This abridged essay is part of the lecture series Here It’s Local — The Struggle for Sustainable Food Security
Imagine you are on standing at the edge of a low-lying escarpment. There is movement in the tall grasses that range across a steppe landscape as far as you can see. A pack of wolves emerge at the edge of a stream on a clearing. You can see their distinctive colourings as they quench their thirsts in the refreshing water. On the far side on a similar clearing a young doe is spooked by their sudden appearance, turns and darts off into the forest. You hear a roar and rustling at the woodland edge of the stream. A large furry animal runs into the stream and scoops a large fish onto the bank. Your eyes follow the stream. It flows into a meandering river and emerges into a wide body of water fed by other streams and rivers in the aqueous landscape. This is a tributary river system and in your mind it is the perfect place.
Your people have fished these rivers and foraged and hunted in these forests, plains and mountains for as long as your ancestors can remember. You are young and your generation has an idea. It is not a new idea. Some of your older people have put the idea into practice during the cold spells and found it not at all unnerving or unpleasant. This is the new stone age and you are a hunter-gatherer about to engage in an activity that will change the course of human history! You are about to settle into a enduring sedentary existence of breeding, herding and milking, of chipping, painting and weaving, of collecting, sowing and harvesting, and of the older habits of fishing, foraging and hunting at the confluence of a stream that will be named Batman Creek and a river that will enter history as one the twins of the land between the two rivers. This is the tributary system of the Upper Tigris Basin and you are a member of humanity in transition, at a place in an evolutionary moment – the beginnings of civilisation as we know it – a place some believe to be the origin of it all, a place where the beliefs and rituals remained the same for one thousand one hundred and fifty years, the course of 46 generations. Today this place is called Körtik Tepe – Worn Hill – and I am about to travel 12,400 years back in time to befriend you, because I am sure we have much in common!
I am not a scholar, I cannot claim to know what the archaeologist knows, what the ethnobotanist knows, what the anthropologist seeks to know with their comparative studies of the old and the new. I am a traveller in time, with an insatiable curiosity about this period – known by archaeologists as the ‘epipaleolithic / pre-pottery neolithic period’ of the new stone age – because I have a keen desire to know the answers to some questions about this epoch-making era.
You my friend I believe are a good person to talk to, because it would appear your people have a good nature and appear to live an egalitarian, functional, sustainable lifestyle, as inoffensive, sensitive and relatively tame hunter-gatherers with shared beliefs and rituals, and I want to ask you if that is a flawed generalisation. You see I have read that your people abandoned the simplicity of the old ways for the complexity of the new ways, developed a food-production strategy, adopted a creative strategy for the production and trade of aesthetic goods, assumed a social strategy and created inequality, and that these activities led to social tensions, interpersonal violence and ultimately to the total collapse of your village community.
So, I wonder, what was it like to live in a village on a wide rising peninsula between two rivers, the pebbled shore a stone’s throw from the nearest dwellings, leather-clad beehive huts, cautious waterfowl in the river, covetous mammals lurking in the forest, curious animals peering out from the woodland?
What did you eat?
The archaeologists tell us you lived in the midst of a wild environment with birds and fish, mammals and waterfowl amongst a deciduous woodland full of almonds, apples, buckthorn, hackberries and pistachios, a riverine forest of ash, beech, fig, poplar, vine and willow, a steppe with every type of wild cereal, herb, plant, root and vine, a resource rich hinterland.
Compared to your previous existence, living in that secluded village must have been sublime, yes?
You cannot tell me, can you?
Your knowledge is limited to the awkward innocence of that fleeting era when beliefs and rituals morphed into the architecture of the newly-formed close-knit community.
And why should you explain, in your position I would have done the same.
Today your village is the subject of a curious debate among archaeologists. A long time after you passed away and were buried along with your belongings, your community evolved to enact ‘high-arousal burial rituals’ possibly to protect its social integrity although not necessarily you might argue. If the driving force of civilisation was housing and nutrition immediately after the first settlements, the emergence of aesthetic sensibilities and artistic skills created the conditions for social hierarchy. There is evidence to suggest that your descendants quickly realised the material danger to your egalitarian way of life. They appeared to solve the problem with a burial ritual that took an individual’s objects with them to the grave. When this did not prevent the institutionalisation of inequality based on material wealth, the ritual was enlarged to allow for the deliberate destruction of the individual’s belongings. The next generation had to generate their own wealth, they could not be allowed to accumulate commodities and objects of worth from inheritance. For a while ‘social inequality based on material wealth’ was apparently counteracted until eventually the process failed and a social hierarchy was established. Are you surprised by this development?
