Good evening and welcome to the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. My name is Hamsa Srikanth and I'm one of the two Athenaeum fellows this year. So we have a very unconventional speaker tonight. Bill Schindler is the Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archeology at Washington College in Maryland. Schindler is a pioneer in the field of experimental archeology, which involves reproducing and using ancient technologies to draw inferences about life in the past. This means that he is actually perfectly at home in the middle of a forest, stalking a deer with a hand made bow. His research revolves around prehistoric technologies, hunting, foraging, as well as prehistoric food acquisition and consumption. I imagine that Schindler is very notorious at his college for making his students butcher animals for extra credit. Honestly, that still sounds better than doing econ problem sets. (laughs) His unique teaching style has earned Schindler the admiration of many of his students, as well as the title of Professor Caveman. Schindler is the recipient of multiple awards, though my personal favorite when I was on the Internet, I saw this, is the time that he was called, quote, ruggedly handsome by The Atlantic. (laughs) Beyond academia, Schindler featured in The Great Human Race, which is a survival genre type TV show on National Geographic channel. Here, Schindler and desert survival expert Cat Bigney actually attempted to reenact the prehistory of humankind. They created their own tools and they used them to survive in extreme environments such as those in like Uganda, Siberia, Alaska. This is a 45 minute presentation and there will be a question and answer round at the end so you can tease him about the Professor Caveman. As always, I must remind you that audiovisual recoding is actually strictly prohibited. Please use this opportunity to put away your devices, stuff your face with bread and adjust your seat if you've not already done so. And without further delay, please join me in welcoming Dr. Bill Schindler. (audience applauding) Thank you so much. Hamsa, thank you so much for that introduction. Thank you all for being here, I'm very sorry for your loss and it means a lot that you're here tonight, and I'm hoping we can make the most of our time to really engage in a different look at our past, our dietary past, it's something that really, in my mind, makes us uniquely human. Excuse me just a minute, I just, here we go. This is an absolutely incredible program and I really appreciate you having me. I come from Washington College on the eastern shore of Maryland, and this is by far one of the best undergraduate student experiences, this whole program that is put together here, I've had wonderful conversations with your students. Priya has been fantastic with making sure this will all work, and this meal was absolutely incredible, so a big thank you to the chefs as well. I would like, for a few minutes, actually, for the next hour, really, for us to really disconnect and from everything we've been told about food and diet and human health, and just for while I have you here, if you could indulge me in listening to what I have to say with wide open minds. This, what I'm talking to you about tonight has been, in many ways, the life, the culmination of and still ongoing, but a lifelong journey for me. And has really, hasn't necessarily given me all the answers that I'm looking for, but at least has allowed me to begin to ask the right questions about one of the things that's plaguing humans, the biggest issue that's plaguing us today, and that's human diet and health. I will say the, my wife told me I needed to mention this, and also Washington College, we are, we have a strong social media presence, both myself, the modern stone age family, which is my family I can tell you more about later on, and also the Eastern Shore Food Lab at Washington College, which I'll speak a little bit more about as well. So if anybody has, wants to take any pictures or ask any questions or relay any information, I think the kind of things that we're talking about today are so extremely important that just having the conversation out there helps quite a bit. I'm gonna start tonight off with a quick comment. I love being human. I do. And I know that may sound strange, but in the next 45 minutes, I'm gonna break this comment down quite a bit and we're gonna start here. I love being human, there's so many wonderful things about being human. Presentations like this and colleges like this are a part of what we've been able to achieve as humans. But being human comes at some very significant costs. We have the most difficult and dangerous childbirth of any animal on the planet. We are very susceptible to danger and, as young infants. We also have a very difficult time dealing with food. So I'm gonna start off, I wanna start off with one of my favorite people on the planet. This is Seamus Caulfield, he is one of the most famous archeologists in Ireland. And he, if you can put, if a leprechaun and Yoda had a baby with an Irish accent, this is, with the biggest heart in the entire world. So my family and I spent the last year in Ireland, we were based out of Ireland working on a food project called the Food Evolutions project in concert with University College Dublin and Odaios Foods. And I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a lot of time with this man. This man and his father actually found the most extensive prehistoric field system in the world, it's in Ceide Fields in Ireland. But the reason I bring him up to start this conversation is because I wanna talk about something that he taught me about a year and a half ago, the difference between landscape and scenery. And it's very applicable to this conversation. So I met Seamus Caulfield first about four years ago at a conference in University College Dublin. At the end of our conversation when we first met, he made me promise him that if I ever made it to his part of the world, this little tiny village, fishing village in the northwest coast in Ireland, overlooking the North Atlantic in County Mayo, Belderrig is the name of the village. That if I ever made it there, that I had to spend the day with him, and he would walk me around not only the archeological sites, but the rugged coastline, this absolutely beautiful, we would dig peat and it would be absolutely wonderful, he promised me, so I told him, I promised him I would do this, and I had no idea whether I'd ever return to Ireland, but I did, last year, we were there for the entire year. So my family and I landed, we packed up the family, we landed in Dublin, and a day later, we were driving across the country up to County Mayo to Belderrig to fulfill this promise. And I spent a day, a magical day with this man, got involved, beautiful neolithic sites, this rugged coastline, the peat bogs. He talked about the geology and the biology, it was wonderful. But we ended at this spot right here overlooking the coastline, and I'm not a very good photographer and I took this on my iPhone, but I'm telling you, I've been all over the world, this view is one of the most beautiful views I've ever had in my entire life. And he stopped at this cottage. This is the kind of thing you'd see dotted across the landscape in Ireland, and we stood there and he looked at, I looked at and he looked at it and he says, "What do you see?" And you know, with Seamus, at this time, I hadn't spent a lot of time with Seamus, but every single story ends in a life lesson, and I know he was setting me up for something. But he says, "What do you see?" And I'm looking at it, I say, "Well, it has no roof." He said, "Well, yeah, it has no roof, "it's over 100 years old and nobody's lived in it, "so okay, it has no roof." And he says, "What else do you see?" I said, "Well, there's no rocks up here on the bog, "all these rocks were hand carried up "from the bottom of the cliffs." He said, "Absolutely, yes. "And what else?" I said, "Wow, this cottage is over 100 years old "and those are huge spaces for windows "for over 100 years old in Ireland." He says, "Yes, that's true." He says, "What else?" And I looked and I looked and I strained and I wondered. And I couldn't figure it out. And then finally, I realized that there were no windows on one side of the building, none whatsoever. This is one side of the building, huge windows with, so five huge windows and the door in the middle. On the other side, you can't really see it, I'm sorry, it's a poor picture. There's absolutely no windows but a door. And the craziest part is that that is the side of the building facing the sea. I'm standing there looking at one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen, looking over the sea, thinking to myself, my wife and I would love to live in this house, we'd fix it up and we'd see this view every morning. And the people that built this house built it intentionally to not look at the sea. I couldn't imagine why that was. And I asked him and he explained to me that it was very very simple. That here in the 1920s, this whole land, everything around it is commonage, this bog, that all the farmers, all the farmers would go to and had equal access to not only dig their own peat to fuel their fires to heat their homes, but also so it'd be forage for their sheep. And this was a time period where primogeniture was common in Ireland, so the first son inherited the land, but all subsequent sons were landless and usually meant either they become fishermen or they go into the military. And right around this time, a second son in another family in this little village decided they were just gonna forget this and build a house out here on the commonage, and they did. And then another second son from a different family did the same thing. And this was the third one. And this location