Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In response to my recent post about whether we could feed more people if everyone were vegetarians (I say no), a poster named Marissa wrote a heartfelt paean to Veganism.
Figure 1. Perhaps the world’s best-known adherent of a strict Vegan diet.
Vegans are a kind of fundamentalist sect of born-again vegetarians who eat exclusively vegetables, no eggs, no fish, no milk, no cheese, no insects. Merissa’s post starts off as follows:
Ok, I don’t think I have read one comment from a true vegan on this thread. Well I am Vegan and let me share with you the benefits that I have experienced …
Merissa follows with a list of the things s/he has gotten from following a Vegan diet. This stirred me to write again about why people eat meat.
Merissa, I think that it is great that you have found a way of eating that works for you. The problem is not that some people find that vegetarianism or Veganism works for them. That’s a good thing. I say more power to you. You should eat exactly what feels best for your life and your body. I ate vegetarian for three years myself.
Now perhaps it’s something in the vegetables that causes the problem, I don’t know. But all too often, recent initiates into the mysteries of some branch of Vegetableism then feel compelled to tell me how much better the world would be if every single person ate, not what works for them, but what works for the Vegetableist in question. And this is all too often accompanied by the claim that we could feed more people if humans only ate vegetables.
For the host of reasons I listed in the previous post, people around the planet have found it advantageous to domesticate and keep (and eat) animals. Perhaps some random Vegan knows more about how to scratch out a living in a hostile world than do all of the billions of poor farmers and householders around the planet, maybe they’re all wrong to keep chickens and pigs and such, maybe we might be able to feed more people if we were all vegetarians … but I doubt it very much. The farmers and the poor around the planet aren’t that stupid.
It has occasionally been my good fortune to work and spend time with very poor people, the dollar a day people, the people at the very opposite end of the economic spectrum from me, or you, or anyone rich enough to own a computer or a pair of nice shoes. There’s a lot to learn at that end of the economy, including about people’s diets. To understand the position of meat in the global diet, you need to remember that most people don’t eat the same as you and me and the folks who own computers and nice shoes. Most people on the planet are already vegetarians most of the time … only not by choice. For most people, meat is a delicacy. It is not on the menu very often.
Once when I was working in Liberia, in West Africa, they were burning a local sugar cane field. The whole village came out with clubs. They surrounded the fire in a long line. When the fire chased the cane rats out of the burning cane, they clubbed the rats and took them home and ate them. I found out that cane rat fried up in slightly over-the-hill orange colored oil palm oil (no refrigeration) tastes pretty good, although for a couple days afterwards I belched more rancid palm oil fumes than an out-of-tune biodiesel Volkwagen …
And of course cane rat is considered a good thing, meat for the family.
Here’s the reason why cane rat is a delicacy, why kids lined up to get some of the meat. The villagers that eat that meat are stronger and healthier and more resistant to disease and quicker to heal and faster growing than the villagers who don’t eat that meat. Simple as that. The chance to eat meat doesn’t come up often. When that chance comes up, those people that eat the meat improve their chances of living compared to those who don’t eat meat.
Our bodies know that and have known it since forever. You could see it in the kids’ eyes, they could smell it, they wanted it, their bodies responded without conscious thought. Meat makes you stronger, it provides a host of vitamins and minerals, it is powerful food. Which is why people eat meat, in Africa and around the planet. It increases their odds of survival in a harsh and unforgiving environment. So they ate cane rats.
Here’s another story from another time and place, with the same subject. One late afternoon, through a series of misunderstandings and coincidences, I found myself sitting in the welcome shade of some trees in a railroad yard in Mexico, waiting to hop a freight train. Two young boys came by, brothers the older one said, perhaps four and seven years old. Built on the usual blueprint of the poor, undersized and skinny. I struck up a conversation in Spanish with the seven year old. The younger boy never said a word. He just trailed a few feet behind his older brother, and watched everything with black shiny eyes.
The older boy had a slingshot made of a tree branch “Y” fork, with a dozen or more ordinary rubber bands of all sizes and colors attached to each fork of the “Y” and to the leather pouch.
I asked what they were doing. The boy said they came to the railroad lines because there were perfectly round stones for his slingshot in the railroad bed. He showed me how hard it was to pull his slingshot. Oh, I suppose you are the grán cazador, the mighty hunter, I jested.
