Decolonizing the Diet

Gideon Mailer, Nicola Hale

Description

A bold re-assessment of the role of food and nutrition in the history of human immunity and in the destruction of native American life.

“Decolonizing the Diet” challenges the common claim that native American communities were decimated after 1492 because they lived in “virgin soils” that were distinct from those in the Old World. Comparing the European transition from Paleolithic hunting and gathering with native American subsistence strategies before and after 1492, this book offers a new way of understanding the link between biology, ecology and history. After examining the history and bioarchaeology of ancient Europe, the ancient Near East, ancient native America and Europe during the medieval Black Death, this book sets out to understand the subsequent collision between indigenous peoples and Europeans in North America from 1492 to the present day. Synthesizing the latest work in the science of nutrition, immunity, and evolutionary genetics with cutting edge scholarship on the history of indigenous North America, this book highlights a fundamental model of human demographic destruction—Human populations have been able to recover from mass epidemics within a century, whatever their genetic heritage. They fail to recover from epidemics when their ability to hunt, gather and farm nutritionally dense plants and animals is diminished by war, colonization and cultural destruction. The history of native America before and after 1492 clearly shows that biological immunity is contingent on historical context, not least in relation to the protection or destruction of long-evolved nutritional building blocks that underlie human immunity.

“Decolonizing the Diet” cautions against assuming that certain communities are more prone to metabolic syndromes and infectious diseases, whether due to genetic differences or a comparative lack of exposure to specific pathogens. This book refocuses our understanding on the ways in which human interventions—particularly in food production, nutritional accessibility and ecology—have exacerbated demographic decline in the face of disease; both in terms of reduced immunity prior to infection and reduced ability to fight pathogenic invasion.

“Decolonizing the Diet” provides a framework to approach contemporary health dilemmas, both inside and outside native America. Many developed nations now face a medical crisis: so-called “diseases of civilization” have been linked to an evolutionary mismatch between our ancient genetic heritage and our present social, nutritional and ecological environments. The disastrous European intervention in native American life after 1492 brought about a similar—though of course far more destructive— mismatch between biological needs and societal context. The curtailment of nutritional diversity is related to declining immunity in the face of infectious disease, to diminishing fertility and to the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndromes such as diabetes. “Decolonizing the Diet” thus intervenes in a series of historical and contemporary debates that now extend beyond native America—while noting the specific destruction wrought on indigenous nutritional systems after 1492.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Nutrition and Immunity in Native America: A Historical and Biological Controversy; Chapter 1:The Evolution of Nutrition and Immunity: From the Paleolithic Era to the Medieval European Black Death; Chapter 2: More Than Maize: Native American Subsistence Strategies from the Bering Migration to the Eve of Contact; Chapter 3: Micronutrients and Immunity in Native America, 1492– 1750; Chapter 4: Metabolic Health and Immunity in Native America, 1750– 1950; Epilogue: Decolonizing the Diet: Food Sovereignty and Biodiversity; Notes; Index.

Sujets

• History of the Americas

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783087167
• Langue: English

Extrait

Decolonizing the Diet
Decolonizing the Diet
Nutrition, Immunity and the Warning from Early America
Gideon A. Mailer and Nicola E. Hale
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Gideon A. Mailer and Nicola E. Hale 2018

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mailer, Gideon A., author. | Hale, Nicola E., 1985– author.
Title: Decolonizing the diet : nutrition, immunity and the warning from early America / Gideon A. Mailer and Nicola E. Hale.
Description: London, UK; New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004290 | ISBN 9781783087143 (hardback) | ISBN 1783087145 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Nutrition – History. | Diet – History. | Indigenous people. | Immunology. | BISAC: HISTORY / Native American.
Classification: LCC RA784.M293 2018 | DDC 613.2–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004290

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-714-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-714-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
[…] our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkies, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythe cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved […]
—Miantonomo, 1642

Any person […] who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands […] will never regain it.
—George Washington, 1767

The circumstance of my Nation is changed, the game is gone, our former wilderness is now settled by thousands of white people, and our settlements are circumscrib’d and surrounded, and it bec[o]‌mes necessary that my Nation should change the Custom, and leave our forefather’s ways.
—David Folsom (Choctaw), 1824

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
—Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

There is no death, only a change of worlds.
—Duwamish Native American Proverb
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Nutrition and Immunity in Native America: A Biological and Historical Controversy