for this house was on one of the only remaining pieces of dry land in this entire vast bog. So it's the only place that could actually hold a house, so they had to build the house here. And they actually got sued by a farmer and they had to pay 10 pounds in order to keep the house and the guy refused to do it, he just left the house, that's why it doesn't have any roof. But what he explained to me, and the most important part of this was that the guy's, the wife was from the Shetland Islands, and she grew up in a family of fishermen. And she had lost family members to the sea. And to her, the sea wasn't beautiful. To her, the sea reminded her, it was dread and loss and darkness. And the last thing that she wanted to do in this house that she couldn't help its location was look out over that sea every day, so they built this house in a way that, to me, seemed so incredibly odd. In that moment, in literally a 30 second conversation, something that I thought that I knew about this place and that I thought everybody on the planet standing here would want to look at this view and I couldn't understand this house, it made complete sense. See, scenery is what everybody sees, it's like looking at a picture. But a landscape is something with meaning, something with context. And I think this is very relevant for two reasons. One is it sort of front loads everything that I'm gonna say after this, the importance of context cannot be overstated, especially when dealing with food. Food is very, very, very difficult for us to talk about, we talk about food all day long. I mean, we watch TV. We talk about food, we watch television shows that have, you know, are focused on food, we do actually watch, they did a study a few years ago that we watch, the amount of time that we watch television shows on cooking is like three times more than we actually spend in the kitchen. But we talk about food all day long, but how meaningful are those conversations? I have been, for the past few years, I've been speaking all over the world about food, and one of the things I found was that it's very difficult to have a real conversation about food. Every time that we go to the grocery store, every time that we decide what we're gonna cook for our loved ones, every time we pick up a fork and take a bite of food, we are relaying information to the world about us, really important information. Our socioeconomic status, our religion, our politics. All of these things are relayed in every single bite of food that we take. So to talk to somebody about food and bring up some, you know, ideas about food that people may not be comfortable with, it almost sometimes seems like an attack on your family or on your religion or on how you raise your children, it's very hard to have that conversation. But in order to do it, we have to have the context, we have to create it first. And what I'd like to spend the rest of my time doing before we go to questions and answers is actually creating that context. And I truly believe that one of the best things a teacher or a speaker can do, anybody you're learning from can allow you for a moment to see the world through their eyes and use that to augment the way that you already look at the world. And what I'd like to do, if you have an open mind for the next, well, however much time I have left, to hopefully let you see the world through my eyes for a minute, and then spend the rest of the time engaged in a dialogue to answer specific questions. So there's no question that our relationship with food is truly at a crisis level. We are by far the sickest species on this planet and the only species even close to as sick as us are our pets, and it's because we're feeding them people food. I mean, we are literally killing ourselves with what forever has been something that nourished us. Something's wrong. And I think one of the biggest issues is that we're disconnected from our food. And this, I'm sorry, it's not the best photograph ever, but I'll read it to you. This was an editorial in a newspaper 2009, and it's written, to all you hunters who kill animals for food, shame on you; you ought to go to the store and by the meant that was made there, where no animals were harmed. Obviously, this is silly, but it's tragic at the same time. I mean, the disconnect from where food comes from to the person that wrote this is gross in every sense of the word. But I would suggest that all of us on some level are that disconnected from where our food comes from, we might not voice it in a newspaper like this, but I think we are. And the first thing that we need to do is reconnect with our food, reconnect with our food on a level that we haven't seen in hundreds or thousands of years. And by doing so, we can start to make the changes that we need. So let's start with context. Let's start with understanding why context is so very important to this conversation. So one of the things that context does, creating the context shapes the way that we view food and diet. And I think one of the biggest, we had some wonderful conversations at this table before I came up here, and we were talking about the changes that happened with diet as the result of agriculture and things like this, and there were some significant changes we can talk about later, but I think the biggest issue, the biggest thing that has disconnected us from our food, it was a process that began a little over 100 years ago with the invention of this machine. Many would see this as progress and many would see this as good, but I'm gonna make some suggestions that maybe, of course, there were some other things that happened as a result of it that weren't so good at all and really, in many ways, helped make the situation we're in today possible. This is the calorimeter. This calorimeter, Atwater built this calorimeter in late 1800s, early 1900s, and it was the first time that we could take food and identify and quantify something inside of that food that we couldn't see and couldn't touch. And again, this, many see this as progress, because after this, we began to identify things like protein and carbohydrates and fat and all sorts of vitamins and minerals that were in food, and we could quantify these things and then we could be told how we should eat as, you know, based upon certain levels and numbers of these things, and we can identify our diet this way. And maybe there are some good things about that. But I suggest that this was the beginning of disconnecting us from our food in ways we've never seen before in the history of our species. You know, because to do anything with that information, even get at that information, you had to have one of these machines or have access to one of these machines. And certainly, that was limited to just a few people. But just as importantly, once you got all these numbers, how this many calories, this many carbohydrates, this many grams of fat, this many whatever, you had to do something with that information, so then we had to have people figure out what that means and then translate it to us. We no longer look at food when it's put in front of us as food. We look at food as a multitude of calories and carbohydrates and fats, and then we make decisions on whether or not we should be eating that food based upon that information. That information that was, that came from something that we can't touch or feel ourselves that was translated to us by people we've never met, and we're deciding about every bite of food that we take based upon things like this. We look at bread and we no longer see bread, we look at bread and see gluten and ooh, we're not gonna eat gluten. This is very very problematic. Context also controls the dialogue about food and diet. Now, I took this picture years ago when we actually had a bunch of bookstores in the US, and we don't have them anymore, but this was a Borders at Barnes & Noble. And it floored me that every time I walked into one of these bookstores, the very first table you saw, the one that was covered in books, was about food and diet. And you'd look at this, if you just glanced at it real quick, it's, we got it all figured out. I mean, look at all this information about food and diet. But if you took a closer look, you'd realize that every one of these authors was telling us to do something completely different from the other. How much do we really know about what we should be eating? Where do we start to build that conversation, how do we know what we know, where did that information come from? How biased is that information? If you took all these authors and put them in the same room, they literally would kill each other. I mean, it's that, if you've read even 5 or 10 of those books, you would realize how drastically different the recommendations are from one another. And to me, one of the things that's very very important about context is that it also allows us to break down meaningless food categories. We talk about food all the time. And I'm asked all the time questions like, should humans be eating bread? Should humans be eating meat? Should human adults be drinking milk? And every one of those conversations, as soon as I hear it, I begin to shut down, because there's no answer to that. Because the categories are too broad. Should humans be eating this? Absolutely not. But this thing over here, this is bread I made a couple days ago. This took less than an hour to make. I don't know if you know, but sliced pan or sandwich bread like this, from flour to actually being put into the plastic package, takes less than an hour total. This took me a day and a half to make. They are, they're both called bread, they are completely different foods. The way we deal with animals as food, the way we deal with dairy, the way we deal with any of these categories that we say bread, milk. There's no real conversation that can be had about it unless