Si, Señor, yo soy, he explained very soberly in Spanish, yes, Sir, I am.
My skepticism must have shown in my eyes. Mira, he said, watch.
He searched around, picked up and discarded a few stones, finally settling on exactly the right one. He put it in the pouch of the slingshot, and started walking around and gazing intently up into the tree branches above us. He stopped, pulled back and let fly.
There was a “poof” sound up in the tree, and a bird the size of a small robin, that I didn’t even know was in the tree, tumbled down at my feet. He and his tiny brother both jumped on it, and he twisted its neck in an economical, practised fashion.
With my mouth hanging open, I hastened to assure him that I was wrong to doubt his word. I said he was indeed a skilled hunter. I asked what he would do with the bird. Oh, para comer, señor, it’s for food, sir, he said. I said are you going to take it home to your mamá to cook it? Oh, no, Señor, somos siete, he said … oh no, Sir … there’s seven of us kids … I nodded my understanding.
He and his short confederate scurried off. They returned with some grass and twigs. He pulled out a tattered matchbook and lit a fire. In no time he had plucked that bird, gutted it, skewered it, and had it cooking over the fire. I watched in astonishment.
I walked to the corner where an old lady was frying tacos on a dished-top tin can stove. I bought a few potato tacos the size of silver dollars. She didn’t sell meat tacos, poor people don’t buy meat tacos. She made tacos with potatoes and tacos with beans. I brought them back, and gave most of them to the midget hunter and his mini-amigo. And God damn it, he wanted me to take half the bird, but I could see their eyes caressing it.
So I told them I could only eat a small bite on account of my liver. That being the common explanation there for any physical infirmity, the older boy nodded sagely. He agreed that a man has to take care of his liver, you can’t be too careful. He said his liver was fine, thanks, and they happily polished off that bird. I bought another round of potato tacos to celebrate, which had similarly short lifetimes.
And you know, as the two of them sat there content under the tree, sucking on the bird bones and watching the sun set, somehow I just didn’t have the heart to tell that small man and his smaller brother-in-arms just how much better off he and his little bitty buddy and the rest of the world would be if only they and everyone else became vegans …
My best to all,
w.
[UPDATE] Twelve years after I wrote this, science is finally catching up with what every kid on a cattle ranch knows … see “Going Vegan Isn’t the Most Sustainable Option for Humanity“.
Sleepalot says:
October 20, 2010 at 2:17 am
“A great deal of meat is reared in factory type conditions and suffer
considerable stress.”
Whereas in the wild, zebra get followed around by lions…
Plenty of stress there, the lion has to run fast to get a meal. The zebra..he just has to run faster..for longer!
It’s simple-We eat cows because they are able to break down the cellulose in grass and we aren’t. It’s not, as some vegetarians seem to think, that perfectly edible vegetables get fed to livestock. These animals primarily are grazers and eat grass. And we don’t, because we wouldn’t be able to break down the cellulose for the most part, and it would just end up as “dietary fiber” not as calories our bodies can use for energy. Of course we could feed more people if people could eat grass. But we can’t, really. We aren’t ruminants.
We could also produce plenty of corn and wheat to feed the world here in America if we didn’t have subsidies for not growing crops that date back to the New Deal, and ethanol mandates. Of course, farmers will complain that this would make prices drop precipitously. Duh! How are you going to feed the world by charging people too much for food? At the very least it makes little sense for the New Deal subsidies meant to protect small farmers from flooding their market and bankrupting each other, to now go to big Agribusiness that surely doesn’t need protection from this by the government as they are hardly the “little guy”.
George says:
October 20, 2010 at 6:40 am
Something tells me, George, that you too have spent some time in Asia. I draw the line at balut, too.
I see great parallels between the AGW myth and the cholesterol myth, especially the one-sided, ‘alarmist’ views projected by our governments and the public media.
That is why so few of us know that cholesterol is no more of a villain than carbon dioxide. In fact it is an essential building block of our bodies.
Eating foods high in cholesterol is not dangerous, while forcing your blood cholesterol levels down with chemicals is dangerous, and will not prevent heart disease.
To become more informed read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffe_Ravnskov
Chad Woodburn- I second what you have said also. Nutrition is the key. I and my wife follow a similar program, too. We have a friend who is on the “Sinatra proticol” wich is identical to your program. She had dramatic improvement in her heart function.
