TL;DR: Fuck the State: eat like an ungovernable caveman.

Just some light, fun dinner party conversation!

“Vinney, why do you avoid eating grains?”

The short and boring answer is: “I believe this is metabolically optimal for a human being.”

But since you’re here, I assume you want the long and insane answer! So let’s go: Because of coordination problems and systems theory stuff.

Specifically, the concept I have in mind is something like a multi-level selection problem or hierarchical optimization conflict but with a twist - more like “optimization target misalignment across scales”. Briefly: what is optimal at different scales of organization can be fundamentally incompatible with each other.

A multi-level selection problem occurs when natural selection operates at multiple levels simultaneously (genes, individuals, groups) with potentially conflicting outcomes. What benefits the individual might harm the group and vice versa.

Hierarchical optimization conflicts are when different levels of a hierarchy optimize for different objectives in conflict with each other. Like a department head optimizing his unit’s performance in a way that hurts the company overall.

To understand “optimization target misalignment across scales” - a term that isn’t part of the zeitgeist in evolutionary biology or organizational behavior, though the concept appears across many fields - in the way I’m applying it here, we have to take a fun detour into ancient history.

For most of human history, we thrived as small, autonomous groups eating mostly meat plus foraged fruits and vegetables. Because we ate this way for so long, this diet is strongly in-tune with our biology. Adaptive strategies abhor hyper-novelty.

The agricultural revolution centralized food production around grains. They’re cheap, easy to store and easy to scale - but they’re far less nutrient-dense. (There’s a reason corn is pig feed and bread is prisoner feed.)

Cities naturally formed around these grain surpluses. A fixed population is easier to count, conscript and coerce. To make matters worse, when people become reliant on centralized grain production, they relinquish a measure of autonomy and ease of exit. All of this forms an irresistibly-juicy target for an emerging State: Hierarchies emerged to manage the growing infrastructure and a need for large-scale defense. To fund it all, the centralized grain surplus hegemony enacted taxes and developed a monopoly on violence (for “invaders” and/or “tax evaders”).

The grain-based diet emerged not because it was best for individuals, but because it was best for managing and feeding fixed populations en masse as cheaply as possible while allowing for extraction of predictable taxes and offering a single control plane from which to spin out all manner of coercive structures.

So to bring it back: A diet that is in harmony with the human body’s immense evolutionary history and metabolically optimal happens to be in direct conflict with a food-industrial-complex-cum-population-control-mechanism favored by the State since its inception.

This is part principal-agent problem, part collective action problem, part surreptitious enslavement gambit. The term I used at the outset was “optimization target misalignment across scales”. At the individual level, the objective function is to maximize nutritional density and metabolic health. At the city/State scale it becomes “maximize caloric yield per acre, storage stability, tax revenue and population dependence”.

Mathematically, you literally cannot optimize for both of these simultaneously because they pull in different directions.
Which would you choose, individual human?

Fuck the State: eat like an ungovernable caveman.

Also posted on nostr