sidetracked

The more I’ve been getting into natural food, making everything from scratch and more into nature, I’ve noticed a few things. This also comes about from watching far too much Survivorman (amazing show, I’d recommend it to most people — thanks for showing it to me Dave).

At some point, our evolution got sidetracked. And I’m not even saying this just because my nickname is “devo” whose name comes from their own concept of “de-evolution” as seen in the “dysfunction and herd mentality of American Society”. You can read more about that here.

So, about the sidetracked evolution. Take the average person and drop them into a survival situation. Or even show people random plants and ask them which are safe and which will kill you. Most people, including myself, have no idea. At some point we must have known instinctively which plants were safe and what weren’t. But, through the spread of supermarkets and the gradual death of growing your own food, we lost this ability. And that’s pretty sad. Apparently we’re the only species that needs to be taught what to eat.
For example, I own a diffenbacchia plant that successfully survived a repotting last Saturday. Turns out this is one of the most widely common and poisonous houseplants around. Now I didn’t have plans of eating this plant (I have a hot pepper, oregano and a basil plant for that), but had I of tried it, I’d probably be dead. It’s that poisonous apparently.

Conversely, most people given, say, a drinking cup will know by the weight if it’s good quality and will last or not. If there’s a decent amount of weight, it’s probably glass and not cheap, overly manufactured plastic from the dollar store.

Have we really evolved a higher sense of consumerism than survival away from a grocery store? When the zombie uprising happens, we’re all doomed.

-d