“Live” interviews are DEADLY! (how does this connect? Bear with me…)…
In the 1980’s a “stringer” for National Public Radio was interviewing a woman living in Brazil, who was trying to teach the “locals” to raise Iguanas for a “meat stock”. (She was German, I recall. Collective intelligence here, can anyone identify her for me?)
The interviewer started to do the TYPICAL thing and proposed that if the Iquana could be used instead of cattle, she’d put the “rancheros” out of business, and “save the rainforest”.
To which the German lady (with a nice, rememberance of WWII in her accent..) said, “Oh, if you want to save the rain forest, just kill all the peasants…”
At this point there was a noticible “lag”, and the reporter…trying desperately to recover mumbled, “Ah….could you explain what you mean by that?” The German lady, being intellectually pretty smart, immediately said: “I don’t really mean that to happen, of course I’m working against that. But you must KNOW that the RANCHEROS do not cut down the rain forest. You see the soil down here is so poor, that the peasants engage in what is known as ‘slash and burn’ agriculture. That is, they cut down the boundary of the rainforest. When it has dried enough, they burn it. The “potash” enables the soil for, oh, maybe 10 years, and they farm that freshly burned area for that time. After they deplete that, they ‘slash and burn’ again. The Rancheros merely do the ONLY thing you can do with the soil that is left over. That would be to allow the cattle to graze on the grass that grows on the soil, which is about all it can grow!”
Now I hope it doesn’t take a ‘rocket scientist’ to realize that what this implies is CATTLE RANCHING CAN USE SOILS WHICH CANNOT BE USED FOR GROWING VIABLE PLANT CROPS!
That FACT is what blows the VEGAN/Soil Conservation/Energy efficiency STRAW MAN, right off the post.
Hope some folks had time to read this.
Max (Sometimes called MAD)
“gianmarko says:
October 20, 2010 at 2:31 am
i guess evolution put eyes in front of our skull so we could hunt carrots?
”
Argument exists that evolution put them there so you could judge the distance to the next branch properly, even so vegan’s never happening until bacon and ribeye are reclassified as legumes….
Wade says:
October 20, 2010 at 5:22 am
…. You can only get vitamin B12 from meat.
Not true. For those of us in UK, at least. We have a product called Marmite. Originally derived from the yeast waste from brewing beer, not sure if that’s still the case.
Delicious on buttered toast. Although there is a strange sect who claim to hate the stuff.
(Those in Oz have a similar, if inferior, product called Vegemite)
Why is it vegans must supplement their diet with B-vitamins? Because our bodies are designed to eat meat and obtain essential nutrients from it.
Veganism is anti-evolution. It is a denial of basic nutritional science. Go ahead and eat that way if YOU wish. Just don’t preach to me about it.
I eat a vegan diet mostly, especially between meals.
Damn! Forgot to say that Marmite is rich in B12.
Just to note that cooking food adequately kills the little beasties that can otherwise do you great harm: E. Coli forms, Salmonella, Shigella, etc., Staph., Amoebas, Giardia, Trichina worm, etc. neutralizes botulinus toxin, other bacterial “exo” and “endo” toxins, etc.. I’m assuming that’s the main reason we cook food, “Pasteurize” it, irradiate it.
I’ve been a vegetarian for 30 years. I don’t tell others how they should eat, or live. Nor am I entertained by several pages of largely incoherent drivel (the intellect of the poor, who mostly can’t eat meat, proves we are meat-eaters by nature?) telling me how to eat or live.
You can rant about people choosing to eschew meat if you want. Mock me, the Hindus and the Jains, maybe even throw in a glib comment about silly Jews and Muslims missing out on their bacon sandwiches. But don’t act like you are writing an intelligent article from high moral ground. Just admit you are making fun of people who make different choices than you.
Interestingly, cane rats are not rats at all. While they are rodents, they are closer to porcupines on the spiky family tree. (And reputedly are very tasty, tasting like pork.) A professor I once knew, who died before her time in a car accident, was then conducting a study for facilitating domestic breeding of cane rats here in Africa, for the table.
Anyone who thinks eating meat is bad for you should really read Gary Taube’s excellent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Vegans are the most evil of doctor doom people in their sport to starve the animals and insects to death by eating all their food supply.
