If you look at any modern supermarket and strip out all the processed junk, you’re left with a few types of meat, few types of vegetables and maybe some mushrooms. Most of our dishes are a combination of maybe 25 items of which 6,7 are heavily used.

Would your typical hunter-gatherer have more than 25 edible items regularly around them? I'm not so sure.

> hunter-gatherer

You don't even need to go that far - my Italian grandma who was born in a farming village in the early 1900s, knew dozens of herbs, how you would go about finding them, and how could you use them for this or that other purpose. You can't find any of those herbs in a modern supermarket except maybe for a couple of them.

Imagine the biodiversity on the peninsula before all those humans moved in too. It must have been like a garden of eden to the first migrants of humans. There are islands in the Mediterranean today that are still barren of trees due to Venetian shipbuilding.

I have an Italian mother in law. One of the things that impressed me is how so many of the methods of cooking feed into each other. The leftover milk that's nearly spoiled can go into making cheese and there were many similar techniques like this that I don't remember.

I feel like we've lost some of our food cultures at some point and we're only starting to realize what we're missing.

To be entirely fair, herbs in the quantities we consume aren't very nutritious.

my specific examples was about herbs but it's valid for almost every food category:

* meat: my family is from a village near Rome, Roman traditional cuisine is famously full of recipes that use all sorts of weird meat cuts (pork jowl, internal organs of various animals...) - you won't find most of those in an average supermarket. When it comes to meat, the problem is not just cuts, but also breeds: I live in Australia and it has been extremely hard to find chicken which is not Cornish Cross. In Sydney, you can find heirloom breeds chicken at only a handful of speciality butchers, and prices are very high.

* grains: this is a well known problem, most grain-based products are based on just a handful of varietals. I have to say that the situation is starting to improve: recently, in some upmarket stores, it has become possible again to get products based on some heirloom grains, however they are pricey (example: Pasta Monongrano made from Matt or Kamut flour)

* fish: it is a known problem that fishing boats are forced to throw away certain catch, because certain fish varieties are not "marketable"

the list could continue...

Fair enough. I'm not sure if those foods were any better or worse, but there's definitely an argument to make for the poverty of variety of modern cuisine.

yes, exactly, the problem is not whether those are more or less nutritious, the issue is the lack of variety. It seems that gut bacteria only improves if your diet is very diverse. But modern industrially produced food is made from just a small list of commodity ingredients. If you are curious about these topics, you could check out "The omnivore's dilemma", a book by Micheal Pollan, or the video documentary "Food Inc." that is also narrated by Pollan

I'm not sure if the gut microbiota "improves" in adults at all. It's largely established by the time you're past 3 years old, and even radical dietary changes mainly just shift the relative abundances around.

There's probably still an effect in there, but it seems more likely that it's mainly antibiotics that are killing off gut microbiota variety, with an argument to be made for a role of highly processed foods.

That's true for all of Europe. We just don't care about endemic herbs anymore.

Yes. I can't cite it, but I remember seeing a study that said hunter gatherers in warmer climates can have up to 200 different food sources.

Of course I'm sure it's highly dependent on season and region.

The idea that there is a "typical hunter-gatherer" across all of human history and geography, and that we know what that is -- is I think a fundamental problem with a lot of these theories.

Someone studies one group of people at one (modern) time and place -- a group of people who probably don't even exclusively "forage" for their food and other economic activity now as encountered -- and then they, or their readers, assume that what they found is somehow typical of everyone they assign to the category "hunter gatherer", and further assume what people at what other times and places are "correctly" assigned to that category too.

There needs not be a typical hunter gatherer lifestyle. The distinction is between gray cubicle sedentary junk-eating modern lifestyle and the general hunter gatherer lifestyle, it’s distinct enough.

The world your typical hunter gatherer lived in was remarkably different than today. So much more flora and fauna. Actual functioning ecosystems versus disrupted ones. The world today is so bizarrely different than even the world 500 years ago all thanks to our farming, hunting, and resource gathering over the years.

They'd probably eat more than 25 different edible roots/tubors regularly, plus berries, fruits, leaves, and honey and meat/animal products it would run into hundreds, its surprising how much around us is edible that we no longer see as food.

https://apps.worldagroforestry.org/downloads/Publications/PD...