This is the debate! Some archaeologists accept this theory, that a social hierarchy was established at some point in your village, though not especially because commodification was a source of wealth and as a consequence bestowed social status. Some archaeologists disagree and argue that you and your descendants valued personal relationships and, unlike modern humans who differentiate between the human world and the natural world, did not place an economic value on their animistic and ritualistic objects. Any value was personal.
The archaeologists suggested an integrative approach, comparing anthropological with archaeological data, to come to a logical conclusion.
‘It seems that social tensions between egalitarian concepts and emerging social differentiation occurred. Yet, through the destruction of goods, the people of Körtik Tepe made the accumulation of commodities impossible and powerfully counteracted social inequality based on material wealth.’
If common sense is applied to this debate and the contemporary evidence about the egalitarian nature of modern hunter-gatherer groups is added, I can only come to the same conclusion, that ‘prehistoric mobile foragers’ maintained egalitarian social structures amidst the ‘overlapping identities, tensions and contradictions’ of daily life.
Common sense in itself is not enough. Archaeologists know from experience (and from the history of archaeology) not to judge too quickly and certainly not from a narrow perspective. The concept will always be different from the reality, whatever that was. I want to know whether humanity has always had in its midst beings that are selfish … and stupid! Or is it that we are all, by our nature, incapable of genuine altruism and unable to avoid making decisions that to the enlightened must be seen as stupidity personified?
Once upon a time in lands no longer recognisible in our quantum world, life was cyclical, daughters followed mothers, sons followed fathers, knowledge was gained dutifully by the young, wisdom was stored within the collective consciousness of the elders, equilibrium became a strong constant, fate became a knowable challenge, survival became an attainable goal.
The people at Körtik Tepe in the Upper Tigris River Valley Basin became localised, they did not venture far from the settlement because they had everything they needed. Then suddenly, after more than one thousand years in the same spot, they were no more. After all that aesthetic and artistic specialisation and after all that knowledge of house-building and herding what happened? Did they pack up and leave for another place? Did they gradually return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, leaving in small groups until eventually the settlement was abandoned?
Archaeologists accept the possibility that those with animistic sensibilities and pagan beliefs and a lore that celebrated the quixotic preferred the hunter-gatherer lifestyle because it give no cause for a social hierarchy that would profit from inequality. They cannot know because there is a reality here we may never be able to reveal. Just because archaeologists have not found settlements that can be dated for the years between Körtik Tepe and other settlements in south-central and north-eastern Anatolia does not mean they are not there.
The hunter-gatherer way of life was based on an intimate knowledge of mobile and static food resources that were not always secure and when they were threatened ethnic groups began to domesticate particular environments. Over several thousand years most of these places were abandoned. Very few became permanent. Ancient agriculture was an evolutionary continuum with food security at its foundation, different in every way to the industrial version of agriculture in the modern word.
We do not know what kind of process concluded in a consensus that brought hundreds of nomads together in settlements that offered little in the way of personal space, if such a thing existed in the minds of forager people. These settlements probably began with an idea that had been passed down the generations. It would have been the idea of many, an ethnic band or group or tribe with close familial ties, translated by word of mouth. The nomads would then have voted with their feet, and in time would have been joined by others who had heard about a particular place where the environment was conducive to that idea, what we would call today a transport hub – a mountain pass, a river crossing, a secluded, sheltered bend in a river-valley, naturally close to forest and woodland, similarly a coastal estuary, delta, mouth or peninsula, a lakeside clearing under a mountain pass, somewhere safe, somewhere that could easily be defended from predators.
It is easy from our knowledgable perspective to make arguments for aesthetic pleasure, for food security, for collective symbolism, for spiritual salvation, for tool-making, for craft-work, for trade. What is agreed among archaeologists is one interesting fact. The hunter-gatherers who settled in the first villages did not have the idea of agriculture and husbandry as we understand it today. They used their strength and sweat to build different homes, and from this new base went out fishing, foraging and hunting in groups, fishing in the summer, hunting in the winter, foraging all year round, and we do not really know what made them change the habit of millennia!
