Urban Cavemen

[Francine Barone]

An interesting new (old?) development in urban culture attempts to recreate the diet and lifestyle of paleolithic humans ... in Manhattan?

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times (via @loomnie):

Like many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants. The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.

Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.

Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

Read the rest of the article here.

What role have anthropologists played in introducing others to the search for the "original affluent society"? It seems to me as if a modern-day "caveperson" lifestyle would only be affordable for the un-original affluent urbanite.

[Fredric Hohlen]

I too am curious as to what influence the anthropological literature's reverence for the "primitive" has had on contemporary ideas of "original" human diet. Of course, much of what has filtered into the popular culture seems to be a caricature of both ethnographic knowledge and anthropological theory. Society and biology are not completely disentangled, as the ability of most Westerners to digest lactose demonstrates, and human beings didn't stop evolving in the paleolithic.

But behind the problem of simply identifying a "natural" diet for human beings, there are other interesting things here, including the sort of nature / culture assumptions inherent in rejecting certain types of food, assumptions present into other alternative food movements ranging from veganism to the organic food culture. I also share your sense of irony in that a diet of this sort is limited primarily to upper-class Westerners; that the source (don't get me wrong, I read it every day myself!) is America's most bourgeois paper of record is completely unsurprising.

[Martha Radice]

Thanks for sharing this. It's going straight on my Intro to Anthropology website! Of course, you're right, it's only the affluent now who can indulge in this original affluence. They're not stuck in food deserts. There's also some interesting gendering in the extract you quote: women obviously can't cope with meat (even in a refrigerated locker).

[Francine Barone]

Hi Martha,

It is interesting how this unapologetically walks straight into gender stereotypes, but in a peculiarly upper-middle-class way, by suggesting that there is something admirably masculine about men huddled around swapping recipes and lifestyle tips. The idea that 'paleos' and 'vegans' represent competing urban 'tribes' is also so awkwardly superficial that I think the NYT writer could not help but deduce it.

Is your website public? I'd like to add it to my list of teaching resources if you would like to share a link with us.


Martha Radice said:

Thanks for sharing this. It's going straight on my Intro to Anthropology website! Of course, you're right, it's only the affluent now who can indulge in this original affluence. They're not stuck in food deserts. There's also some interesting gendering in the extract you quote: women obviously can't cope with meat (even in a refrigerated locker).

[Daniel Elliott]

There's a good chance that their zeal for the aboriginal lifestyle they propose they might be all the more educated about neolithic culture(s) in general. It's reductive, yes, and assimilation always has the tendency to trim the fat (pun deeply intended). But it's a gesture towards revivalism and, yes again, no surprise that it's popping up in Nyc since they don't normally hunt and eat game. Here in the Midwest, I guess, some are stilll born into in the culinary stone age.