permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? The Ancestral Health Symposium
2012 - Boing Boing
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/15/where-do-we-come-from-where-a.html#more-176688

"What has come to be known as the paleo diet has been around since the
1970s, but in recent times (thanks to the advent of the
decidedly-non-paleolithic Internet), it's really exploded in popularity. Of
course, anything popular enough begets a conference. Paleo is no exception.
This past weekend, the Harvard Food Law Society and the Ancestral Health
Society <http://www.ancestryfoundation.org/> joined to present the second
annual Ancestral Health
Symposium<http://ancestralhealthsymposium2012.weebly.com/index.html>,
which momentarily infested Twitter under the hashtag #AHS12. I attended
(and fervently live-Tweeted) the inaugural symposium both this year and
last year. With that experience, I can say that there is something
happening in what has been dubbed, tragically, the paleosphere.

AHS12 wasn't only about food, or eating like a caveman. Ancestral health
starts with food, but it doesn’t end there. There was a tangible frisson in
the air at Cambridge, as if the chaos of the Twitterverse commentary was
manifesting physically in the room. In this weird interdisciplinary
mishmash of a conference, couched in a niche diet with an unfortunate name,
there is a real movement brewing. MDs and naturopaths, policy makers and
anarcho-libertarians, lunatic farmers and social media gurus and scientists
of every stripe seem to be asking the same thing: where did we come from?
Where can we go from here?

In a way, the three opening talks set the mood for the whole symposium:
first, Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel
Lieberman<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Eskeleton/danlhome.html>gave a
sort of Evolution 101 class in what humans might (and might not) be
adapted for -- presenting the theory of our mismatch with our current
environment; Binghamton U biological anthropologist David Sloan
Wilson<http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/>called for the
testing of the mismatch hypothesis in rigorous and
controlled studies; and Harvard biochemist and paleo heartthrob Mat
Lalonde<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmL0gKEz00Q>laid out heaps of
data showing, conclusively, that even if you throw out
the anthropology, the foods recommended by the paleo diet win out in terms
of nutrient density alone. In other words, evolution provides the
hypotheses that we then can test.

Because AHS12 was partnered with the Harvard Food Law Society, there was a
powerful focus on policy and even social justice. Our food system is broken
-- when Hershey's and Mars have centers for health and nutrition that
sponsor the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the ADA), there
might be a problem. Health care expenses continue to climb, and despite all
our innovation, it seems like the world is still quite sick. We are in
crisis, and it was no mistake that the keynote address was given by the
inimitable Joel Salatin <http://www.polyfacefarms.com/> of *Food,
Inc.*fame, who, with all the fervor of a Southern Baptist minister,
urged
listeners to ground themselves in the earth and respect and honor the
nature of food, because food is a vessel of the spirit."