Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (4 page)

Women’s Work

Almost every day a large proportion of the women set off, in a group, on a food-collecting expedition. Nursing mothers carry their babies in a leather sling. Older women, old men, and the men not hunting that day stay at the camp with some of the children. The American anthropologist Richard Lee, an untiring researcher of hunter-gatherer societies, reports that during the expedition, the women walk 2 to 12 miles (3 to 20 km).
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They gradually separate but always stay within hailing distance of one another. On the return leg, a woman will be carrying 7 to 15 kg (15–33 pounds) of collected food. Her family will receive a share of most of it.

The women have two types of activity: picking and digging. From above ground, the women pick fruits, nuts, berries, flowers, gums, stalks, pods, leaves, and all kinds of edible plant parts. From below ground, they poke out, with their digging sticks, a whole variety of stems, bulbs, corms, and roots.

The Digging Stick and New Food Resources

The women’s digging stick gives humans a big advantage over their competitors in the same ecological niche. Baboons, for example, often get to a fruiting tree and strip it before the humans arrive, but baboons are incapable of digging down to underground foods.

Green salad vegetables, such as scilla and talinum (a kind of purslane), appear at the start of the rainy season. Fruits, such as the !igwa, ochna, and grewia berries and the ivory fruit, yield hundreds of pounds during their seasons. None of these fruits is sweet and many are bitter. Most foods are highly fibrous. Jiro Tanaka
estimates that the San eat on average 2 pounds (900 g) of plant food per person per day.

Plant foods are an important, even critical, source of water. One of the most important is the bitter-juiced tsama melon, from which our familiar (but sweet) watermelon is descended.
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Indeed, the San obtain more than 90% of their water needs from plants. This is not typical for our African Pleistocene ancestors, who would have had access to waterholes, ponds, and streams year round. It is fascinating to realize that the human body can survive without free water at all, provided there is access to enough plant food of the right type.

The women also collect eggs of all kinds and capture small animals such as locusts, caterpillars, grubs, toads, tortoises, and snakes. Ostrich eggs are particularly valued. The contents supply a good portion of food, the shells make containers for water, and bits of shell are carved into beads.

On their gathering trips, the women will note and report to the men any signs of game that might be good to hunt. Both men and women live in an intimate relationship with the natural world around them. They are incredible botanists and can identify all the plants and know exactly which ones are good to eat and what else each plant might be good for. They are amazing naturalists—they live in close contact with animal life and seem to know what it is like to be in the mind of the larger mammals, such as elephants, lions, or antelopes.

Men’s Work

The men concentrate almost exclusively on hunting. This is sporadic and depends entirely on their reading of the opportunities. Hunting parties are small: usually just one or two men in a party; more if it is a big animal. Hunting trips are made an average of three times a week. The men are away for several hours, sometimes up to 10 hours. Frequently, the hunters return empty-handed.

Most of the hunting is unspectacular. The men go after small creatures using snares, traps, and guile. Commonly, the San hunt for springhare, a type of large rodent that sleeps in its deep burrow during the day. The hunter pokes a flexible, barb-tipped 20-foot pole down the burrow until he has hooked the animal. He then digs the creature out. Porcupines and 150-pound ‘antbears’ are smoked out, dug out, or even speared by crawling down the burrow. Warthogs are run to death with hunting dogs. A fire is lit at the entrance to the tunnel and then they are speared as they try to escape. The warthog is highly prized for its fatty flesh, a rarity in the San diet.

Game birds like guinea fowl, francolin, and bustard are captured in cunning snares. Ostrich is hunted on occasion. As mentioned earlier, the San do not have much access to water, but when they get the chance, they spear fish, trap toads, and collect shellfish.

Big game, such as eland (a huge, ox-like antelope weighing up to one ton), gemsbok, and wildebeest, are hunted as the occasion presents itself. However, the effort required is enormous and the outcome uncertain. In one incident, the San tracked a herd of eland for eight days and finally shot one of them with poison arrows. They followed the wounded eland for another three days before it collapsed and could be killed and butchered. Giraffe are occasionally hunted, but not with much success.

How Important is Hunted Food?

Hunted food does not actually provide a large percentage of the diet. Jiro Tanaka measured the number of game animals caught by one San band. The hunters brought in just 140 animals in six months—about three for each member of the band. About one-third of the weight of an animal (consisting of bones, horns, hooves, and so on) is inedible waste. Tanaka estimates that the weight of game animals actually consumed per person averages about 5 ounces (150g) per person per day.
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When the kill is made, the hunters are allowed to eat the liver immediately and they will eat more of the meat as necessary to satisfy their hunger. If they are far from base, they will eat the parts that spoil fast first. The animal is butchered on the spot. Only the gallbladder and the testicles are discarded. Everything else is taken back to base and will be eaten. Blood is carried in bags made from the stomach or bladder. The hunters wring out the half-digested grasses in the paunch and drink the fluid to save precious water.

Back at the camp, they dry surplus strips of the meat to a kind of pemmican. Even the hide is pounded up and eaten, or parts are kept to make leather artifacts as needed. Soft parts such as udders, fetus, heart, lung, brains, and blood are given to old people with worn down teeth. The intestines are emptied of their excrement, cleaned, and are much prized as a delicacy.

