Prehistoric Diet Quotes

Back in humanity's hunter-gatherer days, you only ate meat if you'd recently made a kill, which required a huge amount of effort, and was therefore relatively rare. There's a reason humans only have one set of incisors to rip our meat apart: we're not supposed to eat the stuff at every meal.

It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?

Acorns were good until bread was found.

The human diet, for millions of years, did not contain any added salt - only the sodium present in natural foods, adding up to only about 1000 mg sodium per day.

Cookery is the art of preparing food for the nourishment of the body. Prehistoric man may have lived on uncooked foods, but there are no savage races today who do not practice cookery in some way, however crude. Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.

It seems that humans have been enjoying the taste and health benefits of blackberries for thousands of years. Gathered blackberries have been found at Neolithic sites, while a preserved iron age bog body, known as Haraldskaer Woman, provides definite evidence of blackberry ingestion.