This thread is derived from another thread (Unbelievable..., started by rdharper) and was in danger of becoming a hijacker.

The question Is bacon Paleo? was the turn of topic. This is just my opinion, but I don't believe that bacon, as I know and love it, is a proper Paleo food. Bacon is highly processed. Even the types that call themselves natural and contain no nitrates at the same time contain a lot of salts, too much fat, and are often pumped up with excess water. Also, a modern pig is a modern pig, and a wild boar is a wild boar (yep, they're both meat last time I looked too ), but the former has been unnaturally fattened and are often fed a diet that causes them a lot of swelling and inflammation - this is to say nothing of the curing process, even "natural" curing processes - salting, sugaring, smoking, handling and packaging. I just think that the combined effect/result was never a part of a H&G, nomadic tribe's menu.

I am currently in another conversation with someone who claims that since some middens have been documented to contain a lot of hazelnut shells, then eating nuts must be a part of the Paleo diet. I don't doubt that nut shells were found in middens, nor that Paleo humans ate them whenever they found them, but I do doubt the existence of Hunter & Gatherer "middens." Hunters & gatherers didn't stay anywhere long enough to accumulate a large refuse heap - they followed the seasons, herds, plants, and yes, wild boar.

I may sound like a bit of a purist, but I'm not, really. I would consider anything over 75% best-effort paleo to be great and about the best we can do in our modern circumstances). My point was and still is that we as folks who may or may not have "issues" with our food often do a great job of convincing ourselves that what we want (i.e., bacon) is actually good for us and that what we want, we may rationalize (meat is meat) as fitting into a "plan" that we've adopted.

If this post gets any longer, then maybe no one will read it!

I wonder how long humans have been preserving food with smoke, drying, salt, curing, etc? We've been cooking food for a long, long time.

I lurve bacon. I eat bacon every day. Bacon is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.

I eat bacon because a natural h/g carnivore diet is low in protein and high in fat. About 80% fat, 20% protein. That's hard to do. What makes it slightly easier is a high quantity of bacon in the morning. Bacon is around there - 78% fat according to the entry I have for it in FitDay. I also deep-fry my scrambled eggs in bacon grease, for added fat.

Because I do eat carbohydrates, my ratio is a measly 65% fat, a possibly-too-high-for-health 26% protein, and a deep-fried-apples-and-plantains 8% carbohydrates.

Yes, I know deep-fried fruit is not really paleo, but it's so damned tasty! (Fried in bacon grease, of course - or hazelnut oil. Hazelnuts are the uber-bomb, sir).

I don't think we have been drying stuff for too long. It's pretty complicated to do in nature with just sticks, rocks etc. You'd have to somehow protect the meat from other animals, like birds.. after we learned to make nets (from whatever material available), it could've been possible from this aspect. Even smoking would seem pretty hard to do in nature, to me atleast. Or maybe it's easier to dry meat over fire than I think.

Hybrid, well, you could get just pork belly instead of bacon (if it's available in your area). It's the same part, so it has as much fat as bacon, but it's not processed as much. If you want to do it.

Walmart carries a bacon that is nitrate/nitrite free, and it's cured in salt or something like that. I'm thinking of getting some now and having some bacon with my liver..as I haven't had bacon in forever it seems. Hybrid, you seem like a really good/creative cook. I've never even thought about deep-frying fruit in bacon grease!

And to answer the OP's question, yes, I think bacon is paleo, but only if it's the nitrate/nitrite free kind and will go bad if not eaten.

Okay, if we can assume that paleolithic humankind could have cured, salted and stored a fatty pig meat (assuming, again, that there were any fatty pigs around), and assuming that they could keep their hungry, grimey fingers away from the goods long enough for it "cure", and then assuming that it didn't rain, and assuming that they weren't driving all the other animals in the areas to a crazed hunger-state, then, well, there is are a lot of assumptions going on.

I'm not saying that bacon doesn't taste good (what kind of man would I be? ), what I am saying is that it cannot be justified into any scenario of pre-agricultural, nomadic hunter and gatherer life. Nor am I saying that there are better, more "natural" forms of the stuff than the bacon that most American eat.

I like rice pudding. And I'm sure through some stretch of my processed-food-addicted brain logic, I could somehow loosely justify eating it in large quantities. Afterall, rice is natural, sugar is natural, milk is natural, butter is natural - all I have to do is pick enough individual rice grains and strip them of their hulls, find some sugar cane and squeeze out the juice and dry away the moisture, milk a wild animal (now that's a picture) and churn some butter from the milk, and, I almost forgot, evaporate some sea water for some salt (you need a little for really good rice pudding). We'll forgo any locating of vanilla beans.