Hooves and trotters are picked clean; gristle is dried and pounded. Sinews are used to make string. The major bones are eagerly cracked open for their fatty marrow; marrow fat is mainly of the monounsaturated kind. The conventional muscle meat is, of course, much desired. Nothing is wasted.

Children eat what the adults eat. Babies and toddlers are breast-fed until they are about four years old. The mother introduces easily chewed, solid foods after the first teeth have broken through.

The search for honey occupies an inordinate amount of effort, guile, and time. The reason is simple: it is just about the only source of sweetness in the San diet. When they find a bees’ nest (usually in a hole in a tree), they waft smoke from a smoldering bunch of specially selected herbs toward the bees. The bees think a forest fire is coming, gorge themselves on honey, and then flee the hive. In this state, they are both absent and docile. This is just as well: these insects are the fearsome African killer bees that make mass attacks and kill anything that gets in the way.

When the coast is clear, the San puts his hand into the nest and scoops up a handful of comb, dripping with honey and flecked with half-developed grubs. This is shared out and eaten on the spot, wax, grubs, and all. The San try to leave enough intact comb so that the bees are not driven away permanently. That way they can come back from time to time and harvest more honey. The San are so possessive about this resource that ownership of the nest is passed on from father to son. From a nutritional point of view, the amount of honey is insignificant; they only get the equivalent of a candy bar three or four times a year. However, from a psychological point of view, this is a high point in the San life.

The San Food Supply

Total animal matter consumption (that is, game animals plus eggs and all the gathered and fished animals) is no more than around 8 ounces (225 g) per person per day. Plant food is about 2 pounds (900 g) per day. This weight of food is rather less than even the San would like to be eating and we will see how this relates to the way we eat today. Nevertheless, the proportions are worth noting: about 20% animal food to 80% plant food measured by weight. Measured by calories, Richard Lee estimated the ratio to be 33% animal food to 67% plant food.
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The reason for the difference is that there are more calories per pound in animal foods than plant foods.

The San can survive very well without hunted food at all. However, it is certain that they could not survive without the women’s gathered animal and plant food. The men’s work—hunting—is an optional extra. In spite of that, hunting preoccupies the thoughts of both men and women. It inspires songs, dances, storytelling, and interminable plotting and cogitation. Why this might be so, and why men are necessary, especially husbands, is discussed in Chapter 6.

Richard Lee estimates that an adult San spends about 12 to 19 hours per week getting food.
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That is the only “work” there is; after that, it is just lazing around, chatting, singing, dancing, making the odd piece of body adornment, and preparing hunting equipment. It is a very easy-going lifestyle. Compared to today’s average 40-hour work week, which does not include food shopping and preparation time, the San lifestyle was very leisurely. This is all very agreeable, but what is the effect of this lifestyle on the
health
of the San?

The State of the San’s Health

Austrian biologist Sylvia Kirchengast reports that the San are, above all, slim
and they stay
slim throughout their lives.
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Their average body mass index (BMI) is around 19. That corresponds to a weight of 110 pounds (50 kg) for a height of 5’4” (163 cm).

Body Mass Index

The body mass index (BMI) is a useful rule of thumb to test whether you are a healthy weight for your height. Conventional medical wisdom considers a “healthy” BMI to lie between 18 and 25; “overweight” is 26 to 30; “obese” is 31 and over.

Stuart Truswell and John Hansen are medical doctors who conducted nutritional and medical research on the San in the 1960s. They found that, predictably, the San do not suffer from diseases associated with obesity.
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Diabetes is unknown. They have one of the lowest cholesterol levels in the world: total cholesterol levels for all age groups are around 120 mg/100 ml; phospholipids and triglycerides are low too.

The diet is very low in fats of all kinds, and the types of fats are healthier. They are mainly polyunsaturated fats with very little saturated fat. It is interesting to compare the fats in the San’s blood with those in the average European’s blood. The San has a much higher percentage of the polyunsaturated omega-3 fat (26% to 9%) and a lower percentage of the polyunsaturated omega-6 fat (34% to 40%). This is not surprising: in contrast to Westerners, the San are eating a diet that contains roughly equal amounts of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. The main sources of fats for the San are nuts and wild creatures, both of which have very different fatty acid profiles to the foods habitually consumed in the West. In addition, their bodies are not fabricating fats out of the kinds of food that are making Westerners fat.

There is no sign of coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, or thrombosis. Researchers have found no case of varicose veins, piles, or hernias. No cases of cancer or osteoporosis were seen either. Average blood pressure is a low 120/75 and it does not increase with age; not a single case was found of high blood pressure.

In 1966, the South African ear, nose, and throat specialists John Jarvis and H.G. van Heerden made hearing tests on 10 old Bushmen and found that they had perfect hearing.
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There was little or no earwax and the drum could be easily seen. Teeth were also free of caries (cavities). In old age, eyesight still remained excellent for distance, but, in a few, the lens has lost some transparency.