Hi all,
What a great topic. I see a great amount of intersectionality between a "permaculture diet" and a paleo diet.
A paleo diet is meant to be easy on the body to digest, nutrient and energy dense. Many athletes are paleo because it keeps them light on their feet. A permaculture diet is presumably one that a permaculture farmer or gardener could grow, and even though we hold Saint Fukuoka's no-work mentality in high regard, we definitely also need the same benefits as paleo claims to offer. Plus, we are uniquely positioned to feed paleo people. We usually have livestock integrated into our systems, unlike mainstream farms, so the usual vegetarian critique about grains being grown for cows instead of humans is not so applicable, as we're building synergy between livestock and vegetation components of the system. Also, we have a great diversity of crop species under deliberate cultivation that lends itself to the nutrient density and diversity that paleo people are after. For instance, even at a broad scale on heavily mechanized farms, we have tremendous crop diversity.
http://wppresearch.org/research/ The Woody Perennial Polyculture research project in Illinois (and hopefully coming for replication to Missouri and a few other places soon) has an alley cropping system of Chestnut, Hazelnut, Apple, Grape, Currant, Raspberry being grown together, plus forage for animals between and beneath. That's got many of your needs for carbs, fat, protein, antioxidants and animal products met without destroying the soil through tilling. Such a system enjoys a very high land equivalency ratio, and so it's not only a land sharing, but a land sparing strategy for wildlife conservation folks- and for feral paleo folks who want wild places to wildcraft their greens from, or whatever.
Also. There is probably an implicit critique of monoculture in paleo, if we spend just a second unpacking it, as paleo people are abstaining from annual crops- no grains or legumes. This shades into the GAPS diet for people with autoimmune disorders pretty quickly. And I think it shades into permaculture's critique of civilization. Are permaculturalists complicit in the 10,000 year old mistake to settle for being sedentary, in comparison with wild and free hunter gatherers? I think we're coming around to a paradigm that goes beyond that binary, thankfully, as it's been killing us ever since we've made the switch. One of my mentors wrote this piece 18 years ago, and it is highly salient to just this point:
http://mountaingardensherbs.com/index.php/paradise-gardening/ The point is, I think there is a rich intersectionality between the agroforestry of permaculture, and the diet of paleo, not even hiding below the surface. Planned ecosystems have always been in the wheelhouse of the hunter gatherer. Consider how North American First Nations folk were incredibly savvy ecosystem engineers. Ecologists are just waking up to this fact, with their use of prescribed fire, girdling trees, planting seeds of their favorite species in and around any semi-permanent settlement. I just saw a presentation by historian Alexander Darr at the Association for Temperate Agroforestry conference, looking at the awestruck conquistadors on De Soto's 16th century expedition through the American Southeast. So much abundance, so little work, their systems were based off of having game parks with persimmon, paw paw, wild plum, hickory and walnut as dominant species around their villages.
Permaculture is pushing back against the many headed disease complex that happens when people stay put and live off of empty calories. At our best we're pretty dang paleo.
Cheers,
Badger Johnson
Graduate Research Assistant, Center for Agroforestry
203G ABNR, University of Missouri- Columbia
(859) 801-3137
bbjc7d@missouri.edu
linkedin.com/in/BadgerJohnson
"Not even are the forests and the spots in which the aspect of Nature is most rugged, destitute of their peculiar remedies; for so universally has that divine parent of all things distributed her succours for the benefit of man, as to implant for him medicinal virtues in the trees of the desert even, while at every step she presents us with the most wonderful illustrations of those antipathies and sympathies which exist in the vegetable world." -Pliny