That’s why always believed they all were from Vegas, what with the vegan behavior of gambling away all their resources on one lucky feel good idea of a number on everyone else’s expense.
Donald (S.Australia) says – October 20, 2010 at 2:44 am: Wasn’t Hitler the world’s best known vegan? ( Or was he some some variant of the quackery?)
redneck says – October 20, 2010 at 7:32 am: Not only Hitler but also Ghandi. Go figure.
Hitler wasn’t vegan or vegetarian, though, in reality. Go figure 😉
Marissa ???
Nice Fig.1 illustration. “Watts up (with that), Doc?”
Stefan says:
October 20, 2010 at 4:29 am
@Ron House
OK, article is inflammatory.
As is your line of questioning…
My perspective is quite simple:
When I am willing to kill, skin, gut, cut and cook an animal then I will also be willing to eat it… until such time I prefer to remain vegetarian.
I do not have much to say regarding the vegan-carnivore spectrum except I am suspicious of the wisdom of either extreme.
I would say with regard to eating well and economically it is a benefit to be able to cook wholesome, and importantly, tasty meals.
I think that there maybe a parallel between diet and climatic change in that they are both likely to get people excited, that there are entrenched belief systems at play, and the science is a bit of a mess. It is arguable that dietry science could be more important than climate science. Personally I think the science be a mess.
I have seen so many foodstuffs demonised, eggs, butter, milk fat, subcutaneous animal fat, intramuscular animal fat, and cheese to name some. Yet the scientific evidence seems contradictory.
I do think that we may have a industrialised food problem, in that it is technically possible to concoct many meals using ingredients that would not work in a home kitchen. By this I mean the ability to use various binders and gums, stabilisers, flavour enhancers, colourings, and treatment procedures to increase the amounts of fats, often hard vegetable fats, MRM, and connective tissue, beyond what would hold together or be palatable in normal cooking.
Also, as an observation, the industrialisation of meat processing seems to have led to an imbalalnce in what is openly consummed by the customer. Live stock produce an array of products of which a goodly proportion is offal, head meats, (brains, brawn, tongue), lungs (lights), kidney, liver, heart, and stomach, as well as cheap cuts like belly, that seem to have dropped of the radar, as has natural fat content, being either trimmed off or selected against in the case of marbling. A lot of very tasty options have been somehow dropped from the menu. I do realise that cooking is an inconvenience to many, sometimes from simply not knowing how to cook and not let it consume a lot of time and effort.
I do believe that there are vegetarians that cannot cook, which to me seems bizarre as there is no comparison between ready to eat vegetarian cuisine and freshly prepared vegetarian meals, I might also add that the standard of vegetarian menus in restaurants that do not specialise in vegetarian/vegan cuisine can be less than appetising.
So I guess my appeal, is to eat better, and for those that proclaim omnivorism to more broadly practise it and eat a wide range of both animal parts and vegetables, or at least seek them out and try them. For those that can, cook. For those that can’t, try to learn. Spending hours in the kitchen is neither necessry not beneficial, nor is it essential to use every pot and pan.
I have at sometime cooked and eaten all of the above and whereas we all have preferences none of it need be unwholesome, nor do I believe any of it was dangerous, bear in mind that brains are >10% cholesterol by dry matter and hence forbidden by the food police. Sadly I used dangerous with the past tense as a catasptrophic calamity in husbandry has led to a taint in animal products epitomised by the prion (BSE) affair.
So eat well, and for those that haven’t tried seek out the best in vegetarian cooking, it has a reputation for being boring and bland, yet the best ranks with the finest haut cuisine, and conversely for those omnivores that haven’t, seek out wild game or traditionally bred and husbanded livestock breeds.
Lastly, a personal gripe, why o why did we permit the homogenisation of milk to become the norm and sometimes the only option, I find it to be bland, chalky, with a poor mouth feel.
Best Wishes
Alex
Well Merissa is evidently not aware that we all started out as vegans; and it didn’t work out too well for us.
Our ancestors spent every waking hour, either having sex, or clambering around in fig trees picking figs; totally kosher vegan food; and also free clean green renewable energy.
