This is an argument from evolution. The point of farming is generate meat, and grain feeding livestock creates that, regardless of the evolutionary history.
I'm not following you. You're right in saying that the hypothesis "ruminants didn't evolve eating grain and thus they shouldn't be eating grain at all" is on faulty scientific grounds, but luckily it has been tested again and again to be true.
The point of farming is to generate meat? Is that a typo? The point of farming is the generate crops. The point of ranching and silvopasture is to generate meat.
She focuses on cellulose a lot. Only some herbivores rely on cellulose (ie. ruminants). If you break the meat we eat up like this; beef, lamb, pork, and chicken, only half eat large amounts of cellulose.
You're right, but it doesn't take away from her larger point that we haven't been in evolutionary competition with any of the animals you listed above.
Eating beef, chickens, sheep, and goats also kills them. I can't understand what the actual problem with grain fed animals she is arguing here is.
Well, she is a radical environmentalist and animal rights activist, so I imagine her problem with grain feeding ruminants is the same problem I'd have if my little brother was living off of Burger King. It leaves the cow (For example) in terrible physiological shape, and if you really love cows, I guess you'd have a problem with that. Her bigger problem more is the fact that we treat cows as big piggy banks, that we just try to get as fat and stuffed full of meat as possible in order to make a profit off of them, instead of treating them like the sentient beings they are and letting them graze in a nice open healthy field.
The disappearance of topsoil is an expensive problem to fix, but can be fixed within a few years (if you have the money). It's clearly nothing like the problem of global warming, and it's been grossly overstated by some environmentalists for years.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know whether or not top soil erosion is as big a problem as global warming is. I think the problem with top soil erosion is the fact that we might reach a tipping point where yes, we still have plenty of top soil around the world, but not quite enough to feed all 7 billion people. The ripple effect off of that could be tremendous.
And yet in some places around the world (such, again, as my state), former agricultural land that turned to essentially desert is being revegetated allowing for a return to farming, and an increase in wildlife. Restoration ecology, as well volcanic islands, and indeed the progress of life on the planet in geological time seems to completely contradict this philosophy. What evidence supports this assertion? Maybe I'm being unfair in taking this statement literally, but the article is full of this kind of washy language which is either wrong, or meaningless.
Uh, no, you're not taking her literally enough. You can talk about restoration ecology and sustainable agriculture and how great they are all you want. That doesn't change the fact that the VAST majority of the worlds food comes from clear cut, monocrop agriculture. Until the VAST majority of the world is using sustainable practices, you can point to all the great things people are doing all you want but it's still the exception to the rule. And again, even if you are growing food sustainably, it doesn't mean you aren't killing something when you exploit a plant for its produce.
You might be interested in this video of some Brit's reforesting a patch of desert in Jordan. Again though, as warm and fuzzy as it might make you feel inside, it is the exception and not the rule. You have to remember, this book is addressed to the vegetarian community at large. This isn't the woman's Ph.D she's defending in front of a board of hard scientists. As any good author does, she speaks to her audience and that occasionally involves her dumbing down the message. It's the same thing as when Paleo people say "Humans evolved over millions of years eating meat, fruit and vegetables, but not grains and legumes, and thus we should eat the former and not the latter". From a scientific perspective, that argument will get you laughed out of the room, but from a laymens perspective, the point hits home and indeed is quite valid.
Regardless though, not everyone lives in England or Australia, where their is a huge scientific community capable of doing restoration ecology. I suppose you could send out proselytizing missionary groups of western ecologists to go around the world to show people techniques such as these, but I could only imagine someone like you, Jeremy, arrogantly going to Southeast Asia and telling farmers who have been tilling the same patch of land for generations how to grow their food. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Not everyone is susceptible to your amazing intellect after all.
Here is the video of them greening the Jordan desert. You should check it out you'd like it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpq6s34Q67Q
These kinds of anecdotes are pointless, but are clearly aimed at making her opponents look irrational. Do you think Peter Singer, Albert Einstein or Abraham Lincoln (all vegetarians) would agree with this argument?
Hahaha this cracked me up dude. You bash anecdotal evidence, and then in the next line ask me without sarcasm what "Abe Lincoln, Einstein, and Peter Singer" would thing about an issue. Do you knot recognize the implicit irony in this? You're right though that anecdotal evidence is the worst kind of evidence to have, but simply listing off a bunch of notable historical figures who agree with you is a really sophomoric way of trying to make your point. Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian? Did you know Pol Pot was a big proponent of sustainable agriculture? I think that means all vegetarians are evil and sustainable agriculture is just the NWO's way of making us all their automatons.
I made the last one up just to show how stupid your argument is.
Lions and hyenas have completely different guts to us, and completely different diets. Lumping us with them is misleading at best
You're right, but it is not misleading to say that for the AVERAGE human being on this planet, meat is a much more easily digestible calorie source when compared 1 to 1 with any grain or legume.
Not only that, but there are huge studies that show that humans that are vegetarians do not suffer any significant detriment to health. In fact if you grossly lump humans as meat eaters and vegetarians, studies continuously show that vegetarians live longer and are healthier. This is misleading because if you split the meat eaters up into those that eat balanced diets and get regular exercise and those who don't, the healthy meat eaters live longer than the same grouping of vegetarians (essentially eating a small amount of meat in a balanced diet, and getting plenty of exercise, is the healthiest lifestyle a person can have).
