Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food Read Online Free PDF Page A

(a huge, ox-like antelope weighing up to one ton), gemsbok, and wildebeest, are hunted as the occasion presents itself. However, the effort required is enormous and the outcome uncertain. In one incident, the San tracked a herd of eland for eight days and finally shot one of them with poison arrows. They followed the wounded eland for another three days before it collapsed and could be killed and butchered. Giraffe are occasionally hunted, but not with much success.
    How Important is Hunted Food?
    Hunted food does not actually provide a large percentage of the diet. Jiro Tanaka measured the number of game animals caught by one San band. The hunters brought in just 140 animals in six months—about three for each member of the band. About one-third of the weight of an animal (consisting of bones, horns, hooves, and so on) is inedible waste. Tanaka estimates that the weight of game animals actually consumed per person averages about 5 ounces (150g) per person per day. 13
    When the kill is made, the hunters are allowed to eat the liver immediately and they will eat more of the meat as necessary to satisfy their hunger. If they are far from base, they will eat the parts that spoil fast first. The animal is butchered on the spot. Only the gallbladder and the testicles are discarded. Everything else is taken back to base and will be eaten. Blood is carried in bags made from the stomach or bladder. The hunters wring out the half-digested grasses in the paunch and drink the fluid to save precious water.
    Back at the camp, they dry surplus strips of the meat to a kind of pemmican. Even the hide is pounded up and eaten, or parts are kept to make leather artifacts as needed. Soft parts such as udders, fetus, heart, lung, brains, and blood are given to old people with worn down teeth. The intestines are emptied of their excrement, cleaned, and are much prized as a delicacy.
    Hooves and trotters are picked clean; gristle is dried and pounded. Sinews are used to make string. The major bones are eagerly cracked open for their fatty marrow; marrow fat is mainly of the monounsaturated kind. The conventional muscle meat is, of course, much desired. Nothing is wasted.
    Children eat what the adults eat. Babies and toddlers are breast-fed until they are about four years old. The mother introduces easily chewed, solid foods after the first teeth have broken through.
    The search for honey occupies an inordinate amount of effort, guile, and time. The reason is simple: it is just about the only source of sweetness in the San diet. When they find a bees’ nest (usually in a hole in a tree), they waft smoke from a smoldering bunch of specially selected herbs toward the bees. The bees think a forest fire is coming, gorge themselves on honey, and then flee the hive. In this state, they are both absent and docile. This is just as well: these insects are the fearsome African killer bees that make mass attacks and kill anything that gets in the way.
    When the coast is clear, the San puts his hand into the nest and scoops up a handful of comb, dripping with honey and flecked with half-developed grubs. This is shared out and eaten on the spot, wax, grubs, and all. The San try to leave enough intact comb so that the bees are not driven away permanently. That way they can come back from time to time and harvest more honey. The San are so possessive about this resource that ownership of the nest is passed on from father to son. From a nutritional point of view, the amount of honey is insignificant; they only get the equivalent of a candy bar three or four times a year. However, from a psychological point of view, this is a high point in the San life.
     
    The San Food Supply
    Total animal matter consumption (that is, game animals plus eggs and all the gathered and fished animals) is no more than around 8 ounces (225 g) per person per day. Plant food is about 2 pounds (900 g) per day. This weight of food is rather less than even the San would like to be eating