Alberta Co-op Grocery

Primal Perspective

Posted June 19th, 2012

by Jim, Working Owner

There are so many choices today.  So when you’re first starting out with a new diet or lifestyle, you find yourself looking at something wondering, “. . . can I eat that?”  This where the Primal or Paleo system works great.  Because we can imagine our ancient ancestors pretty well, and we know a good deal about how they lived, we can imaging what they had access to and what they did not.

The guru of the primal movement, Mark Sissan, has conceived a character he calls Grok to represent this idealized lifestyle.  So when I’m standing there with something in my hand I say “Did Grock have access to this?” and “How much?”  You can imagine he might not think something in a box or a package is even food.  And everything that is grown in an industrial mono-culture setting is out.  Actually, in reality, the vast majority of the food on the market today obviously wouldn’t be available to hunter gatherers.  But our idealized Grok magically has access to everything any conceivable primordial person can get.  So it’s not just salmon and blackberries, which I imagine is all the Groks around here ate.

So yeah, there it is – the produce section.  Could you imagine a real hunter-gather presented with this bounty?  They would be totally psyched!  I think one of the first foods they would marvel at would be the modern banana.  Perhaps a few of their cousins who lived near the equator had something like it, but the Cavendish banana is a special treat to be celebrated.  I think this a fun and revealing way to consider your food.  How happy Grok would be that we’ve cultivated out the seeds, and selected the sweetest variety for him.

I gathered up a bunch last week and just had the last one for my breakfast.  It was perfect, just browning and speckled and oh-so-sweet. But my wife ate most of them and told me yesterday, as she peeled another, “I have to admit the produce from the Co-op has been pretty tasty”.  See, she absolutely hates bland fruits.  She was complaining about conventional supermarket produce way before everybody jumped on the ‘organic’ bandwagon.  But even organic produce can end up bland and tasteless. I’m not sure why.  Perhaps they’re just slapping an ‘organic’ label on and charging a buck more for not using any fertilizers.  But I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been disappointed in fruits even from the ‘natural’ stores.

So kudos to the Alberta Co-op produce department.  Amazing the primal self within me, and I’ll bet even for him life is good when your wife likes the fruit!

Working Owner Jim Prescott is a Portland based musician and writer.  Email him at email hidden; JavaScript is required.

Tags: fruit, gluten-free, organic, paleo
Posted in Food and Drink, General Information, Spotlight, Wellness