Tribe of One

I'm pretty sick of cooking meals for myself. Today I made an amazing breakfast of ground pork seasoned with garlic, ginger, white pepper, and gluten-free tamari, sauteed with shitake mushrooms and yellow squash. I dribbled a few drops of sesame oil on it after I plated it. And then I ate it. Alone. As delicious as it was, there was something missing.

Even in an artist warehouse in a wonderful city where I've found the closest thing to a community I've experienced outside of college, I find myself alone 90% of the time. If we're trying to investigate and even emulate the best parts of hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we have to rethink the ways in which we organize and prioritize our social life. It just doesn't feel natural to have to make plans to see your friends. Ideally, you and your friends find each other through the course of a day organically, because you have the same places you like to go within a relatively small land area, and you gather together to share food because it's more efficient to pool all the fruits of your hunting and gathering than to keep what you have to yourself. I left New York specifically because I was tired of having to "schedule" my friends in.

Of course, I realize people have jobs that force them to arrange their days a certain way. We are still ultimately slaves to clocks and gas tanks and bills and paperwork. This is the modern world, and paleo is only an attempt to remind ourselves who we are on a biological level. We can't actually go back to the paleolithic savanna, but I do think there is room to relearn how to be social according to our evolution.

Check out Evolutionary Psychiatry, a blog specifically about what I'm talking about.

In the meantime, I'm hoping to find people to share food with on a daily basis. Our potlucks are great, but I want that every day. I feel most at peace when I'm breaking bread, er, meat with people. I hope that people who work office jobs can still find a way to make each meal a social event. I think this is a vital component to our overall health that many of us in this lonely modern world are missing.