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Humans have been practicing agriculture for only a tiny fraction of our existence - beginning to domesticate plants and animals about 10,000 years ago - and, as McWilliams sees it, our efforts have failed. Our food production systems are broken, and the vast majority of what we eat is detrimental to our health and the health of the earth. But what if we could eliminate agriculture as we know it, start over, and radically alter the human diet?If we could begin again, what would we do differently? McWilliams argues we'd be wise to take culinary lessons from the bonobo, a primate of Central Africa which eats a diet that's 95 percent plant based and 5 percent animal based. The plants are myriad - unlike the three plants that 60 percent of human calories come from. McWilliams's search for a better human diet leads him to those who are actively exploring the fringes of food, a group of outliers who are seeking nutrition innovation outside the industrial food system. Throughout Eating Promiscuously, we meet with such culinarily curious characters as insect flour manufacturers, seaweed harvesters, road kill foragers, plant biologists, and a morbidly obese family who decides to go healthy - creating a book that is both narrative and informative.Eating Promiscuously seeks to overturn our most basic assumptions about food, health, and ethics, and to generate hope for a more tasteful future - one in which we eat thousands of foods rather than dozens - with a diet that could save both ourselves and our planet.



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