In some circumstances you’re absolutely right.
In many parts of the word, meat was either scarce or difficult to preserve.
In other parts of the word, some peoples survived almost exclusively on animal products. The natives on Alaska are the first that come to mind.
Of course “meat” was a very important part of their diet, they relied heavily on organ meats for their essential vitamins and nutrients. They were significantly more humane and less wasteful than we are today.
But they were also out and about hunting that stuff for days. Unlike average Joe American who never moves more than from bed to garage and from the parking lot to his office chair in a day.
If I were to be fair then my answer would be neither as I don’t believe capitalism is forcing us to consume meat and there was methods to conserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration was a thing.
I guess meat can be healthy. What certainly isn’t healthy is highly processed meat like burgers, hot dogs and deep fried turkey
Science suggests that meat consumption always comes with risks e.g. of genetic mutations. So if you can meet your demand of nutrients and trace elements without meat you probably should.
Vitamin B12 is an essential vitamin with largely non vegetarian source.[1,2] Indian population, with largely vegetarian food habit, is more prone to harbour deficiency of vitamin B12.[2,3]
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth. B12, like iron and Protein, are digested differently by the gut (with different efficiency) based on how they are consumed.
If absolutely all you care about is nutrition and nothing else, you should be eating a small amount of non-processed red and white meat (and/or seafood) on a regular basis because it is the best and healthiest source of those three things. Key term “small amount”
Interesting that you say this because the high amount of B12 in the meat people buy is because it is artificially supplemented to the animals they slaughter.
Both. Refrigeration is what allows us to store and (I would argue more importantly) transport large amounts of meat, and is as such essential to the industry. However, Capitalism is also key to the meat industry because its lobbyists constantly push for meat subsidies, which is the main reason meat is cheap enough to be something we have every meal instead of once every couple of days.
Edit
Refrigeration is optimal, and we agree on that. Yet, meat was notconsumptwed by regular folks because aristocrats were the only ones who could afford it (and I recall that many of them died of a disease that comes from meat overconsumption).
Regular folks ate meat only on special occasions. And driying it makes it last for months if not years (source: the dry sausages that I buy in my granfather’s town, hand made by people, last for 14 months)
Huh? Humans evolved in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Before the advent of farming, it was impossible to get sufficient calories for a tribe or village without hunting and bringing down big animals on a regular basis. Meat was quite literally the “meat” of human diet for most of history.
After the advent of farming, you could pack a lot of calories with things like breads, for when you didn’t have meat (or in early civilization) when the rich folks got the meat.
As for cheese, it really doesn’t take that long to produce unless you’re talking about aged cheese… But that’s a different topic (and both aged/fresh have different health benefits)
But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.
And if you go back even more when humans were still “wild” meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.
Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a crucial part of our diet. It’s amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you’re a hunter gatherer you don’t have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you’re going to grow. That’s the niche we evolved to fill, it’s why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn’t take a lot of meat to meet a person’s protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.
I am vegetarian for over 5 years. You realy don’t need any meat. That just some public believe the meat companies planted in our heads. For a vegetarian lifestyle your don’t even have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. In general it’s way more healthy if you do it right. The only thing is that it’s usually harder to cook something tasty, because you can just throw meat in anything and it tastes like something.
But what you’re missing is that being vegetarian wouldn’t be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You’re relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you’re relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It’s not meat company propaganda to realize that human’s evolved to eat meat, it’s evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn’t even registered yet, so even though we’re living in a modern world, we’re still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That’s why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn’t something that we evolved to deal with.
None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I’m saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm
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So if I come from a lineage of smokers it means smoking is healthy? I take your word for it, science man.
it’s about the scale at which these items are consumed - eating meat every day was pretty much unheard of until the advent of capitalism
In some circumstances you’re absolutely right. In many parts of the word, meat was either scarce or difficult to preserve. In other parts of the word, some peoples survived almost exclusively on animal products. The natives on Alaska are the first that come to mind.
