Ever since I started writing about food, indeed even before that, there has been a certain segment of the population who believes that I and others like me are evil (literally) because we eat meat.
I've come to refer to these people as carnivorous vegans. To be clear, I am not talking about all - or even most - vegetarian/vegans. Most are perfectly nice people and as the saying goes some of my best friends are vegetarians. But there is a select group of folks who patrol food blogging sites and other locales where people discuss their passions for food and scream that meat is murder and I and other carnivores are serial killers (as opposed to cereal killers I guess). You know who you are. Of course everyone is welcome to his or her opinions, and in fact I too find many people's eating habits disturbing, but I don't think a guy is Satan-spawn just because he went to McDonald's.
My arguments, as if I really needed to have any, for why I consume meat are manifold, and chief among them is that if it is raised with care, prepared with passion and served with love, then it's darn tasty. But another point I've always made is that humans are designed to be omnivores: we have eyes in the front of our heads (not the sides), large teeth, keen eyes and a digestive system that can handle it. We are predators, not prey. After all, when mankind crossed the Bering Straits we were not chasing the mushroom, we were chasing the mastodon.
This morning NPR ran a story that adds a little ammunition to this contention, evolutionary proof that meat made us smarter -- literally made our brains bigger. The additional protein in meat made it so our bodies could spend less energy on digestion, and more on creating gray matter. Not only that, but cooking the food -- actually applying heat to both the meat and the veggies -- is enormously beneficial as well. Not just nutritionally, but in terms of civilization:
It encourages people to share labor; it brings families and communities together at the end of the day and encourages conversation and story-telling -- all very human activities.
So we cooks are handy to have around.
All this is to say I am not a bad person. Or at least if I am it is not because I eat meat. But as my daughter once said, I could be a vegetarian if bacon grew on trees.
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Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn: "Last Meal Ribs": How To Make The Best Barbecue Ribs You've Ever Tasted
We're talking Southern ribs here, a style probably created by African slaves and as uniquely American as their other great contributions to our culture.
Now then. If you can prove that at every step of the evolutionary chain, that those with slightly larger brains ate meat and those with slightly smaller brains did not, then your theory might have something.
Maxine Fox
http://reverse-diabetes-naturally.blogspot.com/
Maxine Fox
http://reverse-diabetes-naturally.blogspot.com/
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showpost.php?p=4662167&postcount=34
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/archive/index.php/t-550940.html
One of the more shocking things that I had never heard before was a delay in tooth development. I only saw that once or twice in my searches, but still alarming. Most of these folks have switched over to ovo/lacto/pesco or some version of that.
Another few anecdotes- One of my friends is vegan and hasn't seen her period for almost three years since she became pregnant/had her baby, and a few other friends who went pesco because they could just not keep any weight on after a couple of years.
Anybody got a good recipe for bone marrow?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128958420&sc=fb&cc=fp
This has been proven over and over and over again now. Even Andrew Weil, who warned against saturated fat for years, came out publicly here on the Huff Post and admitted that the science is overwhelming. As he said:
"Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization."
It's time for vegans to drop the baloney argument (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) that saturated fat causes heart disease. As the recent meta-analysis of studies spanning 347,747 test subjects found, there is absolutely no link between saturated fat and heart disease.
Aside from all of the details, a diet that pushed us so far from our historical diet just doesn't make any sense. People can talk about making decisions but the fact is that evolution doesn't move that fast and there must be a recognition of and a concession to this historical diet if we are to be healthy.
Lions, by the way, will not eat cooked meat. They lap the blood and gorge on the organs that we find particularly revolting. We avoid blood. Rancid meat, covered in maggots and smelling to high heaven, produces in us a vomit response. Carnivores salivate when they see that. Carnivores don't eat apples. We do. We're herbivores. We're not "Omnivores" either. We can't suddenly, on a Tuesday, just impulsively decide to eat a rotting corpse and live. We are not prepared to eat meat and in fact, are equipped with some very ingenious features to prevent us from doing so and to save us even after we do. Save your life and go vegan.