Well yes, as you said your own point is very misleading. Comparing vegetarians/vegans (Who tend to be very health conscious, if also very wrong) to your standard American Joe who eats a steak or a burger a few times a week along with a backs of Cool Ranch Dorito's isn't going to get you any reliable results. People who simply can't digest meat excluded, their are no vegetarians/vegans in the world who wouldn't benefit from eating responsibly grown meat 1-2 times a week. That is a very broad statement, but I'm going to stick to it and I assume you will agree with me based on the fact that you too consume meat occasionally now?
I also note that analysis of both the diets of our closest relatives, and of hunter gatherer societies demonstrates clearly that for most of our evolution meat has not been a major part of our diet, especially red meat. Try eating raw meat for a week or two and see what happens. Clearly we ate very little meat until the invention of fire, which is very recent.
Absolutely untrue. You're right in the idea that we weren't hunting down herds of Mammoth's with Atlatl's early in our evolutionary history, but that doesn't mean we weren't eating meat. Next time you're around a bird or a lizard or a frog or something of the like, notice how little attention they often pay to you, and how easy it would be to nail one with a rock. Indeed as Jared Diamond points out, this is the way many modern hunter-gather societies operate today. They talk a big game about going out and bagging big game, but it's usually very small game and insects and the like as you pointed out (I consider insects meat personally, though I'm not sure that's taxonomically corect or whatever).
Also, fire is not at all a recent invention, and certainly predates modern Homo Sapiens by AT LEAST 200,000 years, which is longer than we've even been on the planet. Please dude, if you're going to argue this shit with me you need to go take a evolutionary anthropology class or something. This is basic shit.
You're also wrong to think that we didn't eat meat until the invention of fire. It's pretty well accepted today that what allowed humans brains to grow to the size they are today was the scavenging of meat on the African Savannah, specifically cracking the bones of prey animals with crude tools, and sucking the bone marrow out. Bone marrow is EXTREMELY nutritious, and their would have been a ton of it available thanks to the fact that a lion can't pick up a big stone to crack a Gazelle's femur open to get to the good stuff, whereas a human or proto-human could. This video, though anecdotal, shows just how badass of scavengers humans are when they chase a pride of lions away from their kill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNeNTMmltyc
A human's brains accounts for about 2% of body weight, but receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization, aka a HUGE part of our metabolism. The question that I've already answered though is, how did we get enough nutrients to evolve such a massive and energy expensive brain when we were still basically just Apes running around the African Savannah with no knowledge of fire and no complex tools. The answer, as I've already given, is that we were great scavengers, and used our crude tools to access an energy source that was available only to us. This gave us the nutrient surplus required to continue making further use of more complex tools, and the ball gets rolling from their.
So your assertion that animal products weren't an early part of the human diet is completely false. It's true that we probably weren't eating a lot of large game, but that doesn't matter when you consider the fact that we had all the bone marrow and small game we could have wanted... Tropical fruits alone wouldn't have given humans of 150,000-200,000 years ago enough of a nutrient surplus to become what we are today. You need to go back and study your biological anthropology, because this is really 101 type shit.
As far as eating red meat every night for a week or two, I can say that over the summer I BBQ almost every night for a few months straight, and even after factoring in the amount of beer I drink, I still wake up feeling awesome. Sometimes I grill burgers for breakfest and I can honestly say that I feel super alert and energized for the rest of the day. Granted, I tend to eat responsibly raised, grass-fed meat, but that's what our ancestors would have been eating anyways. Add in the fact that our ancestors were eating the leanest, healthiest animals possible, and it makes sense that our later ancestors (Especially in cold Europe) would've been eating red meat for almost every meal. So yeah, you're wrong.
In fact you have to go back 85 million years to find an ancestor we share with a genuine red meat eating carnivore. We are not 'designed' to eat meat, we evolved eating a diet that mainly consisted of fruit and invertebrates (insects, worms etc.), with the occasional meat. This doesn't give us a reason to eat, or not eat meat. It's false to say that evolution suggests we are 'supposed' to do anything.
I'm glad you put "designed" in scare quotes and clarified it, because this is the dumbest shit I've read in a long time. Besides, Jane Goodall proved that our closest primate relatives (Chimps) eat meat any chance they get, and relish the opportunity to.
But anyways, ya you're right to say that it's false to say that "Evolution suggest we are supposed to do anything". To bring it back to the bone marrow, when proto-humans first started eating that stuff, it was probably a totally novel food source for us, which allowed us to become what we are today. Just because we hadn't evolved eating it doesn't mean that we weren't adapted to consume it. Similarly with grain and legumes, just because we didn't evolve eating that stuff, doesn't mean it's all bad for you. Empirical research however, shows that much of it is quite bad for you.
Our biology tells us that we can eat meat, that we shouldn't eat too much, and that we don't have to. That's all.
Again, I'll refer you to the article I posted about vegan families killing their young infants by forcing them onto a vegan diet. Sure their are a lot of variables present in each individual case, but when it's a clearly demonstrated pattern of babies dying on a vegan diet, that is pretty good circumstantial evidence that we need meat and are healthiest when we have it. Again, if you think of eating meat as a "dilemma", then why do you eat meat at all? Are you just not strong willed enough to resist, or do you admit the nutritional necessity of it?
