Or, we’ll turn to alternative methods, like vat grown meat or plants engineered to grow meat.
For cutting plants ( and meat, of course ). Rabbits are well known for their incisors. We’ve had simple stone tools and fire long enough that our teeth won’t tell you too much about what’s natural for us anyway. It’s natural for us to cut what we eat with a tool, whether it’s a flint blade or a steel one. For that matter, we grind grain and crack nuts with tools, and have for a very long time.
A more important point is that we have the intestines of an omnivore, like xtisme said; shorter than a herbivore, longer than a carnivore. We have the biochemistry of an omnivore or carnivore; as has been pointed out, it’s possible to eat a vegetarian diet and stay healthy - if you know what you are doing. It’s easy to eat one and get sick, because we aren’t really made for it.
As for that article xtisme mentioned : Cecil Speaks !
I have a somewhat different view of this. I suspect that long term, a bunch of meat eaters might serve the planet better than a bunch of vegans. Here’s my thinking…
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Vegans require significantly less farmland to produce their food needs
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Vegans require about the same amount of industrial land to provide for their other needs (cars, energy, segways, iPods, George Foreman grills).
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Humans will continue to overpopulate this planet until the earth pushes back and puts a stop to it in whatever way it can.
ergo: A significant vegetarian population will result in more people, more cars, more industrial parks, and less lush farmland filled with cows softly mooing their way towards a sudden blunt trauma demise.
I’m reminded of a sci fi story where aliens happened upon a nearly dead Earth. They investigated, and discovered that a well meaning scientist had created symbiotic bacteria that would allow humans to eat any plant, in order to solve world hunger. It worked - and people kept breeding, and eating, and breeding, and eating - until they ate so much that the ecology and then civilization collapsed. The survivors kept on eating what they could find to stay alive, never allowing the ecology to recover, until they drove all macroscopic plant life extinct, and died out themselves. The aliens captain blew up his ship, out of fear that someone on his own overpopulated world would be inspired to try the same thing.
Yes, but they don’t need their heads to live!
CMC fnord!
Hmm, I agree with that. Though a vegan who is thinking like this is probably more likely to think about their ecological footprint overall. I know a lot of people who try to live as far out of capitalism as possible, not supporting new production, living as much off of second hand stuff and things that would be thrown out. One guy I know seems to know the schedule or when stores throw produce out really really well.
No. That simply isn’t true, and others have already explained why. There are vast areas of the Earth that can produce almost no human utilisable food without the biomass first being passed through an animal.
By refusing to eat animal products from these vast areas vegans are forced to produce their food on more productive areas of land through intensive production.
That means that vegans in fact require significantly more farmland to produce their food needs.
Once again not true, and once again others have explained why this is not the case.
By refusing to eat extensively produced protein from grazing lands or the oceans vegans are forced to rely on intensively produced legume crops for thier protein. The production and processing of those legume crops requires far more industrial land for the fertiliser and pesticide production, the production of the irrigation pumps and so on and so forth. As a result vegans require significantly more industrial land to provide for their needs.
This is just nonsense. It’s greenie porn.
The indisputable and provable truth is that human population growth rate invariably declines as soon as living standards reach a minimal level. It has happened everywhere in the world.
The fact is that the human population will stabilise at around 9 billion within my lifetime. Therafter it will begins an exponential decline and is predicted to stabilise at around 3 billion by 2200.
The idea that the “the Earth” will “put a stop” to overpopulation, as though the planet were living entity, is pure greenie porn. Humans have overcome everything “the Earth” can thorw at us and have increased our populations in large part to achieve that.
It has been the ability of our technology to prevent The Earth from killing us and our children that has led to a decline in population. Wealth has put a stop to overpopulation worldwide, and as wealth continues to increase population will similarly decline.
Well if only every single point that your argument was based on wasn’t provably wrong there might be something to that. As it is…
Umm, the Earth is a living entity. I mean I guess it depends on how you define living, but I fail to see the difference between a micro eco-system like myself and a macro eco-system like the Earth.
Depressing though it is, you probably mean that.
Planets don’t reproduce. Once you’ve digested that pertinent fact then we can move on to the plethora of other ways in which planets are clearly non-living.
That’s a misleading, apologist, and rabbicentric excuse for an answer, and I expect you to respond with some real facts in the future. Anyone who has seen Monty Python knows rabbits are demented killing machines entirely capable of devouring a full grown man.
This is definitely true, but the wide variety of plant products you need to get the all of the essential amino acids and nutrients the body needs sort of proves xtisme’s point that we’re naturally omnivores (which no one has contested in this thread, obviously.)
It also shows why it’s a good thing we’re omnivores. It’s certainly possible to get all the essential fatty acids, nutrients and et cetera from exclusively a plant diet, that is, when you have access to supplements and plants grown across the globe and shipped to your region via massive supply chains. Ancient man didn’t have that, they had, by and large, what was around them, and unless they were part of a very small percentage of the world that lived in a place that naturally grew plants that gave them EVERYTHING they needed, they would have been in bad shape without meat. Also of course, because ancient man weren’t farmers and didn’t have advanced food storage techniques. We can eat vegetables and fruit all winter long. Ancient man would have been in bad shape when the winter killed most of the plant-food if they hadn’t been able to consume animals.
I’ve actually seen it suggested that grains are inherently bad for us, since paleolithic man had no access to grains.
