There aren’t many arguments left that rely on the notion of the ideal human in a state of nature. Except, for some odd reason, when it comes to the ethics of what we eat.
On the one hand, you have the meat-eaters, sagely tapping their canine teeth with one hand as they dip their Chicken McNuggets with the other. According to this school of thought, Man is at the top of the Food Chain and who are we to argue with Nature? We can eat meat; therefore we must. Pass the cronut burgers.
Matthew Parris recently wrote a clever, interesting and ultimately unfounded piece for The Times of London to explain why he would rather eat the flesh of a dead animal than meat grown in a lab.
What “gives meat its edge,” he argues, is the very thing that makes him uncomfortable with it. “I’m afraid the knowledge that this burger was never a cow dulls the attraction, while the knowledge that I’m eating another creature sharpens it. Sharpens both the attraction and the horror. At some level in our psyche, however buried, I think that carnivores want to know they have killed.”
I applaud Parris’ self-examination, but not his willingness to apply pop evolutionary psychology to the entire human species. The reference to a “buried” emotion conveniently heads off any contradiction from those of us who don’t find that knowing they’ve killed gives their meals more flavour.
“We must surely all have the hunter’s instinct buried somewhere within us,” Parris writes. (When the word “surely” appears in an opinion article, that’s a sign the writer’s on shaky ground.)
Some vegetarians and vegans have decided to meet the meat-eaters on paleolithic territory and fight the battle there. In a recent op-ed for the Vancouver Sun, Patricia Tallman argued that the shape of human teeth and intestines, even our fingernails, puts us firmly in the herbivore category.
“Anthropological evidence and scientific comparison of our anatomical and physiological features demonstrate that humans are designed to be plant-eaters,” she wrote.
Within a single sentence, Tallman appeals to both science and, perhaps unwittingly, creationism. No, humans weren’t designed to be plant-eaters, any more than they were designed to be meat-eaters.
We weren’t “designed” at all. We evolved. We evolved in ways that allow us to eat and benefit from a remarkable variety of plants and animals, which has proved very useful.
If we are not trying to obey the dictates of religion or of an anthropomorphized concept of Nature, then each individual need only ask two questions:
• How much meat do I need to eat to be healthy?
• How much meat is best, from environmental, animal-rights, economic and other standpoints, for our human civilization to consume?
Speaking for myself, the answer to Question 1 is zero. I haven’t eaten meat for about a decade and I’m in very good health. Protein’s easy to get, iron and the omegas require a little planning, and unless you’re a strict, long-term vegan, B12 isn’t usually an issue.
Question 2 is a little more complicated, but there is a consensus, even among defenders of meat production, that humanity could consume a lot less meat than it does today. If there comes a day when evidence shows that humanity en masse is not consuming enough meat to keep the planet functioning, I’ll reconsider my vegetarianism, although I don’t relish the idea.
Food brings out the weird in people. Despite the many modern advances in farming and food technology, the notion persists that pre-modern or traditional food is healthy food, from the Paleo diet to Michael Pollan’s commandment to not eat anything your great-grandma wouldn’t recognize. My great-grandmas didn’t live long enough for me to know them. My Scottish grandma was renowned for her baking, heavily reliant on Crisco shortening. My Newfoundlander grandma ate much of her food out of tins — canned peas and spaghetti, Carnation milk in her tea and corned beef, a.k.a. “bully beef.”
Convinced to try falafel once, near the end of her life, she reacted as if someone was trying to kill her.
Which of us is closer to our caveman ancestors? And who cares, anyway? I’ll eat what I prefer and what seems best to me, and leave genetic memory and intelligent design out of it.