Unfortunately they were a bit on the large and heavy side to get out to the thinner branches where the best sun fed (solar energy) figs could be gathered; so all those hordes of little monkeys got all the good figs.
Then one of our ancestors got a bright idea; either by falling out of the tree, and hitting his head on a rock, or else having a branch spring back and hit him in the head. Ouch! that hurts ! and then there’s all those stars you see till you gather your senses again.
So our thinking ancestor got the idea that we should let the monkeys get all of the good figs, and then we should grab them and kill their little A**** by hitting them on the head with a stick, or bashing them on the tree trunk; and then we could eat them instead of risking getting out there to the good figs.
Then we noticed that there were a lot of really big critters down on the ground eating grass; so we figured that must be good since they got really big on the stuff. Well the grass tasted like; well you know what it tasted like. So we figured we could play the same trick on the zebras and gazelles that we used on the monkeys; we just needed some bigger sticks and some pointed ones.
We really hit pay dirt one day, when a lightning stirke set fire to some long grass, that some water buffalows or hippos were feeding in, and they got caughtup, in the fire and got cooked.
Man was that cooked striped meat ever good and tasty ! Almost as good as a Big Mac.
Well needless to say; having discovered fire and stored chemical energy which it released to cook our steaks, we now could effectively eat all that grass that tastes like; well you know what it tastes like.
So Merissa, vegan diet was not able to get us on the ground, so we could travel and search for even more resources and food options; and the sex must have got better too, because our numbers really started to grow.
But if you really want to be a true vegan Merissa; why don’t you eschew all the advanced living amenities that have been provide by us omnivores; who found more efficient ways for (us) to feed, giving us the time and resources to develop all those goodies that you still want to have along with your vegan way of life.
And don’t go taking any of our animals for clothing to warm your vegan body which can’t generate enough heat from figs to survive a harsh winter.
Good post, and good arguments, but let’s not forget that those of us in the 1st world, mostly Western countries, are guilty of eating TOO MUCH meat now. Heart disease, problems from TOO MUCH of EVERYTHING good we get from meat, yadda yadda yadda. At age 35 I was diagnosed with extremely high cholesterol, and of course since all that meat was salted to mighty tasty levels, my blood pressure was in stroke territory. I cut way back on the meat and salt, and am vastly healthier. For a short time when I was trying to get my cholesterol down, I tried to cut back entirely but was unsuccessful. Turns out caucasians don’t take well to a meatless diet. Go figure. So today, when I eat my beans, it will have pork in it. Sweet, sweet pork.
The reason my grandfather’s generation could get away with all that meat, eggs, and salt, was because they were pre-industrialized farmers. Most the folks you see waddling into your local Chinese restaurant are obviously not manual laborers of my grandfather’s calibre.
And of course, since we often speak disparagingly of government subsidies allowing for unsustainable practices, meat is extremely heavily subsidized in the west. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that meat should naturally be more expensive than plants: if it’s wild meat, it has to be hunted, which takes skill and time. If it’s on a farm, it has to be either pastured or held in a pen, and if it’s held in a pen it will naturally need to be fed some sort of food grown somewhere. As an example, let’s say the livestock is being fed corn that was likely grown in an irrigated field. That corn needed every bit as much labor, fertilization, and payment for pumping water as you would for a human crop. (And remember the “no food for fuel” debate? That corn being used to make ethanol is feed corn.) In addition, someone has to feed that corn to the animals and likely someone is paying to have more water, this time for the livestock (probably the same water thanks to the water cycle, but hey, it takes energy to pump that water) and of course that livestock will need to be slaughtered properly, packaged, and stored. A pork chop should naturally be more expensive than an equivalent slab of unappetizing tofu. And I haven’t even gotten into all the crap they inject the livestock with to grow it fast enough for our insatiable appetite for more and more meat!
…eat exclusively vegetables, …, no insects.
So apparently they never ride a motorcycle without a helmet!
I think my wife would exist on home-grown garden-fresh tomatoes if (a) that would keep her healthy, and (b) I could keep her supplied with them. Unfortunately, the window of ripeness here lasts – sometimes – all of five weeks. Bummer.
~~~~~
Pamela,
Harvesting, preparing, and grilling rattlesnake is a much more exhilarating experience than is working up a good mess of tripe. Not that there is anything wrong with tribe, or head cheese, but each to her/his own.