Living in the Stone Age

During the past several weeks I have often wondered how gluten - indispensable to so many of my favorite foods - could be so unthinking and callous as to make my life a misery. To put it another way, why would my auto-immune system take it upon itself to persecute a substance capable of producing such happiness and conviviality? Either way, it seemed most unfair and I took it upon myself to find some answers.

I read all about celiac disease and how it is often said to be more prevalent in Ireland than anywhere else in the world, due to the relatively late adoption there of grains as dietary staples. I investigated the heroic Dutch pediatrician Willem Karel Dicke, who noticed that children who had been relatively healthy during the German occupation suddenly fell ill and ceased to thrive when American planes started dropping bread bombs all over the place. I learned far more about leukocytes, lymphocytes, and prolamins than could ever be considered desirable or, indeed, decent.

But I couldn't get a handle on the complete picture, until I discovered an explanation (quite by accident, as often happens) in Bill Bryson's admirable new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which I downloaded onto my Kindle just a few short days ago. Whilst holding forth on the Neolithic move from hunter-gatherer nomadism to sedentism (which is what experts in the biz call it when people live in settled, immovable communities), Bryson detours to a potted history of the development of early agriculture. Fascinatingly enough, it appears that sedentism came before cereal domestication, not the other way around, which is the sort of finding ethnographers and their ilk dub 'counterintuitive'. The point is, once humans started to farm crops rather than search for nuts and berries, as it were, they [the humans] became almost immediately shorter, more malnourished, and exceedingly disease-prone.

How anthropologists can possibly know this is a bit of a mystery to me, but I guess that's why they're authorities and I'm not. One thing they do know is why. With sedentism, early humans become reliant on a much smaller range of foods - 'the three great domesticated crops of prehistory'  - all of which have serious deficiencies as dietary staples. Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; corn (maize) is sadly lacking in essential amino acids; and wheat (I sat up sharply in my chair at this point) has a 'chemical' (I assume this is a reference to gluten) that stunts growth and impedes the action of zinc. 

And here's the thing. All the nutritional disasters that plagued our Neolithic ancestors as a result of their settling down are still with us today. There are an estimated thirty thousand types of edible plants on the planet, and just eleven of them (many of them nutritionally wanting or problematic in some way or another) account for 93% of all the food we eat. Bryson concludes, 'We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it is all Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.'

So really, it's not me, but the Cavewoman in me that can't eat gluten. And I find that immensely comforting - not least because she didn't have bay leaves and chopped fennel and I do.