About The Culinary Caveman
It started with a tribe, a bicycle and a question
Long before there was a Culinary Caveman, I was an archaeology and anthropology student, fascinated by the relationship between human beings and the environments in which we evolved and lived.
At university I travelled to Indonesia and spent time with tribal people whose lives were still intimately connected with Nature. They knew their environment because they depended upon it. Their food, plants, seasons, soil and surroundings weren't separate things. They were part of one living system.
I remember looking at them and thinking how remarkably well adapted they were to their environment. They were synergistic with Nature. They belonged there.
Then I looked at myself. I was a sweaty, mosquito-bitten wreck.
But something else struck me.
These people did not seem to suffer — or at least suffered far less frequently — from the collection of chronic diseases that had become so commonplace in the modern West.
The Diseases of Civilisation - Cancer. Heart disease. Iatrogenic harm, obesity, diabetes, dementia, depression, neurological dysfunctions and mental ill-health. With an ever-expanding catalogue of chronic conditions that seems to accompany modern civilisation, which appeared somewhat paradoxical, If we were supposedly so civilizsed why was it the cause of death, often a protracted degenerative one at that?
I didn't know why there was such a disparity. at the time But I never forgot.
Then came the bicycle
Years later, I was cycling home from Brighton after one of my monthly club nights.
I'd been running a record label, DJing and putting on nights. I'd already left Brighton with my wife and three children for some country action about 20 miles away, although I still DJed in the city.
About two-thirds of the way home, I was thinking of the tribal people walking, as if floating, bare-foot across the forest when a voice suddenly shouted in my head:
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Was it really my life's purpose to facilitate drug and alcohol abuse?
Or should I be trying to understand why we get cancer and all these other diseases of civilisation? It was a somewhat bold undertaking.
I was sceptical. I had no grand plan and certainly no intention of becoming a herbalist, writing books or making nutritional powders.
I simply started looking.
And twenty-two years later, I'm still looking.
But I think I've found the answer.
At least, I've found what I believe are the main risk factors — and, more importantly, some possible ways out.
The Seven Deadly Whites
The investigation eventually became my first book:
The Seven Deadly Whites: Evolution to Devolution, the Rise of the Diseases of Civilization.
Published in 2016, it examined how fundamental changes in what we eat, how we grow and process food, and how we live have facilitated the rise of the diseases of civilisation.
The Seven are - Sugar. Milk. Flour. Fats and Oils. Salt. Rice and Lies. Six fundamental foods or food groups which, when relatively untouched by modern processing, can be colourful, complex and nutritionally very healthy. Then we got our hands on them.
We refined them, processed them, stripped them, concentrated them, boiled them, bleached them and Industrialised them.
And many became literally white, constituting over 80% of the average persons calorific daily input. All become a form of carbohydrate, a starch, a sugar. In so doing we have changed the famous saying of the Father of Western medicine from Food is Your Medicine to it being Food is your Poison.
It isn't necessarily the food itself that is the problem. It's what we have done to it.
And then there are the lies — the assumptions, half-truths, commercial interests and accepted wisdom surrounding food, health and agriculture that can become so deeply embedded that we eventually stop questioning them, whilst the white-lie of industry is to prevent a greater harm (a threat to profits), which has left us with a policy of wealth before health, in fact it’s wealth before absolutely everything else.
The more I looked, the less convincing it became that human health could be separated from what we put into our bodies, how our food is produced, or what we do to the world around us.
And then there was iatrogeny. Another uncomfortable piece of the puzzle.
Iatrogeny
Is harm caused by medical diagnosis, treatment or intervention, mostly pharmaceuticals.
It's a word most people have never heard of.
The scale of iatrogenic harm is difficult to quantify, and definitions and estimates vary enormously. Medical error and avoidable harm are not cleanly captured in conventional mortality statistics. A much-discussed BMJ analysis argued that medical error could rank among the leading causes of death in the United States. The precise number isn't the point. The point is that harm caused by healthcare can be remarkably difficult to see, measure and attribute, especially when conducted within an industry worth trillions.