Please eat squirrels, rabbits, wild hogs, nutrias, gophers, geese, ducks and deer. Just don't kill for sport. Kill as few animals as possible to sustain your family. Have soup, stew and ragouts. Include every vegetable that you can stand. Thrive on the abundance that this Earth provides and learn to provide for yourselves. Watch your birthrates. Don't have 20 kids like the Duggars. Refuse to participate in this Circus Spectacle of feeding from or supporting Big Meat and Big Ag. They are not necessary for a good diet. They do not have Americans best interest at heart. They profit from misery of the American people and animals they exploit. Lastly learn to cook.
1) Most people cook their vegetables in the microwave???? Hahaha, seriously?? Where do you live!?!?
2) "Heating" vegetables at an extremely low temp denaturs the vegetable's protein, which decreases allergic reactions and inflammation and also increases the bio availability of their macro nutrients. Although I 100% agree that raw veggies and their corresponding enzymes are an essential part of the balanced diet.
3) 99% of meat DOES come from factory farms, so lets change that asap. BUT I don't buy factory farmed meat and it doesn't look like the author of this article does either, so don't try and make meat synonymous with factory farming. One can and did exist without the other (factory farming didn't exist 100+ years ago).
4) The chemicals you talk about, FDA approved or not (and don't get me started on the FDA), won't be found in the meat I eat. And as I stated above, ingesting chemicals, and ingesting meat... not synonymous with each other either. And the small local farms that I buy my meat from aren't only "about money" and do care about their animals in every sense of the word.
Hopefully the magic of evolutionary biology will be gracing the minds of more and more people as time goes on.
We (and our massive brains) are absolutely, and undeniably, the products of large amounts of animal fat and protein consumption over millions of years. And we function at our best when we eat in that tradition.
So are you saying that these vegetarians weren't functioning at their best?
Cyrus the Great (Emperor of Persia, 6th century BC)
Pythagoras (mathematician, philosopher)
Socrates (ethicist and philosopher)
Plato (mathematician and philosopher)
Aristotle (logician and philosopher)
Matthew (disciple and biographer of Christ)
Plotinus (mystic and philosopher)
Plutarch (Greek historian and essayist)
Leonardo da Vinci (artist, scientist, inventor)
Isaac Newton (mathematician, physicist)
Henry David Thoreau (philosopher)
Thomas Edison (inventor, grandfather of iPod nation)
Vincent van Gogh (artist/painter)
Leo Tolstoy (novelist/essayist)
Mohandas Gandhi (statesman, peacemaker)
Albert Schweitzer (physician, polymath, theologian)
Albert Einstein (theoretical physicist)
Srinivasa Ramanujan (mathematician)
Cesar Chavez (advocate and activist)
Jane Goodall (primatologist and activist)
This is a pretty silly article. Of course our ancient ancestors who ate meat gained a sizable advantage over those that didn't. Animals became a better delivery system of calories and protein than foraging, so naturally those who hunted became better survivors. What does any of that have to do with the modern benefits of cutting meat from your diet?
Plus, pasture-raised or free-range meat just plain tastes better.
It's also the least sustainable group of "food products" out there. Grains are not sustainable agriculture. They can't be, they never will be. The only plant agriculture that's ultimately sustainable is based in perennials, and grazing animals.
However, they did not raise lots of grain to feed their livestock in pens. They allowed them to graze and eat all of that green stuff that contains those essential fatty acids we all need. So, in those days, heart disease was not the huge issue that it has become.
I tried being a vegetarian, gained a lot of water weight and became severely anemic. It took me a very long time to recover from that. I don't eat a lot of meat now, but I do eat some. Humanely raised.
Most Americans do eat too much meat these days but that isn't the whole story behind increased heart problems.
Dried beans and dark green leafy vegetables are especially good sources of iron, better on a per calorie basis than meat. Iron absorption is increased markedly by eating foods containing vitamin C along with foods containing iron.
Sources of Iron
Soybeans, lentils, blackstrap molasses, kidney beans, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, Swiss chard, tempeh, black beans, prune juice, beet greens, tahini, peas, bulghur, bok choy, raisins, watermelon, millet, kale....
So pointing to veg'nism as a reason for anemia is incorrect.
This has been common knowledge for ages.
For some reason (read $$$ + social/political agenda) this information took a long time to jump from academia to the healthcare/food industries, which have long been dominated by the grain-lobby educated, fat = bad, meat is murder crowd.