>Are they eating a lot of different things?

This is a generalization/simplification on my part, but yes.

Hunter gatherers at a minimum are eating different foods throughout the year as seasons change, but even within seasons as different foods become available.

I have a hard time believing they would have a greater variety than a reasonable modern day person.

Reflecting on today, I’ve had four different species of fruit, three different vegetables, and two different subspecies of Cheerio. Not to forget the different meats, nuts, and dairy.

There's a difference between having a greater variety available and eating a greater variety of food. Most people eat what they're comfortable eating, and many eat everything already cooked to death.

Yes, and hunter-gatherers are forced by their circumstance to eat a wide range of foods: individual food species are in limited supply, and the supply of them changes throughout the year (and over the years, too).

Today in the United States, food is so plentiful there is enough to provide a person with the same food every day if that's what they want.

From everything I've come across, hunter-gatherer people are substantially deficient in their Cheerio intake. Modern diets have multiple subspecies to choose from that would likely be unavailable to hunter-gatherers.

Indeed, hunter gatherers are severely lacking in this aspect. They can’t take their Che-vitamins. Look, I’m not even mentioning that they’re burdened with intense physical activities like foraging and hunting for food in the forest instead of enjoying the privileges of modern life, for example sitting in front of a computer all day long to earn green papers to then go to the supermarket and buy processed delicious-corn-syrup foods to eat with those green papers, all without even burdening your leg muscles! It must totally suck to be a hunter gatherer indeed.

Just because you had several different items doesn't mean they are all that diverse

Having a Cavendish banana, Fuji apple and hothouse tomatoes isn't "diversity" as all have basically the same nutrient content [1] which is dwindling rapidly. None of which have manganese for example, because we stripped it from our topsoil long ago.

So yes, eating a handful of legumes and some honey along with a healthy slab of wild meat (which contains everything that the meat ate) could be way more nutritionally diverse than a standard western meat + veg + grain combo. That is effectively the Hadza diet.

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...

Typical fruits people eat are probably the ones that were the easiest to domesticate and have the most sugar, not necessarily representative of more variety in nutrition. And what you might consider a variety of vegetables is in fact just the same couple species but different cultivars. And modern people certainly eat more meat but for the most part have totally abandoned eating organs and other tissue. Probably not as much difference in chicken breast vs turkey breast as chicken breast vs chicken gizzards. I ate mutton and liver as a kid, I've known other people that ate chicken feet as kids. So in some ways you don't even see the variety today you did a generation ago, but things like avocados are more common I guess.

Exercise, lots of plants, variety.

probably eating more dirt

You also have to consider all of the invisible (to the naked eye) stuff you get from eating plants in the wild.

When I graze in the backyard... I don't brush off all the dirt. If there are small bugs on a leaf, I might eat em.

Yeah tapeworms, pinworms all super healthy and tasty.

That's a facetious take on a reasonable opinion. If you disagree - which there are also reasonable grounds for - snark isn't going to help us understand what your real point is.

> When I graze in the backyard... I don't brush off all the dirt.

Given everything we know, this doesn’t seem too reasonable to me. I’m sure those hunters and gatherers would have loved a reliable way to purge those parasites from their digestive system. Even better if they didn’t require removing them in the first place.

I did not think about it as a snark.

More like concise critique. Where I pointed out obvious flaw in “hunter gatherers were so healthy and had such a great quality of life not like us” way of thinking.

From the publication, their diet "includes foraged tubers, berries, honey, and hunted animals."[1]

Their microbiome is more diverse, with "23.4% of microbial species detected in the Hadza infants represent[ing] novel species"[2].

1. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00597-4

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9894631/

Rotten meat is also considered a delicacy by people in the bush. Apparently it’s a bit like cooking it.

There is a super interesting interview with Jeff Leach, a guy who actually went to live with hunter-gatherers, studying how they live and how it influences their microbiome:

https://chrisryan.substack.com/p/307-jeff-leach-microbiome-e...

Sounds like a large part of the reason for their gut diversity seem to be from not just what they eat, but how they eat it (taking in lots of dirt along with their food).

As another commenter mentioned read “against the grain” by James c Scott. Also “eat on the wild side” is another. Today we may eat 20 different kinds of plants. Hunter gatherers ate somewhere like 80-120 different kinds.