A Normal Diet 



ISIDOR GREENWALD 



NEW YORK 



Introduction 



The Diet of Primitive Peoples. From as early a time as we 

 can discern anything of the life of man we find that this has 

 been an almost unceasing struggle for food, for enough to enable 

 him to satisfy his wants. So far as we can judge from the re- 

 mains, from the habits of the animals most closely resembling man, and 

 from those of backward or undeveloped peoples, the diet of primitive man 

 consisted of whatever that was edible that he could secure. The Min- 

 copies, or inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, regarded as among the most, 

 primitive, or lowest in scale of civilization, of the human race, live chiefly 

 on mangoes and other fruit, shellfish .and an occasional small wild pig. 

 The Fuegians, another primitive people, subsist almost entirely on shell- 

 fish. Heaps of shells, supposed to be the remnants of the middens of 

 primitive man, are found in different parts of the world (Avebury, Tyler). 

 Scott-Elliott believes the food of Pleistocene man to have consisted of 

 nuts, fleshy fruits, small birds' eggs, honey, insects and shellfish. There 

 is no evidence that man, except under the influence of a religious or 

 pseudo-scientific inhibition, dating from very recent times, ever voluntarily 

 restricted himself to a purely vegetarian diet. On the contrary, amongst 

 such peoples as the Fuegians, and in the nomadic and pastoral stages 

 of civilization, his diet was almost exclusively of animal origin. The 

 relative importance of vegetable and animal foods varied with their rela- 

 tive availability. Both kinds were frequently eaten raw but the earliest 

 evidences and the descriptions of the life of the most primitive of peoples 

 indicate that, from a very earlv stag'e, man has cooked some of his food, at 



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least occasionally and as opportunity offered. Man has, indeed, been 

 called "the cooking animal." 



Food and Civilization. The development of civilization depended 

 very largely upon the kind of food man was able to secure. Semple states : 

 "In Australia, the lack of a single indigenous mammal fit for domestica- 

 tion and of all cereals blocked from the start the pastoral and agricul- 

 tural development of the native." The American continents were more 

 fortunate for, with beans, maize and pumpkins, it was possible for a 



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