the noble native diet

[Guest guest]

>Fine, I disagree. The natives wouldn't have had the problems of the

> European settlers until they ate the inferior quality of nutrition

> of the European food. Gosh, I thought that was the point Price over

> emphasized in his book.

Eh. There is no perfect " native " diet that all " natives " were eating in its

local/indigenous form. Price documented that plenty of tribes lost the fight

with their neighbors and were shunted to less-fertile land. And any " natives "

resident in societies stratified to any great degree would have varied diets

within the population, the powerful gorging on the fat of the land and the serfs

eating maize mush or millet gruel or bananas and taro. Human sacrifice is a

good indication of high stratification, by the way, and therefore poor diet for

a portion of the population.

This " European diet bad/'native' diet good " trope is itching my hide because

it's completely ahistorical. Which 'natives' where when? Which Europeans where

when? I mean, seriously, King was an indigene. Are we thinking all

" natives " were living in egalitarian, edenic perfection in happy little tribes

without conflict or complicated cultural realities? Because that's kind of

offensive: it presupposes that, mysteriously, in all the world only the tribes

of Europe moved along the continuum from tribe to nation-state to empire. That

presupposition is patently and demonstrably untrue.

Seems to me that the handiest explanation for soil exhaustion by European

settlers would be that a) people used to farming the fertile lowlands of Europe

in an intensive, virtually biodynamic way transferred methods to radically

different soils over a larger area (because they could), and the livestock:soil

area ratio dropped cause everyone was stretching to farm more area and having to

butcher more often, as well; traditional adjuncts were not available far

inland, ie, sea products in Britain and Ireland; c) new technologies in the

1800's radically increased both the land one person could plant and the

exposure/rate of degradation of the soil, which would have been unanticipated.

Traditional European farming methods do not exhaust the soil; there are

productive farms today that were listed as such in the Domesday book. If

anything, the continuous high fertility of most European farmland generated the

high population density, resource pressures and degree of stratification

that drove the conquering machine.

Oh, and Chi? There is ocean-to-land mineral recharge. It's not in NAPD cause

they didn't know about it then. See if you can find it! Good luck!

Okay, that's enough for me. I got sucked in - more time here than I can

spare, so I'm going to no-mail. Thanks for all the intrigue

Oh, and , Sopranos is on DVD, and yes, you should really see it.