we dive a lot, a lot deeper. Context controls all of these conversations. So this is where I'd like us to start. I would like to talk to you, I would like to create a context about our diet, using our dietary past as the platform to engage in these conversations. I'm gonna talk to you not about specific, necessarily specific foods, I'm gonna talk to you about approaches, the way that I believe our ancestors approached food and diet for millions and millions of years. Our dietary past puts everything into perspective. Because in all senses of the word, we are literally what our ancestors ate. Biologically, we are result of our dietary past. And culturally, we are result of our dietary past. Understanding this in my mind should be the basis for all conversations about food. So I love being human. But compared to other animals, we are biologically one of the weakest species on the planet. I know that's hard for us to hear, that's hard for us to think about and it's hard for us to wrap our brains around. But biologically, we are one of the weakest species on the planet. We have a very difficult time getting food from our environment. Think about what do we have biologically. We have our teeth, well, compared to other animals, our teeth are almost useless. And in fact, over millions of years, our teeth have actually gotten smaller. Our nails, well, unless we're painting them, we see them as a nuisance and cut them and try to get rid of them, we can't do much with them. We can't run very fast, we can't climb very easily, we certainly can't fly, we can't swim very fast, we can't even dig in the ground if it's too hard. We are very very limited in our ability to access food. This, when I think of power, when I think of strength, I think of this man right here. This is Kevin Randleman. I wrestled for Ohio State and this was my training partner, every single day. Every single day for years, this is what I faced every day in practice. And I'm telling you for whatever you think you see by looking at it, I felt. I felt that biceps wrapped around my head. To me, that power that I, that you know, when I tried to dive in, that power that I felt, I think of that as power 'cause he's one of the strongest people I know. But how powerful, pound for pound, is he really, compared to other animals on this planet? I mean, he is one of, the epitome of, in my mind, you know, humans, what we can achieve as strength as far as humans are concerned. But what is that like compared to other animals, what is that like to the pound for pound that an ant can do? We have a very difficult time getting food, an extremely difficult time getting food. This is something that I've thought about for years, but several years ago, and in my introduction, it mentioned that I had a unique opportunity to spend nine months working on, well, better part of a year, an amazing project with National Geographic called The Great Human Race, and the premise of this show, in fact, I'll get back to this slide in a second, let me give you, this is the 30 second trailer to the show, let me just show you this very quickly and we'll talk about it and some of the things that I learned from it. Oh, shoot. I'm gonna make this happen. Here we go. National Geographic Channel presents an experiment millions of years in the making. (dramatic music) I don't know how we're gonna get through this. Two experts on a global journey armed only with the tools of each human species. I only have a rock and a stick. If we had to go back to how it all started. We're in the same spot that our ancestors were. Cat! Could mankind survive again? Oh my god, stand your ground. The Great Human Race. The evolution beings next Monday at 10 on National Geographic. Let me back this up very quickly somehow. Okay. I've been teaching about food, teaching about prehistoric technologies, teaching about archeology for years. And several years ago, I got approached by National Geographic to be a part of this program. And I was very excited when they explained what it was, and the idea, if anybody hasn't seen it, is that they were gonna take me and that woman there, Cat Bigney, she's a survival instructor from Boulder out west, well, not as west as here, usually, I'm on the east coast. And the idea was that we were going to retrace the steps of our evolutionary past as homo sapiens beginning two and a half million years ago. And we're gonna be 10 episodes, and each episode would stop and be filmed at a location that something significant happened, we created the technology that allowed us to do something significant. And the idea was that, in each place, my job was to replicate the technology from that time period, the stone tools, the ceramic pots, whatever it was, and we were supposed to live for a period of time, usually about eight days at a time, using only those technologies that were available during that time period in the location where it actually happened. And we started in Tanzania two and a half million years ago and made our way up through Africa, through the Middle East, through Asia, and we ended actually in Oregon, representing about 4000 years ago. And it was a life changing experience for me. You know, I hate to teach about things that I haven't done myself. And as an archeologist, it's very hard, you know, it's a high bar to try to reach. This allowed me, I mean, we're the only two people ever in the world to live even for a period of time all of those major significant time periods in our evolutionary past. And even though it was only eight days at a time, it was long enough to be scared, it was long enough to be really hungry, it was long enough to understand what these really seemingly basic technologies allowed us to do and what it meant for our diets. I mean, the first episode, we didn't have fires, two and a half million years ago, we had a basic stone, a very very very basic stone tool and that was it, and we're in the middle of Tanzania. We were literally sleeping in trees to be away from any of the nasties that were down on the ground at night. It really showed me how limited we are as a species, because we foraged for food, we hunted for food, we trapped things for food. And the only thing that I could've done without the help of a tool was forage. And plants are amazing. Fruits and vegetables are absolutely amazing. But they are not a nutrient dense food, you have to do a lot to them to make them nutrient dense. And even that requires a technology to do these things to it. This is an example, this is a replica, and after I'm all done, if anybody wants, these things will be out if you wanna take a look at them. This is one of the most significant things, tools, artifacts in our evolutionary past. This stone tool dates to 3.3 million years ago, it was only found a few years ago. And it was found just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya. And three and a half million years, almost three and a half million years ago, probably an australopithecine, one of our early ancestors, probably Australopithecus afarensis or Australopithecus africanus, picked up a rock, struck it with another rock and knocked this off. And in less than a second, changed our relationship with our environment. For the first time ever, we were not limited by our nails and our teeth and what we had biologically. We could overcome that. We could cut, we had a strong, sharp, durable edge that we could cut with. And this literally changed the game in many significant ways, most importantly, about diet. And I saw that firsthand and felt it firsthand, here we are scavenging meat from a dead animal out in the middle of Tanzania. And I'm telling you, being in front of an animal this large, the only other thing I could've done if I had no tool was sit there and literally put my face into this animal and start gnawing, but instead, you know, the way we think this happened in the past at two and a half million years ago when we first, or three and a half million years ago, we, animals, we weren't hunting, but we started eating meat for the first time. And we were scavenging this meat. So we know how predators operate right now on the savanna, what typically happens is they'll take another animal down, and if it's a large animal, they'll gorge themselves on the most nutrient dense, amazing parts of the animal, and that's the organs, it's the blood and the guts and the fat. And then, when they fill their bellies, they go off and sleep on a rock or up in a tree, which gives hunter gatherers, scavengers that long ago, time to run in there and hack off as much as they can before it comes back and wants to feed again. And we were in a situation like this, and we wanted to get whatever we could and get somewhere to safety to eat this. And without a stone tool, we probably would've gotten a few calories. But instead, we were able to take a leg with us and crack the bone open for marrow and take meat and bring it off to safety and eat it for the next several days. Here, this is, we were in the Republic of Georgia. And this is the kind of tool that we had, a 40,000 year old technology, a composite point that we made and hunted a wild boar with. We wouldn't have been able to take down that boar with just, I wouldn't have been able to do it myself without the help of these technologies. We have a very very difficult time getting food from our environment. So if you look at things that other animals have, like digging claws or the ability to fly or really really really strong teeth or the speed and the strength to take down other animals, we have none of those things. Before we created technologies, we were limited, we were herbivores and frugivores. We were seasonally eating local fruits, vegetables, and maybe insectivores, and insects. That's it. We stood about that tall as full grown adults, our brains were about the size of my fist. And that's exactly what life was like. We couldn't access anything else in our environment, our bodies wouldn't allow us to do it, we had none of these things. But over time, we replicated through technology these kinds of abilities that other animals have. We don't have digging claws, but ubiquitous around the world, we create digging sticks. We don't have the ability to fly, but we can create all sorts of ways that allow us to get to high heights and extract honey or fruit. We can't crack open nuts with our teeth, but we bang two rocks together with a nut in between. When we think about it, we are so weak that if I put almost any wild nut in front of you, a pile of them, and that's the only thing I gave you to eat, you would die of starvation watching that pile of nuts 'cause you couldn't access even a nut inside of a shell until you put it between two rocks and cracked it open. We can't hunt at a distance, biologically, but we create all sorts of weapons that allow us to do this. So one of the important stories of our dietary past is overcoming our physical limitations and allowing us to access resources, increasingly nutrient dense and diverse resources from our environment. It's a very important part. But that's not the most important part. For as weak as we are as a species, we have an even more difficult time digesting food, we have an incredibly inefficient digestive tract. So even if we get a resource from our environment, our ability to, once we put it in our mouth, to break it down properly into something that our body can derive incredible nutrition from is very very limited. So just because this is a portion of, important as we go on, and I know all of you in this room probably know this, but we're gonna do a basic biology 101 lesson. So this is the way people in the past used to eat. And I know it's a blanket statement, but it's fairly true. They would grab, they would use their eyes and maybe their sense of smell and identify something they might wanna eat, and they'd pick it up and put it by their face. And they'd smell it again and they'd look at it and maybe taste it. And I know these things are strange to us because, at least to my mother, my mother goes nuts when she comes over to the house and I open up something and I smell it before I decide whether to eat it. Because, you know, I grew up in the 70s and a good mother in the 70s, you read the labels, right. If it, if somebody else that you never met said it was good till March 5th, it didn't matter, it was good till March 5th and you look at that date and that's what made your decision. To smell food is a strange thing in my household where I grew up. But so we'd, you'd make the decision whether you put it into your mouth, whether it was safe enough to eat, and then you put it into your mouth. And immediately, you'd begin to break that food down chemically and physically, so our teeth are breaking it down physically, and chemically, the most important thing that happens in our mouth is that the enzyme amylase which breaks down, converts carbohydrates to simple sugars, begins to work, operate on the food, and then we swallow it. And it goes into our stomach, and all sorts of things happen in our stomach. There's continual mechanical breakdown of the food, there's other enzymes and other things are chemically happening to break that food down. And then, once it's sufficiently broken down and you have bile and all of these sorts of things happening to it, it goes through the opening to the small intestines where the pH changes back to something that's much more neutral. And if it's broken down properly, if it's broken down properly and your guts, your intestines are in really good healthy shape, then the nutrients will get absorbed through the intestinal walls and go to where it needs to be in other parts of your body, and then the rest of it goes through, the water's extracted in the large intestines and then it leaves your body. And that sounds amazing and it is, until you compare it to the way other animals deal with it. So I had a mind blowing moment about a year and a half ago, I was in Ireland and I was asked to be on a show called What Are You Eating. It was going into its third season. And they were getting ready to film the first episode of the third season and I got a phone call, they said, "Listen, we'd like you to be "on this episode briefly, you know," and I said, "Okay, that'd be great." And I said, "What's the episode about?" And they said, "It's on veganism." I don't know if you have the right guy, I don't know much about veganism. They said, "No no no, don't worry, don't worry, "we don't need you to talk about veganism, we want," this is the way this show is gonna unfold, the idea was that the host was gonna get a blood test and get a whole body workup. And then he was gonna go on a vegan diet for a month, and during that time, he was gonna interview a bunch of leaders of the vegan movement in Ireland. And it is a very strong movement in Ireland right now. And at the end of that month, he was gonna get his blood and body work, you know, body tested again, and then they wanted me, after that point, to go out with him into the woods and talk about our relationship with animals as food over time. And I said, "Oh, that'd be great." And I said, "Can I," I was visiting professor (mumbles) last year, so I said, "Can I bring some students?" And they said, "Absolutely, no problem at all." And they said, "We're gonna have some tools. "Can you get some animals we could butcher?" I said, "Oh, great." So we got two deer, two ducks and two rabbits. And we go out there and I'm walking him through stone tool technology over time, talking about the changes in animals, in our diet over time, and meanwhile, the students are literally elbow deep in deer and they're butchering, and I can't believe what Irish television showed, it was way more than National Geographic would've showed, especially on an episode with that topic, but anyhow. We're in it, we're doing this. And at one point, he says, "Okay, let's get up "and we're gonna go over," and he says, "Can you clean this duck as you're talking "to me about this?" I say, "Sure." So I'm there and I grab this duck and I cut open the bottom and I reach up inside and I'm talking, and it's all on camera and, you know, there's all sorts of stressors going on, I'm worried about the students, I'm worried about the camera, I'm worried about the duck. You know, it was dead, but anyhow. So I reached up and I start pulling out the inside of this duck as I'm talking. And I had this sort of epiphany at the same time, and it was really hard to finish the interview with my mind just being blown. And I'll tell you a little bit about what it was. Let me preface it real quick. One of the guys I was working on this project with is a man named Jason O'Brien. And he owns several food companies in Ireland, but one of them is Odaios Foods, and within that, he's using this company to reconnect people in Ireland with their real heritage through food. Not, you know, whiskey and potatoes, I mean real true heritage. And one of the first things he started launching was this subset of this other company called Roundstone bread. And it was amazing sour dough bread using only ancient grains from Ireland. And I've been working with him and talking a lot about bread, and I was with Seamus and we were using the corn stone, we were grinding flour, or grinding grain, and all this is running through my head, I actually was just within the day before grinding grain. And I reach up and I pull on the insides out of this duck. And I reach up really far, and I grabbed the crop. And I pulled it out. And I looked at, now I don't have the crop here, this is the gizzard, I'll talk about it in just a second. But the crop. Ducks are designed to eat grains. I mean, they are, all right, most ducks. And ducks don't have teeth, they don't have fingers, they don't have any of that. They take a bill, or beak or, a bill, I guess, and they grab the whole grain and they swallow it. And it goes into their crop. And the crop is kind of this enlarged muscular pouch where the grain sits. And it's warm and it's moist. And the grains sometimes sit there for 12 to 14 hours. And during that time, the grains soak, they ferment, and sometimes even sprout. And then they swallow it further and it goes into this. And this is a gizzard, this is the gizzard cut open. And the gizzard are two muscular disks. And in between the disks are all these rocks that the birds eat intentionally that sit there. And these softened, fermented, soaked, sometimes sprouted grains go in between these disks and the disks go like this. And the rocks grind this fermented soaked grain. And then it goes into the rest of their digestive tract, which is smaller but very similar to ours in the way that it operates. And as I'm holding this, I mean, the thing was just full of soaked, fermented grains. And I'm holding it and I'm thinking to myself, what if I took a grain and bypassed the crop and the gizzard and stuck it right into the stomach. Right where that would be very similar to ours. What would happen to that duck? Would it get all the nutrition from the grain? Would it get sick, would it die? Probably. And that's exactly what we do when we eat, the way that we eat grains today. Because the other parts of this, the crop and the gizzard, we replicate and have replicated for a very long period of time. The corn stone is literally a gizzard. And the crop, what happens in the crop is exactly what we do when we make real, long, slow fermented sour dough bread. And by not doing those two things, we're bypassing that part of a duck's anatomy and feeding ourselves a grain that we have no business eating. So here's some examples of, just like I had before with traits that other animals have that allow them to derive amazing nutrition from their environment biologically, we don't have these things. So for example, a cow have two wonderful things in their bodies that allow them to go out into a field of grass and support these huge bodies. Meanwhile, I could stand right next to that cow and eat the same thing and die of starvation. So when a cow eats grass, several things happen. First of all, they have these huge teeth, and even more importantly, a palate that's designed to break down through the cell walls of this grass, and they chew the grass and they swallow it. And it goes into a rumen, which is the first chamber of a four chambered stomach of a cow. And that does nothing but ferment, it's a fermentation chamber. So a cow will eat the grass if it's eating grass, it should be eating grass, and it eats, it chews it up and breaks it down and it swallows it, it goes into the rumen and ferments. And then they spit it up. And then they chew it and it goes back down. And they do this back and forth and back and forth, that's what a rumen in an animal does, it's chewing the cut, and eventually, when it's broken down enough, it goes through the rest of their digestive tract which, by the way, operates in very similar ways to ours. We don't have huge canines, right, for ripping apart carcasses on the savanna. We don't have, this is another, this is the picture of a gizzard cut the other way. We don't have anything like that to grind grains. But what do we do? We ferment outside of our bodies in crocks and in mason jars and in all sorts of different things. We don't have canines like this, but we don't need to, because for three and a half million years, we've been making sharp edges out of all sorts of things. We don't have this, but we create things like this corn stone. The story of our dietary past is not a story of individual items that we've eaten or chosen over time. It's about extracting the most nutrient dense, bioavailable foods from our environment, and more importantly, transforming those foods before they even touch our lips into the most nutrient dense bioavailable food possible. That's the story of our dietary past, that's the thing we should be focusing on. Now, I wanna give you, in many ways, a very gross example of where that understanding has broken down over time. So I'm gonna start back maybe almost nine years ago. I live on the eastern shore of Maryland in a very rural area, there's not much around it, everything closes at like 6 o'clock. And it was two days before Christmas, and my wife, we were counting the presents and the stockings and all these sorts of things, and she said to me, she goes oh my gosh, Alyssa, our youngest daughter, she has one less stocking stuffer than the other kids. And I said, "Okay." She said, "You gotta go to the store." I said, "Go to the store? "What store?" She goes, "Toys R Us." Toys R Us, it's 45 minutes away, are you kidding me, it's two days before Christmas. You gotta go, we have to have the exact same number. Oh my gosh, okay. She said, "And you can't spend more than like six bucks." So wait a minute. You're sending an adult male 45 minutes with a six dollar limit to get a gift for a six year old girl? Like I was completely set up for failure. So I go. And I'm looking around and very worried about what I was gonna do, and I'm looking, I'm looking, and I finally got to the Play-Doh isle, I knew she loved Play-Doh, and I turned around and I saw what I'm gonna show you in a minute. And immediately like, it was like the sun was shining on it, it was perfectly what I needed. And I grabbed it. And she loved this so much, she kept it, and I got one for myself, because there's something very very cool about this and very important to this. Bear with me for a second, I'm gonna go off script. So this is a Play-Doh press and it's very unique in a lot of ways. The first part of it, it creates this amazing human turd. And somebody was really, had way too much fun putting it together, because it comes with the Play-Doh, and it's just like greenish brown color, it's absolutely disgusting. But that's not the best part, the best part is that it also comes with a little yellow container of yellow Play-Doh. And you can't see if from here, but if you look really close, you can make a kernel of corn. And you stick it on the human turd, that's what it makes. And whether or not you're laughing, everybody in this room knows exactly what that means. Every single person in this room. I know it's funny, but it's actually really really sad. We eat for a lot of reasons as humans, many many many cultural reasons. But at the end of the day, we eat to nourish our bodies. And that corn gave us absolutely no nutrition whatsoever, it passed directly through our bodies and we saw the entire kernel of corn the next day. And I know you guys understand what that all means. But what you may not know is that corn is one of the most difficult things for our bodies to completely digest and derive nutrition from. If you grind that corn, you might not see it the next day because it's been ground up, but you didn't get all the nutrition from it. In fact, there's only one way to process corn to derive all the nutritional benefits from that corn into our human body through these very very inefficient digestive tracts. So corn maize was first domesticated in probably the Balsas valley of Mexico somewhere around 15,000 years ago, in fact, it may be one of the first domesticates in the entire world. And over thousands of years, entire civilizations were built on maize, healthy civilizations. Traditions, religion, all of it based on maize. And when the colonists first, explorers first came over to America, they saw this maize and they saw it everywhere and they took it back to England. And not long after they returned, people started getting sick. And there was a sickness that was first identified in Spain, and not long after, was identified in Italy, and then after that, it identified in different parts of England, different parts of Europe. And it looked very much like this. So early symptoms were red swollen skin and then skin lesions and in many ways, in some cases, something that very much mimicked or looked like leprosy, then blindness, and if left untreated, death. And a lot of people were affected by it. And then, in the mid 19th century, we see it again in Ireland. At the end of the famine, we start seeing this disease popping up. And then we see it again in the early 20th century in poor areas of the American southeast, areas like Georgia, Alabama, you know, some of these southeast, some of those southern states, but in very very poor areas. And it was so bad that it afflicted over, it afflicted literally millions of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of people were dying from this disease. And maybe none of of you know that this had even happened, but it was a very very very big deal. And they hired a doctor by the name of Goldberger, an infectious disease doctor, to go and figure out what this was, because it was running rampant. So he goes down there and he looks at it, and he's studying it, he comes back and he says, "Listen, I think I know what may be causing this, "but it's not infectious, it's diet related." And nobody would believe him. They said, "Go back, nothing this bad can be diet related. "It has to be infectious, go figure out what this is "and give us a solution to it." So he goes back and he actually goes to some mental institutions and some hospitals. And he took volunteers and put them on a nothing but corn diet. 'Cause he thought, he thought it had something to do with corn. And he put people on an exclusive corn diet. And they started showing symptoms of this, and he goes back and they're like nope, it's infectious, figure out what this is. So this disease was a very, people that had family members, people who got this disease were very very embarrassed by this because they thought it was, they called it the filth disease, because it was sweeping through poor areas and they thought it has something to do with being dirty. And so this guy, Goldberger, and his wife and his partner hosted what they called filth parties. And during these parties, he and his wife and his partner, in public, would eat the scabs and the skin off of people that were affected with this, they would take swabs and swab the mucus membranes and swab themselves. And then they even went so far as to extract blood from the victims and stick it into their own veins to show that they weren't getting sick and that it wasn't infectious. So people finally believed them. And they realized that it does have something to do with corn. And they then also found out that it had to do with a deficiency of niacin in the diet. And the problem is that corn is to easy to grow and so filling that it replaced traditional diets wherever it goes. And people may have been hungry before corn came in, but they were at least getting a lot of their food from different places. And when corn came in, they were abandoning a lot of the other places where they got their food and just eating exclusively corn. And they were getting sick and I mean, hundreds of thousands of people were dying in the US from this deficiency of niacin. Here's the punchline. Corn has niacin in it, in fact, it has quite a bit of niacin in it. The only way to get the niacin out of the corn and make it available to our bodies is to go through a process called nixtamalization. And in the past, it was done by putting, it means you put it in an alkaline solution and you simmer it and then you let it steep overnight and then you grind it into masa or what have you. In the past, it was done with wood ash and water. Nowadays, where it's done, it's done with either cal or pickling lime or even lye. This was a disease that you didn't see for 15,000 years, but you saw it in the 1600 to 1700s in Europe, you saw it in the 1800s