When ancestral diets become ancestor worship

I recently listened to a podcast episode with an anthropologist who studies modern isolated people groups, tribes of people essentially untouched by civilization and still living as hunter-gatherers.

The way she described these people made them sound like they were truly living in heaven on earth: "zero" fatigue, anger, fertility problems, or death in childbirth, they have nearly perfect health, they have no fighting in their marriages, no divorce or infidelity, and domestic violence only exists in those groups touched by "modernization".

Like a lot of us, I have learned a lot from the Weston A. Price foundation and believe there is a lot we can learn from traditional people groups and "ancestral diets". I believe a Biblical approach to nutrition has a lot in common with this ancestral-type approach because it harkens back to the diet of people in the relatively recent past rather than trying to pattern modern diets off of the diets of pre-human ancestors based on an atheistic, evolutionary perspective of human history.

Biblically, we should try to learn from and respect the ways of our "ancestors", meaning those who lived generations before us, based on the fifth commandment to "honor your father and mother"—meaning not just your biological parents but many more before us—and the warning in Proverbs to "not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set" (Proverbs 22:28).

To throw out the beliefs of previous generations as "unfounded" and "superstitious" in favor of "new", "scientific" advancements is just an expression of humanism, or another expression of evolution that believes we are more evolved now than generations before. "People in the past didn't have the science we do now to tell us how bad animal products are for us and the environment—that's why they drank milk, but now we know better and drink oat milk instead!!"

And there certainly are plenty of unhealthy foods and products today that are a result of "modernization". (Like oat milk, for example.)

However, we need to be careful how we talk about ancestral diets and ancestral cultures, that we are not calling "modernization" what should instead of be called "sin".

When we start talking about the problems industrialization has wrought on farming, food production, and therefore our health, it's easy to start overly romanticizing the lives and diets of people who lived before modernization, even coming to believe that it is the root of all problems.

I can't speak to the personal experiences of the anthropologist being interviewed on the podcast. I don't even know what cultures she has visited specifically. But I can wonder about the selective perception of someone with a pre-conceived bias about ancestral cultures, about how frank some cultures might be about talking about certain issues with an outsider, about how those cultures might portray themselves to a Westerner, or even just about what observations get selectively shared to an audience eager to hear a certain message.

I know for a fact that life in pre-industrial cultures was not always rosy.

Case Study: Traditional Hawaiian Culture

I recently got interested in studying Hawaiian history, and in this topic there is a particularly strong, modern narrative about how Westerners (Christian missionaries especially) destroyed traditional ways of life. It's common knowledge there that Westerners outlawed hula dancing, discouraged surfing, destroyed the native environment in a money-hungry quest for sandalwood, took out native forests to grow sugarcane, and ultimately overthrew the monarchy and replaced Hawaii's sovereignty with unwanted US rule. It's easy to picture pre-industrial life in Hawaii as a real paradise: life was easy, food was plentiful, and there weren't even mosquitos there before a foreign ship introduced them in 1826!

But there are some good resources out there that present less biased, more factual information, such as Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii by James L. Haley and Hawaii's Missionary Saga by Larue W. Piercy, which presents true stories compiled straight from the diaries of Hawaii's first Christian missionaries.

The reality was that before Christianity and Westernization, people were held hostage to the kapu system—religious laws that could mean instant death for men and women who ate together; for women who ate bananas, pork, coconuts, or certain high-value fish (because these foods represented male deities—the women usually ate dogs instead); and for anyone who cast a shadow on a high chief, or commoners who looked directly at royalty, among many other prohibitions. Often kapus were created by royalty and high ranking chiefs simply to control people as they wished.

The native Hawaiians practiced human sacrifice, including rituals where priests ate human eyeballs. Men and women were both regularly polyamorous. Sexual relationships began at very young ages. High ranking chiefs (men) were commonly accompanied by young male (teenage), sexual companions. Infanticide was widespread for children up to about the age of two. It was normal for people to share their beds with their pigs and to have their homes infected with fleas. Most people lived in relative poverty as fisherman or taro farmers.

It was missionaries, based on their Christian worldview, who introduced the first alphabet and written language, hygiene, education, and sexual boundaries. They oversaw the replacement of the kapu system with Western, Christian ethics.

The real story of traditional culture versus modernization is much more nuanced. While foreigners provided the market for sandalwood, it was natives who burnt down forests looking for the very last bit of the fragrant wood that could be sold to China. While there were mistaken and unfortunate elements of Hawaii's journey to US statehood, 94% of Hawaiian voters favored statehood in a vote taken in 1959.

The strict puritan-descendant missionaries could probably have loosened up a bit on their stance on surfing, but hula dancing, in fact, wasn't outlawed by missionaries, it was outlawed by Hawaii's own royalty when they converted to Christianity, because hula was inherently a worship practice of Hawaii's false gods and traditional dances could be so sexual that they would horrify even tipsy tourists at a resort luau today.

Hawaiian history is just one example. Looking past modern biases and political narratives, we can see similar pictures of many other "traditional" cultures. The reality is universal: without Christianity, people are hopeless and sinful. With Christianity, people are still sinful, but sin is restrained and Biblical direction creates cultures with overall more order, progress, and equality, and higher standards of living.

So how should Christians think about ancestral diets?

To start, we must remember that modernization is not the problem with the world. The problem is sin.

Just as modernization has created problems with the human diet, I don't doubt that isolated cultures today suffer from much less of the chronic diseases we do and that they experience great benefits, health and otherwise, from living in tight-knit communities.

But all too often, "modernization" gets conflated with "Westernization" which gets conflated with "Christianity". And Christianity is absolutely not the cause of the problems with modern diets.

For thousands of years, Christian nations, including in the West, have experienced great health like Weston A. Price observed in traditional cultures. (The Gaelic fisherman and Swiss villagers Price wrote about were Christian.)

Rather, I see the modernization that introduced industrial agriculture, seed oils, and harmful food additives as a product of humanism and atheistic evolution that believed we could disregard God's natural created order in favor of our own modern, evolved inventions.

Second, rather than considering that ancestral cultures had some inherent, enlightened, spiritual wisdom about what to eat, we should recognize that God in His good providence gave good, healthy foods to people all over the world and allowed the natural appetites He gave them to direct them to those good foods.

In other words, ancestral diets were simply a result of people eating the foods God provided them wherever they lived that their appetites and necessity guided them to. They ate meats, animal fats, and milk because they were satisfying and satiating. They ate grains and fruits because they were filling and provided energy. They used traditional preparation methods like soaking, sprouting, and fermentation on grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, and vegetables to preserve them and out of necessity to provide adequate nutrition to survive. They may have been guided to these traditional preparation methods by their own version of a scientific method or simply stumbled upon by accident. And they did possess wisdom about certain foods that were helpful for certain conditions and situations which they passed down over generations. But universally we see that by in large people abandoned these kinds of foods in favor or industrial foods when the opportunity provided itself.

So today, in a world where harmful foods have been created by industrialization and we can no longer simply rely on our appetites and necessity to guide us to the best foods, there is a lot we can learn from ancestral diets and traditional cultures. But not because modernization is the main problem with the world and not because our ancestors were enlightened spiritual beings who should be worshipped today. Be wary when anyone starts talking about traditional cultures as though they were sinless.