Forget those faddish diets: the grapefruit diet, the South Beach diet, the
cabbage soup diet, Posh Spice’s latest starvation diet. There’s only one
diet real men need to worry about and that’s the Paleo Diet - aka the
Caveman Diet - which, in its most basic form, consists of what our
hunter-gatherer ancestors would have eaten.
Who says so? Ray Mears. He’s qualified to pronounce on such matters because he
has spent more than a decade researching what our distant forebears used to
survive on. He has also spent weeks in the wild with nothing more to eat
than nuts, berries and lean meat. These, he believes, are the key to
avoiding illness and premature death associated with our excessive western
consumption of refined sugar and carbohydrate.
“Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who ate a lot of meat and fish. They had
a completely different diet from ours today, and if we were still eating
that diet, I’m certain we wouldn’t be getting as ill,” says Mears. “We still
have a Stone Age body. We have modern minds, but our brains and bodies still
require the same food.”
Right now Mears is perched on a leather-look sofa on the top floor of a hotel
in central London. He has broken cover to promote his latest book, but you
can tell he’d rather be off carving a shelter out of Arctic snow. He shakes
my hand with the brute force of a man accustomed to coaxing fire from sticks
for a living, and, eventually catching the attention of a waiter, he orders
a steak sandwich, chips and a diet cola.
Er . . . excuse me? He grins apologetically. “I’m still a glutton for the bad
things,” he shrugs. “We all crave fat and sugar because they’re hard to find
in the wild. The problem is that we make them too readily available.
Carbohydrates, processed foods, they are the easiest things to eat now, and
we eat too much of them.”
Mears is not the first to take health tips from cave dwellers. The so-called
Paleo Diet (from paleolithic, the period of early man) was first popularised
by Walter L Voegtlin, a gastroenterologist whose book The Stone Age Diet:
Based on In-depth Studies of Human Ecology and the Diet of Man, was
published in 1975.
Applying principles of evolutionary medicine, Voegtlin took the view that
modern human genetics has barely changed since the dawn of agriculture, some
10,000 years ago, and that the optimum diet for modern man is still that of
the hunter-gatherer. The Paleo Diet consists of meat, fish, vegetables,
roots, fruit and nuts, rather than the products of domesticated animals and
cultivated crops - such as dairy, grains, refined sugar and processed
carbohydrates.
A typical day for Mears begins with a bowl of fruit, followed by a lunch of
salad, wild mushrooms and venison - usually from deer he has shot on one of
the country estates near his home in Sussex. Having always been the slightly
cuddly face of wilderness survival, he has hardly morphed into Andy Murray,
but Mears says his new eating habits have already given him a new lease of
life. “I’m not a nutritionist, although I have spoken to nutritionists about
this. I’m doing this because it feels right. You can test it out for
yourself.”
So what would Mears recommend from his extensive feasting among the fields and
hedgerows of Britain?
“Some of the foods our ancestors ate were quite bitter and you wouldn’t like
them,” he concedes. “But cooked hazelnuts are really good and wood
bitter-cress is fantastic - you just chuck it in salads. You can get it all
year round and it will grow in many back yards, even around here,” he says,
gesturing to the forbidding concrete jungle that surrounds us (the only
visible vegetation is a few yucca plants on an otherwise barren roof
terrace).
For the past month, Mears has been filming a new television series in Canada
(“I can’t really talk about that yet”), where good food was hard to come by.
“Fortunately, I was canoeing for the past week so I worked off a lot of
excess calories.”
Home is in High Weald, in the Sussex countryside, in “just a normal house”
rather than a mud hut or a treehouse. Mears keeps fit by going to the gym.
“I can’t run outside, I get distracted. I know I’ll end up watching some
animal,” he says, laughing and rolling his eyes.
This fascination for the natural world began with Mears exploring the North
Downs around his childhood home, armed with a book about animal tracks. “I
was always interested in explorers,” he says. “For some reason, if I have an
interest in something, I don’t just think about it, I do it. If it was
snowing, say, and someone had a sledge, just for tobogganing, I’d stick a
biscuit tin on the back with supplies [a few Oxo cubes], and off we’d go and
have an ‘Arctic adventure’.”
He was an only child, and his parents gave him the freedom to explore his
interests, although he lost direction for a while and slumbered through
A-levels in English, maths and business studies, following that with a
short-lived job in insurance. Writing and photography became his means of
making a living out of his hobby, and helped him to develop his
understanding of the natural world. He set up his bushcraft school, to
spread knowledge about nature and the skills you need to live in it, when he
was only 19, and it celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It is 15
years since Tracks, his first series on the BBC.
Having watched Mears battling to find water in the desert, trying to make fire
in -40C cold before his fingers fall off, and having heard tales of his
close brushes with crocodiles, you’d be forgiven for thinking he enjoys
putting himself in such extreme situations. Yet he bridles at the
suggestion. “No. No I don’t,” he says firmly. “I’m not interested in that.
