What? Evolved for a reason? Like local climate, soil quality, and agricultural and/or animal husbandry technology? That kind of reason? Because I strongly suspect that overcoming the problem of scarcity was a much stronger factor in the development of traditional cuisines than any actual nutritional concerns.

If anything, I’d think that the evolution would go the other way, and the local populations would evolve around being able to survive on what food they could produce. Your community has figured out how to farm barley efficiently? Great. All of you who can digest barley will prosper. Those who can’t digest barley for whatever reason will die out. Which certainly wouldn’t make me think that just picking a traditional cuisine would be that good of an idea.

Plus, even if you did pick the traditional cuisine that matches your genetic makeup, then there’s no guarantee that the species-survival patterns of the past are going to be all that desirable in the present. It’s very possible that, while your traditional cuisine was shaping your tribe’s nutritional requirements, the environment was such that optimal survival meant reproducing early and then dying quickly of a heart attack to clear way for the next generation. Efficient, but hardly a pattern that I’d choose to follow.

“The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.”

If there’s one issue people get over-moral about, to my mind, it’s food. The tendency to want to believe certain foods are bad guys or good guys, to villify “corrupting” influences, to worship “tradition” — it’s all fucking religion, in my book. IDOF sounds like its full of the typical food-moral platitudes. Frankly, the minute anyone starts using moralizing language — whether they’re talking about food or conservation — their credibility starts to go out the window with me.

There was a movement, people. It was called the enlightenment. I, for one, am a fan.