Eating Neolithic

I'm reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (a follow-up to his successful Omnivore's Dilemma from a few years ago) and I'm awed. Some interesting points:

-The American Paradox. Everyone knows that the French eat a high-fat, buttery diet and drink wine and yet remain slim and have long lifespans (the French Paradox). On the other hand, Americans, the people most obsessed with diet and nutrition, have the highest rates of obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (!).
-Our diets are precisely engineered. No other animal needs PROFESSIONAL HELP figuring out what to eat.

In order to avoid the slew of Western diseases and live healthier, longer lives, we ought to basically eat what we evolved to eat. (We haven't evolved responses to high fructose corn syrup, which has been around for about half a century, whereas the human species has consumed maize for thousands of years longer.) Eat what our Neolithic ancestors ate, he says. That means a diet of whole-grain, nonprocessed food, foods prepared according to cultural traditions that unlock key nutrients (for example, processing maize with limestone unlocks niacin), and nothing that ever passed through a factory or manufacturing facility. Would you eat something extruded through a nozzle? Squirtable Go-Gurt? Hydrogenated cardboard Pringles? Fluorescent orange plastic cheese? Splenda? Some other unrecognizable chemical compound that was made in a lab? This stuff is completely unrecognizable as food, but this is our post-industrial diet.

Neolithic or Paleolithic?
This made me think about whether a Paleolithic diet or a Neolithic one would be better.
Hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. Before agriculture, foragers would spend 20 hours a week acquiring food, and then have plenty of leisure time left over to shoot the breeze, visit relatives, make jewelry, weave baskets, play with children, and so on. With agriculture, cultivation of crops became crucial and people spent 7 days a week, 24 hours a day slaving away on a farm. Generally, the foraging diet was more diverse and higher quality nutrient-wise than an agricultural one based on few key crops and livestock, but it probably tastes terrible. Let's see what I can gather....Insects. Raw weeds and tough, fibrous leafy greens. Okra. Bizarre seasonal fruits like durian and mango and avocado and grapes and pears that grow only at the foothills of the most remote mountains in China, but have incredible antioxidant and nutrient properties. Crustaceans. Minimally cooked.

Taste-wise, definitely go Neolithic. I'll take some stone-ground wheat bread and home-churned butter and cheese any day. Soba noodles. Beancurd, mmm. The Neolithic diet sounds yummy and feels like home. It's been 10,000 years and we're still around! Don't eat any of that processed post-industrial garbage.