A Cro Magnon in Manhattan

Here in New York's fashionable East Village you can tell who eats what often from a mere cursory glance. The waify models glow from sushi, vodka and whole fruit, while the Tompkins Square macro-vegans seem about to disappear into a vortex of malnutrition; across the street overfed NYU students staggering lethargically to and from class dragging a startchy anchor of beer and pizza. Then there's us cavemen, eating nuts and berries and whatever we can kill with our bare hands; damn we look fine.

Our current national plentitude demands we adapt constrictive diets as a way to define ourselves and to avoid succumbing to sugar-bred hyperactivity. As anorexic girls all know, NOT eating becomes the new way to stick it to the MAN with his grocery stores and his bread-head trip. But for us determined to survive and thrive in the face of processed sugar (and I'm eating an almond croissant as I write this) it may be time to ask what your ancestors ate; what made them so hearty they'd throw a Kodiak bear a beat-down over rights to a berry bush?

For me, a child of the 1970s who grew up watching ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966) starring Raquel Welch on UHF TV, it's only natural that sooner or later I'd realize the trick to life is to eat like a cave man. In the film, you may remember, Luana (Welch) is a hot cro magnon whose diet of fish and berries mixes nicely with that of her lusty, red meat eating Neanderthal boyfriend, Tumak (John Richardson).

When Tumak man goes out to hunt, Luana and the kids stay home gathering berries and nuts and broccoli to make a nice salad. The catch--and this is important from a gastronomical standpoint--is that you have to "catch" the catch; it could take weeks to actually kill something, especially if all you have is rocks as weapons. As Ted Nugent well knows, mammalian carnivores don't just lay around on the couch; they grab their bow and hit the forest, and maybe they don't come back for six days.

Bearing this in mind, Mother Nature made red meat very slow to digest, providing long lasting energy. Humans can supplement with berries and nuts and ants and roasted grasshoppers and whatever, but then the men get home with the meat and for a day or two, everyone gorges themselves and they're good as far as meat goes for another few days at least. Thus it is written on the cave wall -- man was designed to eat meat…but first he needs to catch it! Hence the meat eater diet makes you thin and gives you energy and less allergies. The backlash hype against Atkins was the MAN coming down in favor of the grain-maker. It's the grain makers that screwed the world up with their books and their bombs and their vaccines and their windmills. Agriculture arrived with a vengeance and for the cavemen it was all over but for the fat ladies singing (there were no fat ladies before).

But let me pose a question to the caveman advocate: do you have the guts to go kill your own dinner on a weekly basis? To look it in the eye, pat it lovingly on the head, and then bash its brains out with a hammer?

I think I do. As an urbanite, you don't want to know how many mice I've had to kill in my time here. And I realized the way to do it is to allow yourself to feel compassion for the animal, to look into its eyes with the hypnotizing calm that vampires use to feed on us, for example. The same goes for plant life, let those vegans wake up to the fact that every tree and plant hurts when its leaves are torn from its body; it just has no mouth with which to scream.

The Hunter Gatherer Diet is hip to these things and in reading his lore on the web, I learned about the evils of soy products! Soy screws with your testosterone, so steer clear. Don't eat anything which isn't growing wild in the woods that would have been in your backyard if the MAN hadn't torn down all the trees to make room for his supermarket. The urban hunter gatherer can frequent the local farmer's markets, where everything claims it is fresh and cut from real non-drugged up beasts. You can also go to the Adirondacks and get some venison if you want to be like Ted Nugent, and you do. Be like the Nuge!

According to my caveman brothers, we have to eliminate all grain-based foods like rice, pasta and flour from our diet. These all have toxic, indigestible properties, which cooking can only do so much to remove. These foods are deliberately toxic because the plants don't want animals to digest the seeds. Many seeds and grains are imbued with enzyme inhibitors that stop them from being digested in the stomach, or decaying on the ground. That not good for cave man! Cave man sneeze and develop food allergies.

Reading all the available anti-soy and pro-meat stuff on the web has me most upset. I'm trying to adapt this diet in order to lose a few pounds and feel good. I even ate an orange yesterday, but the almond croissant I mentioned earlier tasted so good, and now I am sleepy and it's a crisp, lovely fall day. Perhaps it is time for a little nap, and perhaps I shall dream of a cudgel and a wide-eyed, frightened antelope, and perhaps I shall pray for the creature's speedy flight to Valhalla as I gently, lovingly, suddenly, violently bash its brains out.

Source