Quote:
Originally Posted by bubu
I think people shouldn't eat meat as often as we do. It's not about animal cruelty, your own body tells you that you don't really need to eat too much meat.
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bubu, what are some reasons you feel eating meat doesn't have to do with animal cruelty?
I read an interesting article in the Des Moines Register on May 2, 2010, in which an animal industry representative, David Martosko, shared his prepared response for activists who say killing livestock is murder:
"Eating meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder."
I think his response shows the livestock industry recognizes that raising animals and killing them involves cruelty, but this doesn't matter to some in the animal industry because they feel the tastiness of meat is the most important reason for eating animals and trumps ethical concerns.
The article, "Ag industry defender criticizes humane group," is the last one on this page, in case you want to read the source of the quote:
Green Fields: Vilsack says criticism is 'total nonsense' | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register)
Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
The argument is that without meat and fat in our diets, we would be so contrained by our food that evolution to the current size of our brain wouldn't even be a likely possibility. It illustrates the importance of meat for eating in our evolution.
There's another point as well which relates more to behaviour which is that while our stomachs got smaller, our brains got bigger as we shifted from mainly plant diets to including more meat. When we were herbivores, we had to spend more time eating and more energy digesting as plants are tough to digest. Meat is more easily digestible, gives quick energy, gives you more time to do things other than think about the next meal and so on. A herbivore diet constraints animals in that they need to spend more time eating and digesting. Getting rid of this constraint allowed us to evolve other behaviours.
I can't say that all of this is true always and everywhere, but it seems logical to me and I'd like to see what others think about it.
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Tore, I've actually read that it wasn't so much the meat in the diet that encouraged the increase in brain complexity and size (and shrinkage of gut length), but the cooking of food in general, which allows greater nutrient acquisition from a given quantity of food (both plant and animal), and also preserves the food (allowing storage and hoarding). However, are you talking about very early in hominid development, before the evolution of Homo sapiens?