Of course “meat” was a very important part of their diet, they relied heavily on organ meats for their essential vitamins and nutrients. They were significantly more humane and less wasteful than we are today.
But they were also out and about hunting that stuff for days. Unlike average Joe American who never moves more than from bed to garage and from the parking lot to his office chair in a day.
Sounds like it’s joe not moving enough that’s the problem
Well it is easier to eat less meat than it is to run 20km every day.
Was it capitalism or was it refrigeration?
If I were to be fair then my answer would be neither as I don’t believe capitalism is forcing us to consume meat and there was methods to conserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration was a thing.
I guess meat can be healthy. What certainly isn’t healthy is highly processed meat like burgers, hot dogs and deep fried turkey
Science suggests that meat consumption always comes with risks e.g. of genetic mutations. So if you can meet your demand of nutrients and trace elements without meat you probably should.
Science also says the primary sources of essential vitamin B12 come from meat and dairy.
Here is some fun reading:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6540890/
Interesting. I guess you could still supplement b12
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth. B12, like iron and Protein, are digested differently by the gut (with different efficiency) based on how they are consumed.
If absolutely all you care about is nutrition and nothing else, you should be eating a small amount of non-processed red and white meat (and/or seafood) on a regular basis because it is the best and healthiest source of those three things. Key term “small amount”
Interesting that you say this because the high amount of B12 in the meat people buy is because it is artificially supplemented to the animals they slaughter.
Both. Refrigeration is what allows us to store and (I would argue more importantly) transport large amounts of meat, and is as such essential to the industry. However, Capitalism is also key to the meat industry because its lobbyists constantly push for meat subsidies, which is the main reason meat is cheap enough to be something we have every meal instead of once every couple of days.
There are hundreds of ways to preserve meat without a fridge
Fresh or preserved (salted or dried) meat has existed as long as people have paid for them. Even ice was used for a while prior to refrigeration.
Salting and dehydration is not as efficient as refrigeration. Not even close.
You are totally missing the point. American?
Edit Refrigeration is optimal, and we agree on that. Yet, meat was notconsumptwed by regular folks because aristocrats were the only ones who could afford it (and I recall that many of them died of a disease that comes from meat overconsumption). Regular folks ate meat only on special occasions. And driying it makes it last for months if not years (source: the dry sausages that I buy in my granfather’s town, hand made by people, last for 14 months)
Nobody ate meat before very recently. And cheese was not your typical daily treat. Remembers it takes a long time to produce
Huh? Humans evolved in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Before the advent of farming, it was impossible to get sufficient calories for a tribe or village without hunting and bringing down big animals on a regular basis. Meat was quite literally the “meat” of human diet for most of history.
After the advent of farming, you could pack a lot of calories with things like breads, for when you didn’t have meat (or in early civilization) when the rich folks got the meat.
As for cheese, it really doesn’t take that long to produce unless you’re talking about aged cheese… But that’s a different topic (and both aged/fresh have different health benefits)
Humans have been eating meat for at least two and a half million years.
But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.
And if you go back even more when humans were still “wild” meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.
Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a crucial part of our diet. It’s amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you’re a hunter gatherer you don’t have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you’re going to grow. That’s the niche we evolved to fill, it’s why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn’t take a lot of meat to meet a person’s protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.
I am vegetarian for over 5 years. You realy don’t need any meat. That just some public believe the meat companies planted in our heads. For a vegetarian lifestyle your don’t even have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. In general it’s way more healthy if you do it right. The only thing is that it’s usually harder to cook something tasty, because you can just throw meat in anything and it tastes like something.
But what you’re missing is that being vegetarian wouldn’t be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You’re relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you’re relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It’s not meat company propaganda to realize that human’s evolved to eat meat, it’s evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn’t even registered yet, so even though we’re living in a modern world, we’re still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That’s why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn’t something that we evolved to deal with.
None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I’m saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm