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“Am I eating right?”

We ask ourselves this question all the time.

What is a good diet? What are we supposed to eat?

Supposed to? Are you out of your mind? It’s astounding that we’re even here—an ape-like creature that has domesticated grasses, developed the light-bulb and the locomotive, spread to the corners of the world—cooking, eating, gambling, Skyping, shitting in giant sanitary systems, creating music and visual art, splitting the atom for energy, orbiting the planet in vessels made out of materials extracted from the rock of the earth—and now inquiring, in such ceaseless chatter, about what we’re supposed to be eating… can even there be an answer?

The diet of our species is beyond unusual; even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, can’t provide us with the clues we need—they don’t share our gastronomic history. Humans have undergone thousands of years’ worth of evolution in the presence of cooked food; no other organism on this earth can say the same. Homo erectus, a long-lost relative of ours, was cooking before the first true human… he’s not around to answer any questions, however, but we have spent millions of dollars analyzing his teeth for different microscopic grooves characteristic of different diets, in our desire to answer this question.

As researchers progressively probe the realm of nutrition, our understanding of a healthy diet is slowly being developed, based on qualitative and quantitative observations. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that the “Food Pyramid”, which we’re encouraged to follow (Be good… eat your burger!), changes every couple of years as we use newfound knowledge to develop diets that (on paper, at least) make us less prone to disease, deficiency, and so on.

“Am I eating right?”

I’m afraid I can’t say. We’re working on it, though, that’s for sure.

Many apologies,

–The Omnivore

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