The settlements that have been found in modern Anatolia – Körtik Tepe in the Upper Tigris River Valley Basin in the south-east, Göbekli Tepe in the nearby Urfa region, Aşıklı Höyük near the modern city of Aksaray and the volcanic tufa cones of Cappadocia, about 500 kilometres from the Black Sea and 300 kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea, Boncuklu Höyük and Çatalhöyük near Konya in the south-central region, about 220 kilometres from the Mediterranean coast, Alacahöyük, to the north-east in the Çorum region, about 220 kilometres from the Black Sea coast – are separated by thousands of years and a world of amazing difference.
The south-eastern settlements around Göbekli Tepe suggest a different direction, with the emergence of a belief system, a lore sensibility if you like, that placed the well-being of the community before the selfish nature of the individual! Göbekli Tepe and the other T-pillar sites in the region are evidence that the people had not lost their civilising skills and talents.
Göbekli Tepe is a conundrum.
On 1 July 2018 the World Heritage Committee added it to the UNESCO World Heritage List. In her report to announce this event, Eva Götting described the site.
‘On the hill of Göbekli Tepe, stone pillars stand tall against the Turkish summer sky. People first came here more than 11,000 years ago. These men and women, who lived as hunters and gatherers, achieved a great deal with very little. Without metal tools, the highly skilled artisans of Göbekli Tepe carved the T-shaped pillars from the local limestone. These pillars – some of which were up to 5.5 metres high and weighed several tons – then found their way from the nearby quarry to the site, where the communities incorporated them into round-oval, semi-subterranean stone buildings. Fox, crane, boar, snake and scorpion arise from the light-coloured stone, leaving a vivid testimony of Neolithic art. For thousands of years, the monumental structures were forgotten, covered by a mound of earth and rubble.’
Under the auspices of Klaus Schmidt, who excavated the site from 1995 to 2014, a Turkish-German collaboration of archaeologists gradually unearthed the secrets of Göbekli Tepe. Archaeologist Lee Clare said the hill site illustrated ‘a significant stage in human history’ especially for ‘our understanding of the Neolithic transition in this key area of the Fertile Crescent’. During those years the team of archaeologists began to understand the significance of the site for its creators and the legacy it would leave. ‘When Klaus Schmidt initiated excavations at Göbekli Tepe in the mid-1990s, there was practically no indication of the significance that this site held for us and future generations.’
These symbolic stones at this remote site near the village of Örencik, 20 kilometres north-east of Şanlıurfa, predate the stones of the pyramids (and the stones of Newgrange and Stonehenge) by 6,000 years and it would appear they have nothing in common. Archaeologists generally agree that the 11,500 year old site and its surrounding stones indicate some kind of belief system coupled to artist expression that celebrated the symbolism of life and death, the possible worship of animals, gods and celestial bodies, and an organised collectivism that became active across the region. There is no evidence of the domestication of animals and the cultivation of einkorn wheat was a pragmatic solution that produced beer as well as bread. There is a suggestion that the tepe was used for communal activity including cereal distribution, death rites, family ceremonies and what has been described as ‘external memorial storage,’ a sanctuary where the dead could rest in peace, safe from scavenging birds and animals. And this is where the conundrum comes into play.
For the time being everything is speculative!
The significance of Göbekli Tepe has been warped into a riddle in recent years. The archaeologists want to ensure it does not become a game for those who like a good puzzle. What the archaeologists do know, from their scans, is that there are around 20 enclosures with 200 megalithic pillars on the tepe, and, until they have a better understanding of these stones and the other stone sites in the region, they want to keep the debate about the symbolic character of the stones in perspective.
Archaeologist Jens Notroff explained.
‘We know little of the beliefs these people might have followed, so it would seem rather bold to denote these monumental pillar-statues as personifications of “deities”. They seem to represent something more, supposedly something beyond the self-referential depiction of human beings. Together with the obviously narrative character of other depictions on these T-pillars which clearly exceed simple decorative purposes, this perception feeds the impression that we are confronted here with a complex iconography – with mythological narrations probably even.’