in Ireland because, at the end of the potato famine, what did we do? We shipped tons of cornmeal to Ireland as famine relief. And people then were no longer dying from starvation, but they were dying and starving from pellagra. And then we see it again in the early 20th century. So what do we do as a country? Do we start processing it the right way? No, we start fortifying everything with niacin instead. So this is, and that's why, when you see niacin on literally everything, one of the main reasons is the result of this disease, it was running rampant for decades. In fact, the term redneck comes from pellagra, which is kind of interesting as well. The craziest part is this. Not only can we tell this really unique and insane story and sad story about corn, but we could say very similar things about every major food that we eat today. I can tell you very similar stories about barley or wheat or dairy or even animals. Not necessarily at the scale that we saw it here, but the way that we process these foods today are at the expense of the nutrients. Not to make them more nutrient dense, not to make them more bioavailable, at the expense of the nutrients. So very quickly, I know I'm almost out of time, here's some of the issues. Our gut is 60% the size of what is expected of a similar size primate. When we stood upright somewhere between five and seven million years ago, our guts shrank almost in half. The size of our guts are directly related to how far we can process food, and how long it sits in our small intestines is directly related to how we can absorb the nutrients, if they're broken down properly, into our bodies. So when we stood upright, our guts shrank, partially to fit inside of this pelvic girdle, right, this very small pelvic girdle. And as a result of that, our ability to derive nutrition from our environment is severely compromised. One of the other things we sort of had going for us was the size of our teeth. This is a very, this isn't the best example in the world, but this is homo habilis at two and a half million years ago, homo erectus at two million years ago, neanderthals, this one is around 250,000 years ago. And this is homo sapiens, us today. And if you look at just the post-canine teeth, the molars, look at the size difference over time. They're getting smaller. Now, this one lost its wisdom teeth, but pretend there was something here. They're getting smaller over time. Now, this is really crazy when you look at that in comparison to the size of the brains as they're increasing, right. So not only are the teeth getting smaller, the bodies and the heads and the brains are getting larger at the same time. Our guts have shrunk, our teeth are getting smaller, but everything, all the nutrition that we need is skyrocketing. Our brains represent 2% of, I'm sorry, 2% of our bodies, but require 20% of the nutrition that we take in. Most other animals, 10% of what they eat goes to fuel their brains, we're 20. Homo habilis, full grown homo habilis, stood about this tall, I'm not a great example 'cause I'm five foot seven, but a normal human is taller than me. You know, body size grows, brain size grows exponentially, females are actually getting much closer in size to males. All of that requires extensive nutrition. But biologically, everything that we have to get food and process it is going away or getting smaller. Right, that's the huge, encephalization is hugely expensive. So how did we do this? How did we literally do the impossible? Get bigger, grow these immense brains at the same time that everything we had that allowed us to get food from our environment biologically and process it was getting smaller? How did we do it? Well, this is how we did it, and this is the takeaway. We, through cultural adaptations, we sought, behavior patterns, we sought out increasingly nutrient dense food. So we targeted, found out ways of getting food from our environment that we had no business eating biologically, increasingly nutrient dense food. Again, we were subsisting on fruits and vegetables, seasonally subsisting on fruits and vegetables and probably some insects. That's all that our body had any business going out and getting, that's all that we could do without any tools at all. But we created behavior patterns and tools that allowed us to get increasingly nutrient dense food from our environment. And secondly and most importantly, we developed technologies that allowed us to process food, to increase the density, and more importantly, the bioavailability of our nutrients. In other words, to unlock those nutrients and make it available to our bodies without working too hard. I mean, the short takeaway is, we found ways of getting more by doing less. We exerted less energy and got more in return. That's exactly what we did. I mean, the focus, think about the focus. Whether you want to admit it or not, when you make a decision about how to feed yourself or feed your family, what do you really really think about? Our ancestors wanted to get the most amount with the least amount of work, that's what they wanted. And they found ways to do it. Modern Americans want to eat all day long and not get fat. Really, we seek out nutrient free foods. There was a study done several years ago on American grocery stores where they look at all the packaged food and what the advertising was boasting about, what it was advertising, what the labels were advertising. And 80% of the packaged food boasted about what it didn't have in it. Fat free, gluten free, low sugar, low calorie, whatever. And many of these things we probably shouldn't have in our bodies anyhow. But the paradigm, the thought process is 180 degrees from what it was in the past. We seek out nutrient free foods. This is, these are the kinds of technologies I'm talking about, digging sticks, stone tools, fire, grinding, the ability to hunt at a distance, these are the things that allowed us to do this over time. And this is great, and these are the kinds of food processing examples I'm talking about, none of it is rocket science, most of it is very basic. I mean, remember, a lot of these things are being done in caves in the middle of somewhere hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. Cooking is huge. Fermenting, nixtamalizing, grinding. Soaking, drying, slicing, chopping, dicing, and even things like coagulating. There is, we can talk more about it if somebody has a question, but I'm gonna plant the seed very quickly. Most of the things I talked about as creating behavior patterns or technologies to mimic, we're mimicking what other animals do naturally or have naturally, right. Stone tools, mimicking teeth and the ability to climb and all this. But one of the things that we've kind of mimicked our own species doing at a different time in life is coagulating. There's a lot of discussion right now whether humans should be drinking dairy or eating anything dairy. Because we're the only species that eats dairy as adults, right. Do I think we should be drinking ultra pasteurized skim milk, absolutely not, it has no business going into our bodies. But are the things that we can do to dairy that fall in line with the same approaches to the other foods and therefore, in my mind, render them something amazing for us to eat, absolutely. And instead of looking to another animal, let's look to our own species but as infants. When a baby drinks milk, it goes into their stomach and several things happen when that liquid, the mother's milk goes into its stomach. One of the things that happens is that chymosin, this enzyme attacks it and coagulates it, makes it, and thickens it. And if you ever had a baby spit up on you and it looked like clotted cheese, it's because it's exactly what it is. All right, now, it smells like a really strong provolone and that's because of the lipase enzyme, but that's another thing, but it's there, it's cheese, the baby was making cheese. And the reason the baby makes cheese in the stomach is because, if all it's doing is drinking a liquid, the liquid passes right through their digestive tract way too quickly for it to derive all the nutrition it can. And it passes through too quickly that doesn't allow it to ferment. So when a baby drinks milk and it coagulates into its stomach into something that's somewhat semi-solid, it sits there a little bit longer and it breaks down better and it actually ferments. And then this more broken down fermented food then goes into the small intestines, and then more nutrients can be absorbed from it. I literally just described to you the process of making cheese, that's what we do. There are, I'm passionate, I'm passionate about cheese, I swear I am. I've traveled the world making cheese, I love cheese. But we spent time last year, my family and I, with Samburu in Kenya. And the Samburu, just like the Maasai, are nomadic pastoralists that subsist, in many ways, primarily on blood and milk. And they milk their animals and they also, they have this wonderful way of shooting this arrow that only goes in about a quarter of an inch into their jugular, and they collect milk from it, they don't kill the cow, the cow, actually, when we did it, the cow didn't even flinch. And they collect this blood and this milk and they mix it together and they drink it regularly. The men during the dry season, when they're following the animals, that's all that they eat twice a day, blood and milk. They are the only traditional groups that I know that actually drink milk. Now first of all, it's 100% raw, but drink milk. Every other traditional culture in the world ferments the milk. They make yogurt or kefir or a variety of different cheeses or a whole host of other fermented dairy products. The way that we, forget the, we can talk a lot about pasteurization and homogenization later, but the way that we drink milk out of a glass and pour it on