I’m sure you know the fable of the slow-boiled frog. If you drop a frog into a boiling pot of water, the frog will leap out to escape the heat. If, however, you place a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and then slowly bring the pot to boil, the frog won’t sense the slow temperature change and will stay in the pot of rising, boiling water, until the frog is cooked, and dead.
Every day, anywhere from three to five times per day, we make important choices about the foods we choose to consume. What is going to fill our plates and bowls — beyond meeting the need to keep our bellies full and our nutritional needs met, is anything else important? I would certainly say so, given how much of the food that gets sold ends up in its tidy packaging on the store shelf.
A relatively new breed of dieters out there are looking to lose weight and get in shape by sticking to a simple diet, similar to the kind embraced (by necessity) by the people living in the Paleolithic era.
I don’t have very many strong memories of being in first grade. I was barely seven years old, after all. I do remember that there was a large sign by the door with various ideas for helping to do our part to conserve resources — water, electricity, etc. There was one thing on the sign that I did not see and that was to not eat meat.
We are known for our monkey love and for our Lucy love; but yesterday the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology revealed the reason we are able to outlive our ape relatives: We have a meat-adaptive gene and they do not.
10,000 years ago agriculture was invented and in the midst of its successful evolution, the world was ruined because the fruit of the land — the wealth of our health — was held in a few hands instead of everyone’s.
America built its reputation in the world by being fresh-faced, fertile, undiscovered and undeveloped.
We fed ourselves first and then we 
fed everyone else and in that process our families split apart, people in the Homeland grew hungry and we lost the ability to individually feed ourselves with our own labor and the sweat from our own hewn hands.
There was a time — in the pre-industrial Age — when families would raise their own crops, hunt their own food and feed their own families. You canned food for the winter.
You hoped for the best against the rain and wind and snow.
The commoditization of sugar and cotton created slavery and the fertility of the land became more valuable than its people. Prosperity in the industrialization of agriculture was determined by the luck of the land and never again by individual familial hard work.
Continue reading → Luck of the Land: How Agriculture Ruined the World
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