Conceptual and Moral Minefields between the Humanities and Science

1. The Evolution of Nutrition and Immunity: From the Paleolithic Era to the Medieval European Black Death

Expanding the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis: Evolutionary Nutritional Interactions between the Small Gut and the Large Brain
Immunity, Inflammation and the Evolution of Nutritional Needs
Evolutionary Health and the Rise of Neolithic Agriculture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis
Mitigating Nutritional Degradation through Genetic or Societal Adaptations: A Neolithic Model Denied to Native Americans after European Contact
The Medieval European Model of Nutrition and Contingency
2. More Than Maize: Native American Subsistence Strategies from the Bering Migration to the Eve of Contact

The Earliest Indigenous North American Subsistence Strategies
The Positive and Negative Consequences of Maize Intensification in Native America
Adapting to Agricultural Intensification through Continued Hunting and Gathering
Southeast North America
Southwest North America
The Northeast Atlantic, New England and Iroquois Country
From the Great Plains to the Great Basin
Ancient and Precontact California
The Pacific Northwest before Contact
Precontact Alaska and Arctic North America
3. Micronutrients and Immunity in Native America, 1492–1750

Beyond Virgin Soils: Nutrition as a Primary Contingent Factor in Demographic Loss
New Ways to Approach the Link between Nutrition and Immunity
Nutritional Degradation and Compromised Immunity in Postcontact Florida: Understanding the Effects of Iron, Protein and B-12 Deficiencies
Nutritional Degradation and Immunity in the Postcontact Southeast: Framing Deficiencies in Zinc, Magnesium and Multiple Vitamins
Nutritional Degradation in the Postcontact Southwest, the Great Plains and the Great Basin: Essential Amino Acids, Folate and the Contingent Threat to Demographic Recovery
Nutritional Degradation in the Postcontact Northeast, New England and Iroquois Country: Zoonotic Diseases and the Interaction between Plant Micronutrients and Animal Fats
After the Revolution
4. Metabolic Health and Immunity in Native America, 1750–1950

The Insulin Hypothesis and Immunity in Native America after Contact
Shattered Subsistence in California and the Pacific Northwest in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Acorns, Resistant Starch and the Assault on the Indigenous Microbiome
Shattered Subsistence in Alaska in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Seasonal Vitamin D, Fatty Acids, Ketosis and Autophagy
Epilogue. Decolonizing the Diet: Food Sovereignty and Biodiversity

From Compromised Immunity to Autoimmunity in the Modern Era
From Native America to North America: Compromised National Nutritional Guidelines
Modern Tribal Sovereignty as a Model for American Biodiversity and Public Health
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
This book was inspired by a collaboration that began several years ago. We began to draw together materials from history, anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics and nutritional biochemistry, for a unique interdisciplinary course at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, on nutrition, evolutionary medicine, and early American and Native American history. We soon realized that no existing text synthesizes the science of immunity and autoimmunity in light of historical case studies of nutritional change.
We noticed the ways in which the history of the agricultural transition 10,000 years ago—and its health dynamics—could inform the history of the Euro-American assault on Native American subsistence and nutrition after 1492. In writing and researching the book over the last few years, we also became increasingly aware of its place within broader public health debates.
We are grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers in both stages of the review process. This book required a great deal of cross-disciplinary expertise from the reviewers, as well as specific knowledge in their various fields (whether in biological science, history or Native American studies). Thus, we are extremely grateful for their time and their recommendations. Without their comments and critiques, this book would not be what it is today.
Nicola is grateful to all those who have helped her skills in research and synthesis at the University of Cambridge over the years, particularly during her time at the Glover lab under Dr. Nikola Dzhindzhev and as a research assistant at the Laura Itzhaki lab investigating protein structures and protein-protein interactions. She is also grateful for the mentorship she received during her year working at the Kevin Hardwick lab at the University of Edinburgh, Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, in 2012. She is grateful to the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Evolution and Health , who refined her thinking on the genetic adaptations relating to nutrition and disease resistance.
Gideon is grateful to the Department of History and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Dr. Susan Maher, for their support in this project, and the Academic Affairs Committee for its help and comments during the development of the course that gave birth to this book. He is also grateful to David Woodward for his advice and recommendations in discussions on the ethnohistory and archaeology of early America. He is grateful to the Ancestral Health Symposium for providing a framework to present some of the ideas in this book, over the last few years.
Finally, we are both grateful to the editorial and production team at Anthem Press, for believing in this project, and for taking so much time to make sure that it was finally born. We are also grateful to Heather Dubnick for her editorial and indexing expertise.
Duluth, Minnesota, February 2018
Introduction
NUTRITION AND IMMUNITY IN NATIVE AMERICA: A BIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTROVERSY
This book argues that resistance to disease is often contingent on historical context; particularly in relation to the protection or destruction of the long-evolved nutritional and metabolic building blocks that underlie human immunity. It joins other recent scholarship in modifying the common claim that Native American communities were decimated after European contact because their immunity was somehow distinct from populations