A ROUGH HISTORY

It's a safe bet prehistoric man ate a lot of things we wouldn't eat today. Bark. Moss. Scaly little bugs. Prehistoric man was always hungry. There's not a museum anywhere that doesn't have a diorama of a cave family hunkered down around a gnawed-on slab of something raw. And in some of those exhibits you can see one caveman sitting by himself off in a corner, trying to invent fire.

Because cave people were always hungry, they'd try to eat almost anything. Just imagine how hungry the guy was who first picked up an oyster, looked at it and thought, "Yum-yum!"

If you ask me, the primary function of an oyster is to convey that yummy sauce to your mouth. It's only good manners that keep us from sucking up the sauce and spitting the oyster into the nearest potted palm.

Early man died of many things while discovering the world: spear points, animal bites, all manner of septic infections from bad scratches, not to mention falling things. Like rocks. Big trees. Mastodons. If you were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, a falling mastodon could be fatal.

I doubt colon cancer was high on the list of causes of death. I can't find evidence anywhere of any prehistoric coroner who ever pulled out a Mount Blanc fountain pen and wrote "colon cancer" as the proximal cause of death.

If prehistoric diets had anything going for them, they had fiber. We call it "roughage" today. And it was. Lots of prehistoric remains have been unearthed that show teeth worn down to stubs, but as far as I know not a single archaeologist has ever discovered the remains of a prehistoric man with a bad colon.

Roughage is still with us. I find it interesting that while Mother Nature has spent aeons putting roughage into our food, we're determined to get rid of it before we'll eat what's left. We peel our cucumbers and carrots and apples; we want our orange juice strained; most of us won't eat a potato peel unless it's deep-fried and coated with melted cheese, sour cream and chives. I'm not sure what "bacon bits" are actually made of, but I'm pretty sure they don't count as fiber. They're sort of today's equivalent of bark or beetle carcasses.

We'll gladly gorge ourselves on gourmet chocolates, but no matter how expensive those little morsels are, we all try to avoid the ones with fiber in them. You know...the ones with coconut centers.

Everyone hates those little strings you find in celery, but besides being good natural fiber, they're handy for flossing the peanut butter or cream cheese out of your teeth. No one eats naked celery.

Here's the truth: we all ought to eat a lot more fiber than we do. If we did that, we'd put a lot of gastroenterologists and surgeons out of business. Stock shares in Metamucil and CorrectAll Natural Grain would fall like a Minnesota thermometer in January. And if we ate more fiber, we wouldn't have to use our garbage disposals more than once or twice a week.

Let me prove my point: have you ever met a chicken with a bad colon? Of course not, because chickens get all the peelings and fiber and roughage even a farmer won't eat. And a hard-working farmer will eat almost anything that falls on his plate. I know. I have some cousins who are farmers in Oklahoma, and I've tried to keep up with them at meal time. It can't be done - but that's another story and I'm out of space here.

Face it: we should all eat more fiber, even if we don't like it very much. It's good for us. And we can always think of it as a taste of prehistoric history.