I actually have seen little evidence suggesting “organic” crops are higher quality. Technology allows us to keep insects and other bad things off the plants while they grow, and also allows us to genetically modify them so they grow larger, as well as use fertilizers to keep the soil rich.
Organic produce is, imo a “designer” food these days, ignoring the benefits of modern society without any real reason. It’s fine for organic produce to exist on the designer level, but actually doing away with all “non-organic” produce production could easily result in the mass starvation of the world, you don’t get a human population of 6.5 billion by foregoing the use of modern agricultural technology.
“That’s no ordinary rabbit !” Most rabbits are not like the Vorpal Bunny - yet. It was obviously part of Bunnydom’s super-rabbitsoldier program that King Arthur and crew stumbled upon. Fortunately, it proved vulnerable to explosives, and the Vorpal Bunny’s loss before it could breed set back the program, which is why they have yet to unleash their Hopping Legions upon us. So far.
Do you really think so? I see a future when hip-hop celebrities will wear 64-ounce prime rib medallions around their necks as a show of status, where suburbanites drive giant SUV’s that run on lambchops.
For once, I agree with Hyde. My boyfriend works for Whole Foods in purchasing. Even with a generous employee discount, if he bought groceries solely where he works, he would be spending four or five times as much as he does in the regular grocery store. Clearly, if “organic” is better it’s better only for the rich.
Actually I think you’ve got it backwards. Strictly organic food is of dubious sustainability because without efficiency multipliers like fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides, it requires the sacrifice of a lot more land to sustain humans. Ultimately though, animal farming requires more energy and water than equivalent amounts of grain and vegetables. I don’t have cites for those but Harper’s had a good article a year or so ago about how a staggering amount of of US energy consumption goes into the farming, processing, and transportation of meat and processed foods. So in this case it seems that the veggies have it right as far as environmentalism but the commercialists have it right as far as land conservation.
The exact same thing is true of an omnivore diet. There is nothing inherently about vegetarianism that makes it more difficult; plenty of people eat themselves to heart disease and diabetes on omnivore diets.
Depends on what you define as “difficult.”
The reason omnivorous diets are “easier” is you’re much less likely to run into a deficiency disease, in “nature” by living as an omnivorous human. Sure, with modern technology and a thorough understanding of what supplements you need to take and what exotic, imported-from halfway-across-the-world plants to eat it’s easy to be a perfectly healthy vegetarian. But that’s not realistic for the human population at large, and even if it is now, vegetarianism (or living as a pure carnivore) is inherently more difficult.
I think vegetarianism is inherently more difficult for the following reasons:
-The body needs protein, in many areas of the world, it’s difficult to find lots of protein rich plants in nature
-The body needs the Essential Fatty Acids, said acids are way more difficult to obtain through plant matter alone (although in general almost no one gets as much EFA as they need, it’s hard without a supplement in the first place)
-The body needs Vitamin B12–this one is tricky
The issue of getting a wide mix of vegetarian fare, rich in proteins, with a nice balance of fat (essential for life) and carbohydrates (essential for energy) is solved “easily” by having a global network of trade and massive supply chains coupled with high disposable income and the ability to be very picky about what you buy at the supermarket.
The issue with EFAs is possibly a non-issue, as I believe most people are chronically EFA deficient.
B12 is both essential and virtually non-existant in nature from exclusively plant-sources. B12 actually can’t be produced by any plant or animal, but the bacteria that can produce it frequently thrive in meat and dairy products.
The few exclusively non-animal sources I’m aware of are either incredibly obscure or require significant processing, for example fermented soy products can contain B12. As does the Chinese herb Dang Gui.
In the modern world, you easily sidestep this problem with B12 supplements, B12 fortified foods (tons of foods like breakfast cereal are fortified with B120 or et cetera.
But when the only way a vegetarian diet is feasible is with:
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The benefit of disposable income + global interlocking trade and massive supply chains
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Modern supplements or highly processed, selective foods
I find it hard to accept that such a diet is no more “inherently difficult” than omnivorism. For some people, the difficulty of adhering to a strict vegetarian diet would not only be inherently greater, it would be insurmountable or even deadly.
Whoever suggested that was a fool. We have grindstones used to proces grains dating from 30, 000 YBP, and even chimpanzees consume large quantities of grains when they are available.
For at least part of the year paleolithic man had more access to grains than to any other foodstuff.
The people in question are those who advocate the “Paleolithic Diet.” Their contention is, since paleolithic man didn’t have wide access to grains (or dairy products) both are best left unconsumed.
Even if humans did consume grains 30,000 YBP, the paleolithic era is generally regarded as having started 2.5 million years ago and to have ended about 10,000 years ago with the beginning of the neolithic era, so grain consumption would still represent only a very small part of human* history. One of their underlying arguments is that 10,000 years (or 30,000 years if we’re to believe humans widely consumed grains that long ago) isn’t long enough for evolutionary changes to take place in human physiology, thus the body isn’t “adapted” for eating grains.
I’m not actually a proponent of the “Paleolithic Diet” in fact I think it’s pretty stupid and pointless. Especially because it’s widely believed that adulthood production of lactase is a relatively new phenomenon, having become widespread in some populations in the last 10,000 years (while I believe most of the world’s population continues to be lactose intolerant, the overwhelming majority in some populations are not, most of Europe and those of European ancestry have lactose intolerance rates under 10%) demonstrating that significant changes to physiology can indeed happen over such a short time period.