. When it comes to gathering food, humans like to maximize their gains and minimize their costs foods that are calorie Rich come in large package sizes and are easy to prepare are always top choices for hunter gatherers in most environments that means that they're

0:55going to pursue the largest prey animals available to them and they're going to use their plant Foods very carefully going preferentially for tubers in large fruits if you're going to go through the effort to track pursue and raise your spear at an animal better a mammoth than a mouse and when it comes to plant Foods better to have materials that are very easy to prepare and consume than costly materials that require a lot of processing I don't see this as much different than how we make our own food choices when we're tired and hungry we often opt to go through the fast food drive-thru as opposed to to making a meal or stop by the grocery store and pick up some calorie rich food that requires very little preparation or we simply pick up the value pack but there

1:39are some resources hunter gatherers will consistently go to Great Lengths to procure and those are items that are high in fat and sugar in most environments fatty foods are in short supply so items like bone marrow and oil Rich nuts and seeds are always favorite items these Foods require additional processing but hunter gatherers will go to those extra lengths cracking open bones for a marrow or shelling and husking seeds and nuts to get at those oil rich foods simply because they taste good the same applies to Sweet items like honey when Hunter gathers encounter bees and know that they can acquire sweet honey they'll often drop everything they're doing to pursue that sweet resource many of our current dietary health problems can be traced

2:27back to these same decisions our hunter gather ancestors made thousands and thousands of years ago they're simply exaggerated by the realities of modern food availability when it comes to fat and sugars economic decisions tend to fly out the window I suspect if we could transport a group of Paleolithic Hunter gathers into a modern-day grocery store they'd head straight for the bacon and all of the candy and sugar the leafy vegetables would be left to languish on the shelves through time these hunter gatherer food choices have fueled human population growth and the migration into new Landscapes when hunter gatherers enter new lands they often prefer to pursue those top prey Choice items first we see a wake of Extinction in the

3:14aftermath of human settling new Landscapes whether it be mammoth in North America or moas in New Zealand those top food choices are often the first to become extinct as an imbalance between supply and demand becomes apparent we see Hunter ga s including more and more items in their diet often including small nuts and seeds and small prey animals that they previously would have overlooked and this same Trend continues today as our appetite for meat and calorie Rich grains pushes the development of new lands and decimates the habitats of other large animals think about your own food choices again and what ways do you think it resembles or perhaps is different from the choices made by our foraging ancestors what

3:59factors do you consider when grabbing a meal