Genius Foods

carbohydrate were highly limited, if you had access to them
at all.
Wild fruits, the only sweet food available to ancestral
you, looked and tasted much different from the
domesticated fruits that would line supermarket shelves eons
later. You likely wouldn’t even recognize them when placed
next to their contemporary counterparts, a contrast almost as
stark as a Maltese lapdog standing next to its original
ancestor, the gray wolf. These early fruits would be small,
taste a fraction as sweet, and be available only seasonally.
Then, approximately ten thousand years ago, a hairpin
turn in human evolution occurred. In the blink of an eye,
you went from a roaming tribal forager subject to the whims
of season to a settler with planted crops and farmed animals.
The invention of agriculture brought to your family—and
the rest of humanity—what was a previously inconceivable
notion: the ability to produce a surplus of food beyond the
immediate needs of daily subsistence. This was one of the
major “singularities” of human existence—a paradigm shift
marking a point-of-no-return entry into a new reality. And in
that new reality, though we procured quantities of foods that
would feed many people cheaply and fuel global population
growth, individual health took a downward turn.
For hundreds of thousands of years prior, the human diet
was rich in an array of nutrients spanning diverse climes,
but this micronutrient and geographic diversity disappeared
when every meal became based on the handful of plant and
animal species that we were able to cultivate. Starvation was
less of an immediate threat, but we became slaves to single
crops, making nutrient deficiencies more prevalent. The