Quote:
Originally Posted by Dadhawk
Yea, he lost me immediately with that. probably not a good place for him to start his talk if he is trying to convince anyone that doesn't already "believe".
The bottom line is human, like most mammals, are omnivores and we evolved to eat meat and vegetables. We could "choose" to live off one or the other but it is not in our nature to do so. Frankly, to me the whole drive to create "non-meat" meat just points to that fact. It's great that they've come up with some of this processed foods (and that is exactly what it is) and some of it is actually good, but it just seems disingenuous to me to say we should all be vegans but we really need this stuff that tastes like the backside of a cow to do that.
|
When you say most, do you mean by species or biomass? Terrestrial or marine? There might be many more species of a particular type like rodents, but there might be more biomass of another. In general, being omnivorous and opportunistic could be seen as evolutionarily favorable because it would lead to a better chance of survival, but many large terrestrial mammals are herbivores because plants are abundant and many marine mammals are carnivores because animals are abundant. Just because we were omnivores doesn't mean we need to stay omnivores. Many species evolved to change their diets including us. For instance, we know humans have evolved to be more tolerant of lactose since we began to source dairy products, but this is fairly recent in our evolutionary history, so by a similar line of logic, we shouldn't be eating dairy products since it wasn't part of our evolutionary history up until 12,000 years ago for a percentage of the human population. Our digestive tracts are more similar to herbivores than carnivores, especially herbivores that have been cooking food, which we have been doing for hundred of thousands to millions of years. If we compare modern human teeth to ancestors like ancient humans, neanderthals and other descendants, and if we compare wear patterns then we see that humans have more in common with other herbivores than carnivores or even than other omnivores like bears, which get 90% of their food from vegetables:
https://medium.com/four-pursuits-ven...s-6f492d78f605
I don't think it is that we need to eat these things. We have built culinary dishes and cultures around eating meat, so these vegan-meat alternatives are there for those that want to still eat meat, but many vegans have been vegans for life like maybe their parents were vegans, so it is all they know. For instance, the largest country with vegetarians is India with estimates around a quarter to a third or more being vegetarian, and their cuisine reflects a lot of choices that is vegetarian.
Regardless, we do many things that are unnatural or that differed from our past, so using a "natural" argument as to why we should continue to eat animals, especially when it means being cruel to animals and damaging the earth in the process actually seems more contrived.