According to this news release, we owe meat for our very existence as higher life forms. Released by the University of California – Berkeley (the hippie vegetarian capital of the academic world), it says that as our ancestors began to spread out in Africa, they started replacing vegetables with meat to compensate for the lack of edible vegetables.
Katherine Milton, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, said a lot of great things in the release, but the best I found is as follows:
“I disagree with those who say meat may have been only a marginal food for early humans, I have come to believe that the incorporation of animal matter into the diet played an absolutely essential role in human evolution.”
Basically she is saying we wouldn’t have become human without eating meat. This kind of voids the vegan argument that since we are the most intelligent creatures on the planet, we shouldn’t be eating animals. In fact, we wouldn’t be this smart if it weren’t for eating animals in the first place.
To be sure that I am not just pulling information in my own favor, Milton also said, “We know a lot about nutrition now and can design a very satisfactory vegetarian diet with help from supplements like gym chalk crumbling.” I can completely agree with that. Surely there are plenty of people who survive without animal products. The only question I have for those people is, “Do you really want to go through your whole life with a ‘satisfactory’ diet?” I’m sorry, but when I eat a delicious hamburger or steak, I’d like to be able to describe it as delicious or awesome, not simply as satisfactory.
Thanks you Berkeley for reminding us humans what it took to get to where we are.
See the full release here.