I could worry about catching up with the tribe later. If I was wasn't already exiled.

But, ignoring all of this, if bacon is Paleo and I'm all screwed up, then where does this leave me? Am I a man without a diet plan? Maybe I'm the one getting myself exiled.

-P

Yes, but you can make that argument about any modern meat, in which case all meat would be non-paleo. Do you eat only 100% free-range grassfed or hunted meat? If you do, then great! But did you know you can also get free-range heirloom pork? There is a farm very near my house that raises such animals, and last time I checked they also made bacon from them. I'm sure you could also "baconize" wild boar if you were lucky enough to catch yourself one.



Ray Audette says that you can dissolve the salt and sugar out of bacon by soaking it in water overnight. I'm sure that it is possible to make bacon without massive quantities of salt, it just wouldn't sell very well. As far as handling and packaging - I see that as a non-argument, as any food you buys nowadays will have been both handled and packaged in some modern fashion unless you are growing your own produce and raising or hunting your own animals.



If you had a largish h-g tribe and nuts were a staple food, I'm sure you could build up quite a trash heap in just a week or two. You may speculate that h-g's didn't stay in one place long enough to produce a midden, but then how do you explain the discovery of middens by archaeologists? Do you think they have errors in their dating techniques? I am curious.




Have you ever been to the Pacific Northwest? The natives who lived there constructed wooden racks that they hung gutted fish carcasses on. These would then be placed over the fire and the fish would dry out and smoke. This smoked fish was a very important dietary staple for them. And last time I checked the PacNW is pretty darn rainy (I lived there), so they must have been able to do it even with the rain. So yes, I would say that people could keep their grimy mitts off of some pork belly for long enough to let it smoke a little as well.

I think we may have a different understanding of the Paleolithic and evolution. I don't disagree with most of your points - to a point.

First point



The key words here are "heirloom pork," "farm." And no, as I said before, I'm not a purist. I eat bacon like the rest of ya.




I have no interest in further proceesing bacon (soaking). I like it salty the way it is. And Audette doesn't back up his claims very well.




The middens discovered by archeologists are from sedentary or partially sedentary societies, not HG nomadic tribes. How could HGs find that many nuts in one place? I do not believe that the Paleolithic earth was a Garden of Eden/utopia.




Yes, I've been there. Again, the natives in Pacific NW were fairly sationary. After reading this last response, I believe we are talking about two distinctly different eras and different kinds of tribes/ancestors. The fact remains that through most of hominid evolution, we were not much more than the most sophisticated chimpanzees of today. The tribes you are referring to were near or at agricultural practice - less nomadic.

I'm not trying to say that your's or anyone elses diet here is bad. I firmly believe to each his/her own and different things work for different people. But I do think that the points you and I make are worthy of discussion among people who claim to have a stake in it. I'm not trying to take away anyone's bacon (especially mine). I hope no one has taken offense at my candid nature.

-P

First off, I wanted to say that I didn't mean for my posts to come off sounding rude or belligerent or anything like that. I just tend to go into "scientific" or "essay" mode sometimes which I realize can sound impersonal or antagonizing when I don't mean it to be.



Well yes, in the technical sense it can't be paleo since it's from a farm. But like I said, that means that NONE of the meat we can procure nowadays is paleo (unless you are a hunter). I would love to try bacon made from wild boar, but unfortunately even "wild boar" nowadays is raised on a farm since it is illegal to sell truly wild game.



Fair enough.




I don't think it was a garden of eden either. But I guess what I wonder is what makes a partially sedentary tribe any more "paleo" than a completely nomadic tribe? If they both existed in the same time period, then they are equally paleo, IMO. The idea of a "home base" has been popular in HG studies for quite some time as well (don't know if it has fallen out of favor or not, as I studied anthropology a few years ago - the field moves pretty quickly). Or maybe there was a nomadic tribe that always found themselves in the same area at the same time every year because that's where the herds liked to go, and that time happened to be when nuts were in season - and their midden built up over the course of several years as they kept returning? I'm just saying, we can't discount evidence just because it doesn't fit the story we want to hear and there is always more than one explanation.