And that mattered to my investigation.
I wasn't interested in attacking medicine. Modern medicine can be extraordinary.
I was interested in asking a more fundamental question:
What if we spent rather more effort understanding why people become ill in the first place?
And that brought me back to the plants.
Seven Plants
The second book took the investigation somewhere rather more hopeful. Seven Plants to Save the World: The Rise of the Weeds and an End to the Diseases of Civilization, published in 2025.
I called the seven plants Human Plants:
Nettles. Dandelion. Yarrow. Plantain. Cannabis. Hawthorn. Blackberry.
Mostly seen as weeds. Yet these are plants humans have known, eaten and used for thousands of years — plants growing around us while we spend enormous amounts of money trying to eradicate them.
The more I investigated them, the more extraordinary they became.
These weren't magic plants. They weren't seven miracle cures. They were something much more interesting: plants with long relationships with human beings and remarkable nutritional and biological complexity.
All were part of the natural environment in which our ancestors evolved. Perhaps we didn't merely evolve around these plants. Perhaps, in part, we evolved on and with them.
And if that is true, perhaps the weeds aren't simply remnants of our past, perhaps they are part of our future.
The powders happened
The powders weren't the original plan. They emerged from the research.
I began experimenting with the foods, plants and nutrients that kept appearing in the investigation, initially trying combinations on friends and family.
I saw the effects of plants repeatedly, sometimes in people with very serious health problems.
At first I was sceptical.
But after years of observation, experimentation and further research, I became increasingly convinced that something much more fundamental was happening than coincidence or placebo alone.
The food mattered. The plants mattered. The soil mattered.
What had been removed from food mattered.
What had been added mattered.
And perhaps most importantly, what the body could actually absorb and use mattered.
The formulations evolved from that process.
I eventually became a herbalist, and in 2012 the Culinary Caveman was established.
The powders are therefore not a separate business bolted onto the books.
They are the practical expression of the same investigation.
The books explain the thinking.
The powders put some of that thinking into a teaspoon.
Because let's be honest: Nobody wants to read a 400-page groundbreaking tome before breakfast.
A teaspoon is easier.
So why “Culinary Caveman”?
Because somewhere along the way we became extraordinarily clever at manipulating food while becoming remarkably disconnected from it.
We are animals.
We evolved in Nature.
Our ancestors ate plants, seeds, roots, fruits, leaves and whatever else the seasons and landscape provided, not excluding bugs and meat, which itself feeds on plants .
Food back then didn't have a nutritional label and it wasn't plastic wrapped with a Best Before date.
They didn't have a pharmaceutical industry and they didn't have industrial agriculture.
They certainly didn't have Instagram, Facebook or an app telling them what their gut microbiome was doing.
They had food, plants, soil and survival.
I'm not suggesting we abandon modern civilisation and go and live in a cave.
I'm suggesting we remember something -
That food is more than calories.
That plants are more than weeds.
That soil is more than dirt.
That agriculture is more than a monocultural industrial process.
And that human health cannot ultimately be separated from the natural living systems
Indeed, we can only be as healthy as the soil beneath our feet — and that isn't looking too clever from any angle, is it?
The mission statement
The Culinary Caveman exists to:
Remineralise the human organism.
Restore nutritional balance.
Challenge the causes of the diseases of civilisation.
Not with miracle cures.
Not with fashionable ingredients thrown into a tub because they're currently trending.
And not by pretending that one teaspoon can replace a good diet.
The aim is simpler — and considerably more ambitious.
To understand what went wrong.
To understand what Nature has been doing right.
And to put some of that knowledge back into human hands.
Better nutrition.
More plants.
Less unnecessary processing.
Freedom from detrimental agricultural chemicals.
A healthier relationship with the soil, the food we eat and the natural world that ultimately feeds us all.
That's the journey that began with a sweaty cyclist somewhere between Brighton and home.
Twenty-two years later, I'm still riding.