Craving Instincts?

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#1

So my wife is going through Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a must read from 1939 that still packs a hell of a punch. There are plenty of gems in it, but this one stuck out:

it is important to keep in mind that, in general, the wild animal life has largely escaped many of the degenerative processes which affect modern white peoples. We ascribe this to animal instinct in the matter of food selection. It is possible that man has lost through disuse some of the normal faculty for consciously recognizing body requirements. In other words, the only hunger of which we now are conscious is a hunger for energy to keep us warm and to supply power. In general, we stop eating when an adequate amount of energy has been provided, whether or not the body building and repairing materials have been included in the food. Page 257

It’s interesting to think about how we seemingly think more now in terms of “all food is food” and “medicinals are medicinals”, even more so than seeing food in general as nourishment over energy source. We have this implanted survivalist instinct which may come more or less from eating Store Food that is nutritionally not food.
I’ve seen a tendency to carry on a lot of that survivalism into rewilding as though all calories are equal. Price’s book, in many, many instances, reminds us that this is absolutely not the case. The mores, ritual, and circumstance around wild foods that is pervasive amongst indigenous societies isn’t simply “doing what our parents did”, there is a mythos surrounding these foods and their applications, but that doesn’t mean a more literal sense of “this for that” doesn’t exist. That’s something Price drew out, possibly far better than most trained anthropologists who carried that same “all calories are equal” bias.
So I find this really fascinating. Kind of another area of the survivalism vs rewilding topic: What is the functionality of food? What do cravings tell us? How do we learn to listen?
Obviously that last point carries on ad infinitum throughout the rewilding process, but it’s important to draw it out because the things that should be obvious (what our bodies want), are the things we’ve become most adept at ignoring.

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#2

Surely some of our instincts are trampled on and/or redirected by the domestication process. How much do you think it’s that, and how much do you think it’s mismatch theory stuff where our instincts are out of sync with the built world?

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#3

No doubt a good bit of mismatch at play here. I’ve said for a long time now that capitalists/domesticators aren’t smart enough to create needs, they just redirect the ones we already have. So a kind of cellular confusion in the terms of what we know is inevitable, but there’s something to it.
If it comes across as me saying, your body might crave Betty Crocker yellow cakes because you need sugar, then that’s definitely not my point here. This relates to the rewilding/undomesticating process, not just sitting on my computer at midnight on the feralculture site weird cravings.

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#4

I think Charles Eisenstein refers it to as poor substitutes for what we really need. He or someone else pointed out this may be the basis of greed. The unfulfilling over accumulation of money, status, food, whatever. The natural negative feedback loop is somehow broken.

#5

I think you’re onto something in all of this. It makes me think of other ways domesticated food cultures reinforce adherence to those cultures. I’ve heard many times from individuals that they “can’t live without {whatever}”. Whether we’re talking engineered hyper-stimulation reinforcing inherent sense biases, mismatch, or various gradations, civilization’s ubiquitous variety and subversion of seasonality are successful marketing tools that make people psychologically dependent on agriculture, and limit rewilding.

After that happens, even when people realize simple food can be just as amazing, they’re so deskilled that they can’t even figure out how to get a single ingredient without a market.

#6

My wife has tossed an interesting factor into this mix: that the unhealthy bacteria that we’ve let flourish and pumped full of sugar in our intestines can actually almost act in a parasitic fashion and cause a sugar craving. This kind of thing happens quite often in the real world, so the micro-biomes that we create with processed foods in our gut flora would have no reason not to act the same way.
There’s actually a good bit of science behind this in terms of Candida to say the least. Nora apparently talks about it and there are a lot of links, but I’m too tired to sort through them to find the ones that look the most credible to repost here.

#7

Once and a while I crave sauerkraut. A good example of live a food that aids in good gut health.

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