Have Pseudo Foods Reached Ethiopia?
Almost everywhere I’ve been on the planet—from Kichwa (Quechua) communities in Ecuador to Aboriginal lands in Australia—I’ve seen the displacing foods of modern commerce, as Dr. Price calls them. In remote areas of Kenya, there are small roadside stands selling local produce…under tin roofs painted with an outsized big and bold red and white Coca-Cola logo. I’ve seen Maasai tribal communities passing out soda bottles at celebrations. And Mongolian Kazakh Eagle hunters with trays of individually-wrapped candies on their dinner tables.
But for the first time on all my travels, I was astounded to find that in the Omo Valley region in Ethiopia, where I traveled this summer, among the 5 tribes I visited, there were NO signs of the influence of modern foods. Not one.
There was no evidence of chips, cakes, or candies. There were no cereals or flours. There was no soda (or pop). I was astounded!
You see I have continually followed in the footsteps of Dr. Weston A. Price, the dentist/researcher from the 1930s who traveled the world, seeking to learn from isolated, indigenous people groups and their traditional health ways. When he traveled (nearly 100 years ago), he struggled to find peoples untouched by modernity. You can only imagine what it’s been like for me in the 21 st century!
Happily, I have indeed met some people living according to their ancient traditions, but I have not truly met folks completely untouched my modern tech or foods. Even back in 2015, the Maasai I connected with had flip cellphones!
But this summer, ancestral nutritionist Mary Ruddick and I, visited 5 tribes in the southern region of the Omo Valley: the Mursi, Karo, Hamer, Daasenach, and Dorze. And not a single village we visited had packaged, canned, or boxed foods.
What a relief!
Just to be clear, in Dr. Price’s book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”, his observations of people worldwide pointed to the damage that modern foods cause for otherwise healthy peoples. And this was over 100 years ago! Already modern foods were creeping into remote places in the world. And in region after region, from among the Seminole Indians in Florida to the Eskimos in Alaska, he documented the negative outcomes for dental health and overall health from four main “foods” or what I would call “pseudo foods”.
The culprits were:
Refined flour
Refined sugar
Canned foods
Vegetable oils (yes, seed oils were around, even back in the 1930s)
I’m glad that these foods have not reached some of the tribal peoples of the Omo Valley. That’s not to say that that everyone I came across exhibited perfect health, exactly, but at the very least they are protected from the damaging displacing foods of modern commerce, for the moment.
The question is: are you? What does your diet look like? Does it include the foods Dr. Price referred to?