our cereal and eat it fresh is a very unique thing. That's not the best way to get the most nutrients from the dairy. So we can even do things like coagulating, these are the kinds of technologies that I'm talking about that can unlock nutrients and make them more nutrient dense. So really quickly, just to plant another seed, so to speak, in your mind. This is a picture of the actual tool that that's a cast of, that 3.3 million year old stone tool. There are a lot of questions people are arguing right now about what is the first domesticated species? We don't know, the plant, hmm. Probably, could be maize, 15,000 years ago, or some other plant around that same time period. Animal wise, well, most animals that we see domesticated began domestication around 8000 plus, 10,000 years ago. Dogs were very early, maybe as early as 30,000 years ago or so. But if your definition of domestication is taking a species out of its natural environment, putting it in a human created environment, a cultural environment, and tending it and protecting it and doing things to it to the point where it genetically changes, and in some cases, can't survive on its own without that cultural environment, if that's your definition, which it's mine, I think it's a good one, then humans are the first domesticated species, and we began to domesticate ourselves three and a half million years ago when we made that tool. Because we made that tool, we started, we gained the ability to extract more resources from our environment and process that food in ways that we couldn't do it before. And then we continued to do that and create new technologies and change our diet and change our diet. I don't care of you are Bear Grylls and knows everything about surviving in every place in the world. If I stripped you down from your clothes and all of your technologies and threw you anywhere in the world, you could not survive. We can't do it. We need these technologies to survive, we need these technologies to transform raw materials to support these bodies, we appear as homo sapiens 300,000 years ago. And we really haven't changed that much since and our digestive tracts have not changed, the way we process food has not changed. We built these bodies on diets that were three and a half million years in the making. And those are the diets that I think we need to turn to for at least inspiration for how we address modern issues of food and diet today. So there's an issue though. One of the things that I like to say is it's not about eating like cavemen, it's about learning to eat like humans again, there's much more to eating than just the nutritional value of foods. If I certainly, there was no one diet 300,000 years ago, but let's suggest that there was for just a second. And let's suggest that I knew what it was, I have no idea, but let's suggest I knew exactly what it was. And I could convince you tonight that you should eat that food and biologically, that it makes amazing sense that that is the diet that we can be the healthiest humans on and I put that food in front of you, I might get you to eat it. And tomorrow morning, you might wake up and eat it again. But next week, you probably wouldn't eat it. I don't care how important you thought it was. Because even though biologically, we are very similar to how we were 300,000 years ago, culturally, we are very very very different. And what I'm working on now and where I think we need to move forward is to understand our dietary past, understand what makes it so important, understand our diets that actually physically, biologically made us human. But also take into account our modern expectations and needs, culturally, we are very different than we were five years ago. We're certainly very different than we were 300,000 years ago. We had different expectations of taste and texture and smell and presentation and different access to resources and time. So any real significant move forward has to take both of these things into account. We have to be able to enjoy what we're eating. Because after all, eating, the way that we eat, the way that we share food is a very very uniquely human thing. So all the stuff that I've been working on now, the work that I was doing last year on the Food Evolutions project has been and is focused on that. Taking an understanding from the past, these things that made our diets so incredibly amazing, and fusing it with modern approaches to cooking that can create something that meets and exceeds all those expectations, we can talk about more of that later on, but I'm almost done here, I wanna say a few other words. The cool thing is, when we do this, so many other things that we have problems with fall into place. This is my family, well, my wife's not pictured here, but my son is 13, Billy, my daughter Brianna, who's 15, and my daughter Alyssa, who's 11. And I was very fortunate to be able to take them with me last year, we were in 13 different countries working with amazing indigenous and traditional groups and also working with some top star Michelin chefs around the world. And they got to be a part of this. And I got to witness it, not just through the eyes of a 46 year old male, but through a middle schooler, a high schooler and an elementary schooler, and also through my wife's eyes, and we also got to witness what addressing these things in this way did for the rest of the problems. You know, health, community, sustainability. When we approach our food through this really connected, amazing way, with context, all of these other things really start to fall into a place. It's not a panacea, we're not gonna solve all the world's problems. But a lot of the things we see as problems will either go away or will at least lessen in severity if we approach it this way. So I'll leave you with this. My newest project at Washington College is the creation of, it's an eight year long project called the Eastern Shore Food Lab. And we are very much the same size of Claremont McKenna, we have almost 1400 students. It's a primarily undergraduate school, we're located in a really unique place, we're very student focused. And we've created this center, this lab where we're experimenting with all sorts of different ways to do everything I just said. And we're focused on quality, increasing the nutrient density, bioavailability and variability in food. We're focused on reconnecting people, through everything in, using food as a vehicle to connect them with everything in their lives. And also, we're making sure to hold on to that cultural context that comes with food. Because food has stories. Some of the most important moments of my life were around food or celebrated with food, and we can't lose sight of those things, as we experiment with things and take things from different culture and fuse these things together, we have to make sure we're documenting, keeping these stories alive. If anybody's interested, this is the website, washcoll.edu/esfl. I'm very excited about this project, and we've only launched in November, so it's fairly new, but we're doing some really really cool things. So again, very quickly, this is my information, if any, and I mean this, you can get a hold of me on @drbillschindler, I'm opening, wide open for questions, but I'm sure we're not gonna be able to answer everything while we're here. If anybody has questions beyond tonight, please contact me, and I welcome any communication. So questions. (audience applauding) Yes. Oh, okay, one second. Sorry, we have about 10 minutes for questions, please raise your hand-- I'm so sorry. That's fine. So please raise your hand if you have a question, Bruno and I will get a mic to you. Please, in the interest of time, try to keep it as brief as possible. And priority will have to go to students, we'll try to get to as many people as we can. Hi. Thank you so much for you talk. This is something that I'm really interested and passionate about, and I've studied food history more in like the last 200,000 or 300,000 years, so it's really interesting to see where it's coming from. You said a little bit at the end about us in modernity having more of an expectation about taste, so I'm curious, having done that project with National Geographic, what you think our ancestors would expect from taste of their food for enjoyment of their food, and then what it felt like to you and what it tasted like to you to eat that way. That's a great question. And actually, we had a very similar question earlier before I got up, so it's a very important one. I don't know, obviously, what people's tastes in the past were like, but I can say this. I don't think we have necessarily, our modern expectations aren't necessarily more, they're different. The idea that people in the past were starving and barely getting by and eating all this terrible food is probably not very accurate at all. First off, you know, the fact that we're sitting here means that we weren't just surviving, we were doing really really well. 