John Jarrett

In 1919 a New York physician got so fed up with watching his patients get worse that he went to a museum to ask the dead for advice. His name was Blake Donaldson. He had a practice full of people who were overweight, ill, and getting steadily worse no matter what the medicine of the day threw at them, and he had run clean out of ideas. So he walked into the American Museum of Natural History, found the anthropologists, and asked them the question no respectable doctor was supposed to ask. What did healthy humans actually eat before all of this? They showed him the skulls. Ancient ones. Pre-agricultural ones. And the teeth stopped him in his tracks. No decay. No crowding. No abscesses. Rows of clean, strong, untroubled teeth belonging to people who had never met a dentist, a toothbrush, or a sack of flour. The anthropologists told him about the Plains hunters who lived on buffalo, and about pemmican, the dense brick of dried meat and rendered fat that carried men through a North American winter on next to nothing else. Donaldson went back to his surgery and did something that would get a modern doctor hauled in front of a committee. He put his patients on meat. Fat meat, specifically. Roughly six ounces of lean with two ounces of visible fat, three times a day, from beef or lamb. Coffee. Water. That was the prescription. He stripped out what he called the worst offenders, the flour and the sugar and the sweet milk, and he watched what happened. What happened was they got better. The weight came off without hunger, because he insisted they eat enough and eat often. The blood pressure settled. The gallstones, the migraines, the aching joints, the sour stomachs, the whole catalogue of modern complaints he had been failing to shift for years began, quietly, to resolve. He kept going. By the end he had run something like seventeen thousand patients through this regime over roughly forty years, which is a working lifetime of evidence rather than a passing fad. He wrote it down in a book called Strong Medicine in 1961. The establishment's response was swift and familiar. One prominent figure pronounced the book hardly scientific. Another filed Donaldson under food faddism and implied he had simply forgotten whatever he once knew about nutrition. A man with forty years of patient outcomes was waved off by people armed with a theory and a grievance, and the profession moved smoothly on to the low-fat advice that has served us so brilliantly ever since. He was not a guru and never pretended to be one. He thought he was just copying what those museum skulls had been quietly demonstrating for ten thousand years, which is about the most honest thing a doctor has ever said about diet. The book is still in print. The skulls are still in the case. And the advice that buried him is still printed on the side of the cereal box.

Cute theory, let's play it out. A monkey hoards a trillion bananas. The troop, enraged, beats him to death. They gather around the pile to feast at last. But... oh wait, there is no pile. It turns out the "bananas" were shares in a banana-launching company the dead monkey founded. The shares were worth a trillion because he was alive to run it. Now he is dead and the stock is worth $0. The retarded monkeys have clubbed their way into a recession. But it gets worse. Half the "bananas" were tied up in a rocket that supplies bananas to monkeys on the far mountain who had no bananas at all. Another chunk was tied up in a little satellite dish that beamed banana coordinates to the troop after a flood took out their trees. So now they realized they beat to death the only monkey who knew how the dish worked. So the monkeys sit there. No bananas. No rockets. No coordinates to get more banananas. Just a dead body and a powerful sense of fairness as they all now became infinitely poorer. OH And somewhere a smaller monkey watches the whole thing and quietly decides he will never build anything in front of these animals again.

You can crash your yard's mosquito population without spraying a single chemical with a Mosquito Bucket of Doom. Fill a 5-gallon bucket about two-thirds with water. Drop in a handful of grass clippings, leaves, or hay. Let it sit for a day, then drop in a Bti dunk (also called Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, sold at any hardware store as "mosquito dunks," about $10 for six). Mosquitoes are powerfully attracted to fermenting water and will lay their eggs in your bucket. Bti is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that produces a toxin that kills mosquito, blackfly, and fungus gnat larvae only. This method doesn't harm bees, butterflies, fireflies, fish, frogs, birds, pets, or people. BTI dunks are EPA-approved for organic use and safe in animal water troughs and birdbaths. One dunk lasts about 30 days. Top off the water as it evaporates. Cover with 1/2-in Mesh Hardware Cloth to prevent animals from getting trapped and put the bucket somewhere shady where pets and kids won't get into it. The bucket becomes a mosquito magnet and a dead end. Compare that to fogging the entire yard with pyrethroids, which kills every insect in it, including the predators that eat mosquitoes. Doug Tallamy's Homegrown National Park has been running the "Mosquito Bucket Challenge" since 2021. The more buckets in a neighborhood, the bigger the dent. One bucket per yard is a great start.