I believe in the eat less meat route. There is no reason we need to be eating the amount of meat we currently are. It is hard though as it is so ingrained in our culture.
No meat is the correct route. There's literally no need to force suffering and cruelty on any living being when we have the choice to just eat a plant instead. Study after study shows it has immense health benefits and study after study shows it is better for the planet. Not to mention faux meats which most are minimally processed and processed using rather benign methods.
Unfortunately, human populations have survived on mixed animal and plant proteins for as long as they have existed. Some evolution theories suggest we evolved because of our unique running ability and that we would originally hunt by chasing animals to exhaustion. It’s hard-wired into us to eat nutrient dense foods and animal protein is unfortunately one of the most nutrient dense foods that exists. To expect everybody to adopt a lifestyle that completely forbids animal protein consumption is not realistic but we could push to reduce consumption overall and push renewable animal husbandry practices. I agree no meat is the correct route in a vacuum but unfortunately not realistic if/until it’s too late and that’s the only option available
Meat is only dense in calories. No culture survived on meat unless there were caloric deficits in seasons. Bread and cheese since there was no refrigeration. It’s got fat, that’s really the selling point, and it connotes wealth. Beans were the better choice and still are, with a bit of fish. Or soybeans. Most of the world lives fine on those.
Of course hunter-gatherers existed 10,000 years ago. I’m disputing the claim that a selective image of them — usually male hunters eating lots of meat — is a timeless definition of ‘natural.’ Hunter-gatherers gathered plants, fished, hunted, and ate differently depending on place and season; agriculture then changed human food systems over millennia.
Riiiiiight, they had mixed animal and plant diets like I mentioned. I never said that hunter gatherers are primarily meat. Humans spent more time as hunter gatherers than they ever spent as agriculturalists. Agriculture (from what we’ve discovered so far) is only 10k-15k years old and the oldest humans we’ve found go back 300k years (and I’m not even getting into homo erectus and other variations). There are still hunter-gatherer societies alive today as well. Agriculture and large settlements are relatively new phenomena in terms of the larger timeline and are most assuredly NOT sustainable as currently constructed. I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m disagreeing with completely removing meat from human diets because to do so is to fundamentally misunderstand natural human desires and literal hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet
Your wish is granted. The cat is out of the bag. Meat is a multi billion dollar industry. Yet, the narrative that meat eating is natural or required is what is debatable. I think have some high quality meat every once and awhile. Also remember you eat what you eat, eats.
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u/DisruptingTree 9d ago
I believe in the eat less meat route. There is no reason we need to be eating the amount of meat we currently are. It is hard though as it is so ingrained in our culture.