Willendorf Venus and the Paleo Diet

In all my years writing this blog, I have never, ever once alluded to diet, not the least because there are so many other people writing about how starve to keep in shape. However, I had been hearing so much recently about the “Paleo” diet that I couldn’t resist googling the matter, at least. The Paleo or Palaeolithic diet is based on the food that our ancestors supposedly ate around 10, 20 or 30,000 years ago. It includes meat, eggs, fruit and vegetables, roots and nuts, in short, food eaten by “hunter gatherers”. It excludes dairy produce, bread and cereal foods, potatoes – the results of agriculture - and, of course, the usual processed and refined baddies of our times. Popularized by Walter Voegtlin in the 1970s, the thinking behind the Paleo diet is that, since we have the same genetic makeup as our caveman forbears, we should confine ourselves as much as possible to the same kinds of food as (we think) they ate. For example, hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have kept animals or grown crops. No cows, no milk or no cheese, no bread or potatoes, just the stuff that runs on the hoof, swims in the sea or can be plucked from branches – enter Adam and Eve! Adherents of the Paleo diet suffered less from heart disease, high blood pressure, certain cancers and obesity. In short, if you were running wild with the woolly mammoths, you couldn’t possibly sport excess flesh. Enter the Willendorf Venus, a statuette from about 25,000 years ago, blessed with a body that would put the Michelin man to shame. It begs the question - where did prehistoric artists get the model to create WV woman with? Of course, it could be a construct, a mere votive figurine created to induce fertility, big boobs and belly, and all of that. But experts have pointed out the existence of thin female fertility figures. Why go to the bother of creating a figure not modelled by at least one real, live woman? Art is the lie that tells the truth, they say. I’ll leave off starting the Paleo diet for another day.