Animal figures associated with the symbols of the various tribes who frequented the sanctuary are shown in relief on the stones. The boar, bull, crane, duck, fox, lion, scorpion and snake are represented. The large T-shaped pillars feature reliefs of stylised human figures. Klaus Schmidt was also reluctant to associate the artwork with a belief system. He suggested Göbekli Tepe had been built as a ‘sanctuary’ and as a ‘terminus’ where the dead could be safely left in the open.
Others had a different idea.
In 2019 Manu Seyfzadeh and Robert Schoch concluded that the T-shaped pillars were symbolically marked to represent a god who guarded the entry to the afterlife for animals and humans. ‘We propose that this theme may have been inspired by real celestial images of the then prevailing night sky, ritually reenacted and celebrated for centuries by hunter-gatherer pilgrims to this hill and then spread by their descendants across Anatolia still influencing language in the region spoken and written thousands of years later.’
It would appear the enclosures or gates of the megalith were astronomically aligned. One enclosure is apparently oriented towards the rising point of the Sun on the day of the harvest festival, a day approximately halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox.
All this adds to the arguments, opinions, speculations and theories that the hunter-gatherer tribes of eastern Anatolia and upper Mesopotamia around eleven thousand years ago were highly cognitive, spatially conscious of their environment and had developed a form of animism they felt a desire to celebrate with their creativity. As nomads they would have collected geographical, geological and topographical knowledge, much like the birds and animals they hunted. They lived among them and as inhabitants of that world they shared the same traits, symbolic association must have seemed like the natural thing to do.
A network of T-pillar enclosures exists within a 200 kilometre radius of Göbekli Tepe. These were assembled, decorated and erected by trans-egalitarian tribes with skilled workers and they had to be fed. Oliver Dietrich, Jens Notroff and Klaus Schmidt said this was a shift in perspective. ‘Vast evidence for feasting at [each] site seems to hint at work feasts to accomplish the common, religiously motivated task of constructing these enclosures.’
My curiosity is drawn to the lore of the site, and that is seen in the aesthetic aspect – like the honeycomb painting at Çatalhöyük, but it is also apparent in the societal aspect and specifically with the culinary aspect. Knowledge of indigenous plant life in the region was contained in their food lore. And they knew that lore by heart.
Laura Dietrich, Oliver Dietrich, Julia Heeb and Nils Schäkel collaborated on a paper they titled ‘Plant food management as a prerequisite for monumental building at Göbekli Tepe‘. They also asked a curious question, how many scientists does it take to make a stone speak? It is a trick question so don’t go there, but it is relevant because over 10,000 grinding stones were found at the site and macrobotanical analysis revealed traces of the wild variants of almond, barley, einkorn, emmer and pistachio, as you would expect from this region.
The team also experimented with the different shapes of handstones for grinding the cereals and nuts, and meat from wild animals and concluded that the different types had specific practical purposes. With our knowledge of the long history of the traditional food in the region (modern Turkey, Syria and the Levant), we can tell you that the mortar and pestle method for grinding and pounding ingredients produced numerous iconic foods that are engrained in those ancient methods and traditions.
One of these is icli köfte, a type of meatball made with a crust from fine ground bulgar, semolina and walnuts with a core of pounded meat, onions and walnuts with various herbs and spices including cumin, dried red pepper flakes, mint, parsley and sumac plus red pepper paste and an ingredient that has been part of Anatolian and Assyrian food culture for a very long time – pomegranate molasses. These portable little packages can be baked in a hearth, boiled in water and fried in oil. It does not require a stretch of the imagination to see the cooks at Göbekli Tepe engaged in the production of this type of food from indigenous ingredients.
In his review of James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, archaeologist Steven Mithen wondered whether the wild einkorn was deliberately cultivated to feed the workers who built the pillars and walls of the sanctuary. ‘If the Neolithic gods could persuade people to invest so much effort in construction, and to suffer the physical injuries, ailments and deaths that came along with it, then perhaps expending those extra calories in the fields would have seemed quite trivial.’
