Decolonizing the Diet

Gideon Mailer questions a widely repeated explanation for why Indigenous North American societies suffered such catastrophic losses after 1492: that these populations had no prior exposure to disease and were biologically unlike people in the Old World. Mailer instead sets the shift from Paleolithic foraging to settled agriculture in Europe beside the food systems of Native Americans before and after Columbus's arrival, tracing how each changed the link between biology, environment and human history.

The book moves through the evidence in stages, covering the history and bio-archaeology of ancient Europe, the ancient Near East and ancient Native America, along with Europe during the medieval Black Death. From there it follows the encounter between Indigenous peoples and Europeans across North America from 1492 to the present.

Drawing on recent research in nutrition, immunity and evolutionary genetics, and combining it with current scholarship on Indigenous North American history, the author argues that populations generally recover from mass epidemics within a century, whatever their genetic inheritance. Recovery breaks down when war, colonization and cultural destruction erode people's capacity to hunt, gather and farm foods rich in nutrients. On this reading, immunity depends on historical circumstances, especially whether the long-established nutritional foundations of human health are preserved or lost.