'Cause people that are just surviving don't have babies, and if they do have, or don't think about having babies, and if they do think about it, it's very rare for them to take the baby to full term, and if the baby does come to full term, it's very difficult for that baby to grow to the point where they can. So they were doing, they were subsisting or doing really really well. I mean, that's, I think, first of all. But I do think that taste and flavor and texture were very important, even in the past. We know for sure that neanderthals a long time ago could control fire to within a very specific range of degrees in order to make a specific kind of glue from birch tar from birch trees. It's a very narrow range. I mean, they were controlling fire 200,000 years ago to within just a few degrees. I mean, there are not people who were just slapping slabs of meat on a rock and hoping it cooked. They knew their environment, herbs, spices, all these things had to be a part of it. So I don't think it's necessarily more now, but it is different, which we need to take into account. What was the second part of the question? About your experience. Oh. I'll give you one quick example so we get another. So we ate very little while we were there. I did have to, I have a very open mind about food anyhow, but I did, obviously, I'd opened it a little bit more than before. But I'll say this. Our main camera guy by the name of Luke Cormack, very talented cameraman, had the unfortunate job of looking through a lens at me for many many many hours. And one of the things he said to me about halfway through the season was very unique. He said, "You know, at the beginning of every episode, "your eyes change. "Like they get brighter, your entire face brightens." And I ate a fairly good diet anyhow, but when I was restricted to just that, he actually saw a change in my eyes 10 different times where they got brighter and everything changed, and I thought that was really interesting. Do we have another one? Thank you so much for you talk. Given that today, there are so many different competing theories as to what we should eat and what is healthy. And you know, as you were showing in your picture from like the Barnes & Noble, there are all these authors with, you know, different ideas of what is healthy. And even looking at like human evolution, it's very difficult to kind of estimate what we used to eat given that there is so much variation across the world and, you know, we can't go back and interview our ancestors. So how, you know, should the ordinary person kind of navigate this very complex modern landscape of eating, especially if we wish to have healthy lives? That's a great question. So it's one that I struggled with my whole life. I grew up as a very pudgy kid. And then I became an athlete in high school, and then I ended up wrestling for Ohio State, and athletics are very important to me, but diet was always front and center in my mind. And my parents hired a nutritionist for me when I was in high school, and we obviously had nutritionists and people, everybody telling us how to eat when we were in college. And after that, I did south, I've done a little bit of all of it. None of it felt right and none of it ever stuck either, but none of it felt right. And I would say this, that we like, we tend to gravitate, as modern humans, towards diets, because for as much as we don't wanna be told what to eat, we do wanna be told what to eat. We don't want to be burdened with the thinking about eating. We want somebody to tell us what to eat, and all of a sudden, we're focused. And we see it even with, you know, things like the gluten free movement. Where, you know, it's easy for us to say okay, I'm not gonna eat gluten, so everything that says gluten free on it is fair game. Well, most of the stuff that says gluten free is complete junk, right. In my mind, I think this approach is very liberating. I don't want anybody to tell me how to eat, I wanna take control again and I wanna make informed decisions for myself. So what I do in every situation that I'm in, and it's also very flexible. Whatever's put in front of me, I look at it and I say what is the most, what is the best way for me to get the most amount of nutrients in a way that my body can access possible, and then I make that decision on the spot. Which is very very liberating, right. So if, and I get very angry when somebody tries to give me something that doesn't meet that, right. So if somebody gives me, I don't eat a whole lot of bread, but you know what, if you put a loaf of sour dough bread in front of me, I will eat it. And if you put good cheese in front of me, I will eat it. And if you do something great with animal that, you know, I will eat it. And I focus fat, finally, we've gotten away from this, they call it the oiling of the America, oiling of America for the past 30 years, right, the idea that we should be eating highly processed vegetable oil at the expense of animal fats. There was just an article that came out a couple weeks ago, I think it was in the Journal of Archaeological Science, that's suggesting that the thing that actually made us human was bone marrow, accessing bone marrow from other animals. We are founded, our species requires high quality fat. And one of the things, if somebody asked me, one of the worries is what do we do with children, young babies, what do we give babies, what's the best thing to do for babies? The three most important things to me is one, connect them with their food, let them see food being made, let them see, if you're gonna put meat in their diet, let them be around animals being butchered, let them be a part of the cooking, all of that is important. But as far as what to feed them that's missing from their diets today, high quality fat and probiotics. Those are the two things that I think are missing the most for a developing brain in a young human baby, those two things are significantly missing from our diets. So I don't have an exact answer, but I think this is empowering, we don't need somebody else to tell us, we've never before needed somebody else to tell us how to eat, we shouldn't need it now. We'll have time for one more question. Hi, thanks for your talk, that was awesome. I'm curious about how time plays into this, like the movement of fast food and how like people don't have time to cook, it's like sour dough takes two days versus the hour that a loaf of processed bread takes. Do you find that, in modern kitchens, like time becomes a barrier to people eating well and getting good nutrients, or it's more of a mindset of how people are viewing their food? It's a little bit of both, so the question's about time. And it's a very, very important question. I think the biggest, the most amount of time should be invested in the talking about food and the learning about how food can and should, should is fairly subjective, but should be, how food should be processed. So one of the really cool, when I started down this particular road 15 or 20 years ago, I spent a lot of time trying to get the information I needed and then learn through much trial and error how to do everything from making yogurt to making sour dough bread, and the amount of time that it took was oppressive, almost to the point, not almost, it was too far, there was a year in my kids' life several years ago that I said I'm gonna make every single thing in their lunches for the entire year entirely from scratch. I made all the cheese, I made all the bread, I cured all the meats, I made all the mayonnaise, all of it. And I was set on, I didn't want them to look different from the other kids so they'd be like set to the other table. So their lunches looked just like the kids around them, but it was entirely, it was way too far. But I learned a lot during that time, and one of the things that I learned is that, when you understand how this food is made, it doesn't, a lot of it doesn't take that much time. Or it can work around the other thing, so at night, you know, I refresh the kefir, I do a couple, literally, a couple minutes of work. Now, as a professor, I have a freedom in my, a flexibility in my schedule to do a lot of different things, which is great. But I just finished a book, and one of the things in the book is about sour dough bread and understanding the biggest resource that we don't have access to today I think is time. Ane one of the things I talk about with the sour dough is, you know, sour dough bread, you can slot out an entire Saturday to make sour dough bread, which is not very, you know, many of us can't do that, especially with kids. But the active working time in sour dough bread is like 17 minutes. So understanding how to control things like temperature, you can work it around your work schedule that if you start on a Monday morning and spend a couple minutes in the morning, a couple minutes that night and a couple minutes the next day, you're gonna have sour dough bread, the exact same sour dough bread, coming out of the oven for dinner that night. And you've only, you've worked around a complete work schedule just a few minutes, but you understand how to put it in the fridge and how to slow down the fermentation. It's not that hard. But getting to the point to understand it is, and more importantly, getting to the point, this is the captive audience, right, getting to the point to have that conversation is even more important. So I would say, and I'll leave you with this. I think the most important thing that we can do and the thing that's the most empowering to us is to take the things that you eat every day, your favorite foods that you eat every day, I don't care what it is, it could be hot dogs and French fries, it could be macaroni and cheese. And make those things from scratch, entirely from scratch once. Even if you fail, what you've done is you've taken the power away from the people that are putting you between you and your food, and you walked into the grocery store with a completely new set of eyes. Even if you never make sour dough bread again, even if you never make macaroni and cheese again, you can walk through that grocery store and with your money, you can support the people that are doing things the right way, and you're not relying on advertising or somebody else to tell you which one of those things it is, because you know how real food is made. And I think that's one of the most important things that we can do. All right, unfortunately, that was our last question, but we do have the social media handles here for you to photograph and save for later. Maybe you'll come up with a question at your hopefully made from scratch breakfast tomorrow. Now please join me in thanking Dr. Schindler. Thank you. (audience applauding)
