Friday, January 28, 2005

More Nature's Operating Instructions

I forgot to include this quote from Margolin's essay:

The California natives ate lower on the food chain than we do today. They consumed foods that white settlers had contempt for, such as squirrels, mice, gophers, and grasshoppers, which everybody said tasted like shrimp. They also ate oak moths and moth larvae, which everybody said tasted like shrimp. And they ate shrimp, which everybody said tasted like moth larvae. But, of course, eating certain animals at certain times of the year was a powerful land management tool, controlling populations that could otherwise compete too successfully for the food supply or harm the land's productivity.

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