Now you can say "bite me."

The thing about butter is it is the lowest in casein (of all the dairy products). It is a fairly pure product for something that is "processed". I occasionally use butter but not often. I prefer bacon fat on my veggies. & I also like to sub coconut oil for butter.

& back to the topic for veggies. I think veggies are good but I also think that all veggies are not good for all people. The only veggies I eat are:
sweet potatoes, carrots, cabbages, kale, celery, lettuces (sometimes but I mostly just eat kale), cilantro, jicama, onions, garlic, chives and other fresh herbs, parsley, radishes, Broccoli, tomatoes (okay I know, not really a veggie) some squash, and a few others that I am sure I am forgetting about. oh, maybe fresh corn on the cob once a year, that is my limit for corn. I am Southern & I have even given up cornbread.

I think the following veggies are very unhealthy for me - so I do not eat them.
Spinach, bell peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, peas, hot peppers, and potatoes.

I just plain do not like cauliflower, brussel sprouts. asparagus, mustard greens, other cooked greens, turnips and beets. I am allergic to black pepper...

Unlike meat, I think not all veggies are equal...

I'd personally like to see an "evolutionary" food forum that encompasses what most people consider to be paleo plus ancient foods and practices which are (perhaps wrongly) assumed to be non-paleo - but still healthful, like dairy and fermentation. The arguments come from people making religion of their dietary practices.

LOL... ok. I apologize for my bitchiness.

That would be fun. It would be a nice way to include WAPF-style traditional foods, which are sort of homeless on here. On the other hand, I like keeping dairy out of the discussion most of the time - not because of "religion" but because it is not healthful for me.

Or perhaps they could just change the name on this forum to be more inclusive. It isn't like there is such an overwhelming amount of purely paleo people posting here that there isn't room for other conversations.

Most of us posting here aren't pure paleo. We come far enough to get the health benefits we're interested in but stop short so our food still is entertaining and appealing to our modern sensibilities.

Still, I like to argue with the soaking, fermenting crowd. I mean, why try to detoxify something with such measures when you can just eat something else? If you answer with anything other than "because it entertains my mouth" I will scoff at you twice over!

I wish the Paleo Forum could be Paleo/Carnivore. We ZC/VLCers have no place to go .

I dunno, seem like ZC has the most in common with every forum except the vegetarian low carbers! Ok, maybe not the CAD forum either.

I think by "detoxifying" you mean the removal of phytates and enzyme inhibitors. But fermentation does more than that - it breaks down fiber and other carbs. In my opinion, that's a pure benefit - even if you start with something perfectly edible, fermentation makes it more edible, just as cooking does. In fact, I ought to turn your argument around - in another thread you said yams are acceptable because we've been cooking food for long enough - but why would you want to "detoxify" them when you could have cabbage instead?

Well, first off, the yams you and I eat we could eat raw. They're not really yams and they're not toxic eaten raw. But not even true yams are all toxic.

Why did humans take to cooking? Was it simply to detoxify things or was it so they could get more nutrients from their food? Was it a crucial step in supporting our calorie sucking brains? Or were parasites and bacteria an issue that it solved. Or did we do it because we were just entertaining our mouths?

If you can provide a credible answer for that then I think you'll probably win some kind of a prize.

But I maintain, for whatever reason, cooking was an important step in our evolution while fermenting grains and dairy, probably not.

There was even something on PBS recently about cooking and "the human spark".

I wouldn't assume that fermenting is just for detoxing vegetable matter (although it's certainly useful for that). And I'd also argue that fermentation as a practical way to preserve food could have easily preceded cooking. Consider ye old hunting party, having brought down a large ruminant and divvied it up for carrying back to camp. What to do with the smaller bits - organs, meat and fat that's been separated from the bone - that don't lend themselves so well to slinging over a shoulder? Why, there's a nice big bag, the stomach, conveniently pre-loaded with an excellent starter culture. Just pull out the big fibrous bits, stuff it with the scraps, poke a couple of sticks through it to carry it and by the time you get home you've got a naturally fermented sausage.

Oh, and then there's cheese. Basically the the contents of a calf's stomach, old enough to be grazing a bit but not weaned yet, so the milk will be mixed with salty chyme from grazing. To prepare, kill a nursing calf, open the abdomen and tie off the esophagus and intestine with strips of leather. Then cut the stomach out, hang to dry and ferment a few days to a few weeks. Open and enjoy.

Fair enough, I forgot about the preservation techniques of fermenting. Still, the WAPFers seem to be concerned with fermenting/soaking to detoxify things. I don't know if rennet is used for fermenting meats though. I thought it was bacteria that secretes lactic acid.
Is this speculation or have you actually heard this done or done it yourself?

You first!

man I was just thinking - the deep fry thread was more mouth-watering than this one.

I'd think the early exploitation of fermentation would have been practically inevitable due to the fact that for most of our evolution our food has been far from sterile and refrigeration and chemical preservatives unavailable. Much more plausible as a candidate for early exploitation than fire.
Rennet is actually secreted by the animal, not the bacteria. Rennet and bacteria wouldn't be mutually exclusive because there's a fairly long transition from pure nursing to pure grazing. In ruminants the rennet is mostly secreted in the abomasum (4th stomach) while most active bacterial fermentation of cellulose happens in the reticulorumen (1st-2nd stomach).
I have NOT done this, though I have tasted fresh green tripe (bought for the dogs), which led directly to a session with my head in the kitchen sink trying to rinse the taste out of my mouth. Mind you it didn't taste toxic in the least, but it was unbelievably pungent. All those volatile fatty acids. Imagine a seriously ripe Roquefort that's gotten good and leaky, sitting in a warm closed room for a day or so. Then increase that by a few orders of magnitude. However the dogs are crazy about it, and perhaps our ancestors as well. I'll give it a try with some milk in it with a bit more research... someday