My work is about nature, not surviving. Survival is the brutal end of a much
more beautiful subject.”
Which brings us neatly on to Edward “Bear” Grylls, the former SAS soldier and
star of Born Survivor. Mears recently laughed at the idea that he might
watch Grylls’s television shows for tips - “Yes, on how not to make
television programmes!” he told the Radio Times. “As far as I’m concerned,
these people are just showmen.”
Grylls hit back by refusing to “get into a silly catfight”, and Mears has
clearly decided to be more tactful. “Things were taken out of context,” he
says. “I mean, good luck to him. It’s a different type of television. It’s
just entertainment really. My work is about trying to show the essence of
something before it’s lost.”
Mears’s latest book, Vanishing World: A Life of Bushcraft, is a compilation of
photographs taken on his travels in far-flung wildernesses, and is shot
through with a sense of loss - not just of animal species, but of
traditional human cultures. Loss has also permeated his personal life in
recent years. He lost his father in 2004, and Rachel, his wife, two years
later to breast cancer.
“It’s hard,” he says. “You have to move on. You have to accept it. I have a
new partner. I’m happy.” He won’t say much more: “I need the privacy of a
normal life. I don’t want to be a celebrity.”
That’s one reason why he’s not about to come over all Jamie Oliver and start
trying to convert the nation to the wonders of the Paleo Diet. There won’t
be a Wild Dinners recipe book any time soon, but he is convinced there’s
something in it. “A lot of the indigenous people I meet are now
supplementing their traditional diets with processed foods, sweet drinks,
and replacing wild honey with refined sugar,” he says. “Diabetes is a major
problem, the last twist of the knife.”
He grimaces as he takes a final mouthful of steak. “This meat is as tough as
old boots,” he tells the waiter. A caveman could have done better.
EAT LIKE RAY MEARS
WHAT IS IT?The Paleolithic Diet turns our modern diet on its head by taking
inspiration from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is based on the premise
that our digestive systems have evolved very little in the 10,000 years or
so since farming began, so our bodies are better adapted to a
preagricultural diet.
WHO INVENTED IT?Cavemen, though a gastroenterologist called Walter L
Voegtlin recognised its potential health benefits and wrote his book The
Stone Age Diet, published in 1975.
WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT IT NOW?The rise of obesity and diabetes, and
concerns about nutrient-poor western diets have revived interest in the
diet.
WHAT DID CAVEMEN EAT?They hunted and foraged for meat, seafood, fruit,
vegetables, roots, nuts and seeds.
WHAT DIDN’T THEY EAT?There was no refined sugar, no processed
foods, little dairy and less of the grain-based carbohydrates that form the
basis of our breakfast cereals, lunchtime sandwiches and pasta suppers. Not
to mention our processed oils, fats and E numbers.
WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by
Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat by Loren Cordain. Wild Food,
co-written by Ray Mears, is not a diet book but will teach you how to
recognise edible plants such as hoary cress and sea plantain.
... FIRST SHOOT YOUR DEER
FLASH-FRIED VENISON AND WILD LEAF SALAD
Prep time Allow several hours to hunt the deer and forage for leaves
(or take 20 minutes in an organic Fresh and Wild store) Cooking time15
minutes
Serves 2
Ingredients
2 venison steaks
6 tbsp of olive oil (okay, we cheated)
50g of wild mushrooms (buy these, unless you are an experienced forager and
know which are edible)
8 juniper berries, crushed
2 tbsp of chopped thyme
1 wild garlic bulb (or 4 cloves of conventional garlic from the supermarket)
For the salad
Several handfuls of lamb’s lettuce
1 handful of watercress
1 sprinkling of wood bittercress (found in hedgerows or gardens; alternatively
use mustard cress)
For the dressing
3 tbsp of olive oil
1 handful of chopped basil
1 tbsp of crushed mustard seeds
First make the salad and dressing. Mix the olive oil, basil and crushed
mustard seeds, then sprinkle liberally over the mixed leaves. Be careful not
to overdo the mustard seeds - too many and the salad will taste bitter.
Remove the excess fat then tenderise the venison by pounding it, or score it
by lightly cutting the steak’s surface diagonally, making a diamond pattern
on the top, bottom and sides. Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan with
half the chopped garlic. Add the chopped mushrooms and fry until cooked
through, then remove from the heat and mix with the thyme.
In another pan, heat 4 tbsp of olive oil with the rest of the garlic and the
crushed juniper berries. Add the venison steaks to the pan and fry lightly
for about 3 minutes on each side. Serve with the cooked mushrooms, a garnish
of thyme and the salad on the side.
A cup of pine-leaf tea makes a good accompaniment. Chop up a handful of pine
leaves, add boiling water, allow to brew for 3-4 minutes, then use a tea
strainer to remove the leaves before drinking.