Klaus Schmidt came to the same conclusion. Without a controlled use of the natural resources, the hunter-gatherers would have exhausted the wild plants during the long period of construction. That solution might have been an agreed plan, to collect the seeds of wild plants like almond, barley, einkorn, emmer and pistachio, plant them on the slopes of the mountain and the surrounding ground and harvest the grains and nuts as needed during the months of carting the limestone from nearby quarries and the laborious carving and placing of the stones on the mountain top. Beer apparently crowned the nightly feasts and as anyone with knowledge of beer will tell you, beer made with wheat has a depth of flavour to quench any thirst!
There is no evidence of permanent agriculture, and no suggestion that any temporary cultivation of grains and nuts and seeds in the Urfa region led to a farming revolution. That did not happen until thousands of years later. Göbekli Tepe had a different purpose, and it may never known what it was beyond the obvious, from the symbolic representation on the stones to the symbolic shape of the stones, and from the symbolic location of the stones – high on a hill.
Which brings me back to the descendants of the people of Körtik Tepe.
The mound, höyük in Turkish, is a symbol of the Anatolian landscape. They are visible everywhere. Some have been excavated extensively, like the village near Aksaray. University of Istanbul archaeologist Ufuk Esin believes the 10,000 year-old village evolved because the conditions in the narrow valley of Melendiz-Su were suitable for settlement, ‘near running water, where there were abundant game animals and edible plants ready for cultivation’. The building activities and the settlement-patterns represented ‘a forerunner of those found at Çatalhoyük East, dated to two thousand years later’.
Excavated in 1989 Aşıklı Höyük had a core, which might have been a temple complex, surrounded by a cluster of houses and a central pebbled street running through the settlement, which was walled. Remains found by Esin’s team suggest a population of around several hundred who lived by hunting and foraging, and possibly by trading. The 72,000 pieces of obsidian found at Aşıklı Höyük have led archaeologists to suggest it was a centre of industry.
‘To judge by the large number of animal bones found at Aşıklı, it seems that hunting was a more important activity than agriculture and animal husbandry in social life. If this assumption is true, Aşıklı with its large settlements represents a new model of sedentary life based on intensified hunting and gathering and a kind of proto-domestication of wild animals. Production of obsidian, bone, horn, ground-stone artefacts, the working of animal skin and preparing leather seem also to have been important activities among the inhabitants of Aşıklı. Since the dwellers of Aşıklı had a great surplus of obsidian and meat, they may eventually have developed interregional trade in obsidian.’
Is it possible they were the descendants of the people of Körtik Tepe, who also desired obsidian, and decided to go to the source?
The sites in Anatolia predate all but a few of the known settlements in the world, including those in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and further east in the Hindu Kush in central Asia, a region that has persisted with animal husbandry and small-scale swidden agriculture.
Jericho in Palestine was a gradual ‘step toward civilisation’ by a group of indigenous hunter-gatherers. The people who settled Qal’at Jarmo in north-eastern Iraq manufactured tools that allowed them to grow cereals and grind the grains into flour. Archaeologists discovered obsidian flint sickle blades and grinding stones. They also found emmer, einkorn and barley grains, the bones of domesticated goats, sheep, and pigs, obsidian tools, stone vessels, and in a later era, pots made with fired-clay. At Maghzaliyah in north-western Iraq a group of hunter-gatherers came together to build clay-walled, stone-floored, thatched houses and practised cereal farming and sheep husbandry. Wheat grown in fertile ground between rock formations was cut with sickles, dried and stored in fired-clay barrels. This settlement survived for 10 generations, not at all insignificant for that period.
These ancient settlements suggest that life 10,000 years ago was not that much different from the previous 5,000 years, in the aftermath of the last ice-age when the area was heavily forested. The people who settled the places known as Körtik Tepe, Göbekli Tepe, Aşıklı, Jericho, Maghzaliyah and Qal’at Jarmo were mostly inoffensive, sensitive and relatively tame hunter-gatherers with shared pagan beliefs, who managed to live with each other through the ages. Each group came to certain conclusions and settled into sedentary existence for reasons that may never be known. They left no history that reveals more than the archaeological record, artifacts, artwork, bones, objects, remains and tools that indicated the gradual emergence of a culture conversed in the cultivation of specific cereals and plants, in the domestication of bovine animals and in the breeding of various species. It is not known whether their population size increased as a consequence of sedentary life, archaeologists just assume that infant mortality was reduced because the general population began to rise. Over the course of time those early settlements were abandoned by the descendants of the first settlers, for reasons that divide opinion amidst speculation among the archaeologists.