I only use the PacNW indians as an example. It's hard to find evidence for these kinds of things archaeologically since items made out of wood don't have great preservation potential. It's true that the PacNW natives were more sedentary, but again I don't know if that should be seen as a negative. If we've been semi-sedentary for long enough, then we will be adapted to it. What's your cutoff for what you consider "paleo" in terms of time?



No offense taken at all, I like the discussion.

Suppose we look at Homo Sapiens alone, and give them credit for agriculture and animal domestication (And we can even go a stretch and include Neanderthals if you like). As the image linked to below here shows, Homo Sapiens' and Neanderthals' time here on earth are just a very small fraction of total hominid evolution.

IMAGE

Less than 1 million years - compared to the 6 million or so before that.

Agriculture first appeared around 10,000 years ago. This leaves very very little time for any significant human evolution to occur. I think that the 6 million or so before that is what really counts. The menu? - Nuts, twigs, lizards and leaves.

I do agree with you that we can never quite get back to H&S status. As I've mentioned in a previous post, we would be lucky to get near 75% Paleo in our diet, and the may be a stretch too. All we can hope for is as close approximation as we can muster.

As far a bacon is concerned. I'll still eat it. But I cannot say without a guilty conscience that it is better or "more Paleo" than a lean piece of flank steak.

Thanks for engaging me on this. I've had to think about how to justify my beliefs, and this is one of the reasons I joined this forum.

-P

Well, Wikipedia article says Paleoithic man had food perserving techniques. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Period

They had hand axes so they could probably make wooden structures.

Probably the closest we'll ever really get to understanding how they lived is to look at how stone-aged tribes live in various parts of the world, and certainly our own native american population would be a pretty good example.

The debate is interesting and fun, but in reality we're modern humans and most of us have to, or choose to, make compromises. Still, even though I'm probably 75% or 80% paleo it makes a huge difference to my health, and that was my goal, not perfection for the sake of perfection.

At the risk of repeating an argument... I look at the question of what fits the paleo diet from a simpler point of view.

Rather than argue what the paleo diet was, to me, the argument comes down to what it was not.

Agriculture is the easy case. Not Paleo. And probably just skipping these products is where the major improvement is made.

Meats raised on a farm are still meats. Pig evolution hasn't changed in the same time period either. Let pigs go wild, they tend to quickly look like wild boars. Is the meat different? I don't think so, other than more lean.

As to additives, salt is also "natural", nitrates not. Do nitrates affect your neolithic digestion? I don't think so, but no data.

Does salt in higher quantity than is "natural", affect digestion. Maybe, but I suspect if you are eating paleo, you can trust your natural hunger to decide whether salt is a problem.

My Great Danes are carnivores/omnivores, albeit bred for their look and gentle demeanor. They do not naturally prefer carbs and will self-limit them if given a choice. Dogs fed with an out of balance ratio will gain weight and become lethargic, much as do humans. Whether they suffer allergic reactions to a highly processed carb diet is not clear... so the analogy may suffer from lack of data. But note that the American dog has trended to the statistically overweight side for decades now, eating more "processed" foods.

So my take, for what its worth, is bacon probably doesn't hurt anyone, especially if the rest of the diet is unsalted.

If you want to avoid the salt, ham is a simple alternative.

I've had butchers slice up pork belly as if it were bacon. Tastes like pork-chops. Right now, I'm using uncured humane-raised bacon. The problem I have with "uncured bacon" is that they dye it with beet juice. I don't like that, because beets are not Paleo. Neither are nitrates and nitrites, but the dietary risk from corn is higher than the dietary risk from nitrates and nitrites.

Ray Audette's solution is to soak bacon overnight to remove as much salt and sugar as possible.

Because of the curing process, hams are pretty salty.

Today I went to my local Whole Foods (Durham, NC) and bought a hefty 18oz package of Wellshire Farms Black Forest Dry Rubbed Salt Cured Bacon. No nitrates. Looks like good ole' thick-sliced bacon that I know, but has a plethora of spices rubbed into each side, giving a burnt, or "Black Forest" appearance.

I'm going to eat some with my "All Natural" NY Strip steak tonight, also bought at Whole Foods.

We may not agree on what Paleo Diet really means, but I'm sure that we may agree on one thing: a person could go broke eating like this. $25 for two strip steaks, $6 for the bacon. Crap, I might be eating those nuts, twigs, lizards and leaves for the rest of the month (good thing it's only 2 more days).

'C, i toad yew I wudn't no pyuerist.'

-P