Frank Forencich, AHS12 speaker, on the paleo movement:
To put it bluntly, the modern Paleo movement is simply too white. By this I don’t refer to skin color, although that well might be a valid claim. Rather, my point is that modern Paleo is too clean, too refined and too abstract. We have become so preoccupied with food, biochemistry and research (“My research can beat up your research!”) that we are ignoring almost everything else. Our method has become too academic and Cartesian; AHS12 was a neck-up symposium about a whole-body, whole-life predicament. Ironically, the modern Paleo movement has become as refined as the white grains and sugars that we are so quick to demonize. If white food will kill us, so too will white thinking and white action.
Brandon Sewall has similar thoughts. Forencich’s challenges for modern paleo movement:
- Make it more holistic. Make it more inclusive. Give it more breadth.
- Take a chance on diversity. Open the doors to more views on the ancestral experience.
- Give food a rest. Nutrition is a mature discipline; we now know most of what we need to know.
- Invite more authentic Paleo voices into the circle, especially Native peoples, shamans, hunters and trackers.
- Embody the vision. Include more movement, more sensation and more touch.
- Above all, include more color, more blood, more sweat, more emotion and more dirt into the process.
Forencich is also the author of Stresscraft, a book I picked up a while ago and found really compelling. I’m bummed I missed the opportunity to connect with him at AHS!
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
These dissenting, multidisciplinary, common-sense voices are speaking to me in a language I knew was missing but couldn’t put my finger on as well as they now are. I was glad to see Free the Animal cite Weston Price aaages ago, and to find Joel Salatin on the AHS roster. Bullet point 4 is a biggie: who CARES what the papers say the Masai or the Kitivans eat/ate? We know ethnographies are imperfect. Ask a Masai/Kitivan (or ten)! To be “white” (in Forencich’s sense) for a moment, this is Orientalism: the foreign Other has primitive but mystic wisdom while We have Technology and Science. How ’bout admitting that knowledge is more than any one of these fascets of reality, sitting down together and talking praxis, and allowing ourselves to mature into a more nuanced understanding of this insanely complex topic?
I’m put off by the endless arguing over food especially carbs, really how many hours a day can you spend eating? There’s more to life than diet.
Well, when the above noted suggestions for changes and improvements in the Paleo movement prompted me to write an essay-long reply, I decided it was more appropriate to post my “response” on my own blog! :) Thanks for inspiring some fun analysis!
Wow … just catching up … that’s an awesome reply! (Here if folks missed it.)
I guess I’ll just say, here, that Sewell’s comment about “…inviting…Native peoples, shamans…” etc into the Paleo “circle” is still stuck in my craw (lodged painfully deep, too), even though I vented by writing an essay on my blog. It’s just SO maddening when people assume they can appropriate bits and pieces of another culture, to try and fill up their own holes inside, and they aren’t even aware of their own emptiness and their own desperate need for those sacred connections within the culture which cannot be taken or replicated.They end up with an illusion of making a meaningful connection—a fantasy of finding something REAL and VALUABLE, and miss out entirely on the intangible connections that gave meaning to the lived experiences of the culture’s people at a tribal level. Just as annoying, those who appropriate don’t realize their own views and practices in “the movement” are being co-opted by the dominant discourse and by the oppressive forces they are struggling to escape. Of course, I’m generalizing. Still. :)
Do we really know most of what we need to know about nutrition? I think we fool ourselves sometimes into thinking we know more than we really do. I believe we still have A LOT to learn about how the human body uses food.
Sandy, I don’t know for sure what his intentions are, but I suspect his point is on “what we need” to know (as opposed to “what there is”). I could imagine the argument that all we “need” to know is that evolutionarily we’re meant to eat food from nature traditionally prepared. The wide range of diets humans have adapted to (e.g., from Kitavan to Inuit) conceivably supports that view.