COURSE IV: What Our Ancestors Ate

In the introduction we first acknowledge the profound elemental nature of what we call nutrition; through death, life is nourished. Something as simple as knowing what as humans we are to eat, has become a fraught arena of conflicting ideologies, investments, biases, misinformation and marketing. In this confusion we review different frameworks for understanding what ‘is’ and reorientate to the ‘scientific method’. The invitation here is to bring awareness and curiosity to each of our biases, keeping heart and mind open to learning.

In What Our Ancestors Ate, we start by contemplating our physical emergence as a species ‘Homo Sapiens’, then compares our gastrointestinal tract to that of our nearest ape ancestors and our fellow mammals, as this can tell us a great deal about the foods we are designed to process. Moving on, we look at the work of Weston Price and others which illustrates that indigenous people from all continents lived free of chronic diseases. This offers many insights into the foods that maintained their health and vitality, and demonstrates how their body’s nutritional needs adapted to the ecologies they were part of. We look at some of the deleterious physical and ecological consequences in losing these ways of being. Attention is then turned to look in more detail at foods from the plant and animal realm that might be considered appropriate nourishment, their benefits and ways of preparing.