These dig sites represent a small number of settlements, and may not be representative of the countless origin-villages dotted across river valleys in Anatolia, the Levant and upper and lower Mesopotamia. None of it was coterminous, and it would take a brave scholar to argue there was a distinct pattern. Climate, water and other resources were crucial to the success of ‘civilised’ food production and dictated where groups of people chose to settle. Eventually, the northerners moved south towards the river-valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Others came across the mountains, first to raid, then to settle and eventually to trade. History knows them as Sumerians, Semites and Hittites. They brought a different kind of sensibility and a style of living manifest in an arrogance epitomised by the Tower of Babel, despite the ostentatiousness of the fruit that dripped from its hanging baskets, that appeared to show empathy.
The period between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago was not the absolute end of the hunter-gatherer phase in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent. Instead it was the start of a gradual beginning that changed the way people thought about their food, a mentality that is still with us today. The type of food cultivated and domesticated between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago defined civilisation, and no one realised this. There was no reason for them to realise it. It might be argued that despite the data from the archaeological record there is still no understanding, none that is rational. In that sense nothing has changed since those remarkable days, when the ancients believed they had found the solution to food security. The majority of us still eat cereals, legumes and tubers, the meat of pigs and sheep, freshwater fish and seawater shellfish.
Then there was a dramatic change, which is not explained by the archaeological record and anything that might be believed is mere speculation. For seven thousand years between 12,500 years ago and 5,500 years ago the settlements remained the same – generally egalitarian, functional, low impact, sustainable. Then all of a sudden humanity entered a period of absolute kings and constant kingdoms, pursuit of power and wealth, obsession with precious jewels and prized minerals, in particular gold, traded and used as a diplomatic device to ease relations between rulers, the priest-kings of antiquity.
In Anatolia this new era was played out at Alacahöyük.
Alacahöyük is a 4,000 year-old centre of the Hittites, Indo-European speaking conquerers from the east, from beyond the mountains. Their land was called Hatti, spread across eastern Anatolia, and it is probably a stretch of the imagination to claim that they were instigators of the culinary arts. This makes their arrival on the civilisation scene more interesting.
Archaeologists generally agree that the first domesticated crops appeared in Anatolia, and in Mesopotamia, the Levant and Jordan around 8,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. These crops included the earliest wheats – einkorn and emmer – along with barley, chickpea, lentil, pea and tubers of unknown species. Spelt was also present but it was a wild grass that grew profusely on stoney ground, and easily cultivated though it was difficult to separate the kernel from the chaff, unlike wheat.
The cereals were coarse-milled into flour, baked into flatbreads and loaves, boiled as dumplings, made into gruel or porridge (aka polenta) and used as thickeners for stew. As whole grains they were added to soup made with the cooking liquids from the bones of various animals.
The Assyrians also knew how to make amazing breads, exquisite pastries, preparations with fruit, grains and meat. The modern baklava is a confectionary variation of the thin dough made by the people of the entire region, with date syrup rather than sugar syrup the medium for the pistachios. The bulgur-crusted meatball made with pounded grains and pounded meats, icli köfte, is known to be an ancient recipe. Marinated meat cooked on skewers over open fires are popular today because the skill was perfected over millennium.
From their writings we know that the Hittites made bread with pounded wheat, that they used figs and honey and olive oil in their breads and pastries, and that they filled their flatbreads with seared meat and raw onion, a tradition that is still quintessential in the region. The leathery dried apricot sheets that were an essential aspect of Ottoman cooking and still prevalent today probably originated with the Assyrians and Hittites.
Was food sophistication the driver of civilisation? Some say it was language, but you can’t eat words when the meaning they convey is arbitrary when it is spoken and opaque when it is written.
The settlements that emerged later as large villages and then as small city-states had the modes of civilisation we can relate to today – they contained agricultural, craft, commercial, civic, culinary, military and religious centres, and communicated through a form of writing, with cuneiform (wedge-shaped) characters.
Nothing much has changed since, just the technology. The medium contains the same message and only those who understand the reality know how to ignore it. Most of us cannot, and so continue on the same path, afraid of the wrong shadows.
Anne and Robert's Big Food Adventure 