Tom Hillman’s latest post cites C.S. Lewis citing Tolkien musing about the effect of living in one place and eating local produce for generations. Maybe, the musing goes, that is the source of hobbits’ apparent power to resist evil.
As it happens, I was just reading about the dangers of eating locally. William Albrecht wrote a famous paper1 about the sorry condition of the teeth of military recruits during World War 2. The men with the worst teeth were geographically concentrated in areas where the combination of soil mineralization and rainfall caused calcium deficiency. Eating locally was the source of the problem. In our modern food system, we eat food from all over, so this doesn’t happen so often.
But then it struck me: I’ve never heard of the Native Americans who originally lived in the Appalachians having dental problems. Google Scholar only finds a few skeletons, explicitly described as anomalous. Bad teeth are found in only the descendants of European colonists. Eliot’s line about how ‘We are synthetic men, uprooted’ seems to be applicable in more places than just the Shire.
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