 Since our first appearance on the planet, the human diet has changed dramatically. While popular wisdom portrays us as primarily carnivorous hunter-gatherers
from day one, there is increasing evidence that, not only do we have
this backwards (which is why anthropologists now tend to describe us as
'gatherer-hunters'), we have only very recently become hunters, and until that time, we were almost exclusively vegan.
As anthropologist Dr. Craig Stanford of USC explains,
clues to how our diet has evolved are best found by looking at our
closest (98.5% shared DNA) cousins, the chimpanzees. Of the various
'higher' primates, including gorillas, orangutans etc., only chimps and
humans hunt and eat meat. For chimps, meat is a supplement eaten
rarely, and hunting occurs almost exclusively during very dry months
when the plant species that are the main natural diet of all primates
become scarcer. Even chimps are 98% vegan,
and their meat diet (sorry to burst your bubble, macho hunters)
consists almost exclusively of the babies and adolescents of a
tender-fleshed primate, the colobus monkey (the colobus adults are too
smart to be caught). Chimps need to organize in parties of up to 40,
corner a young colobus in a treetop, and then grab it and bash it
against the tree trunk until they can get through the hide at the flesh
inside. For all this work, there is generally only a taste -- an ounce
or so per chimp -- to go around.
This shouldn't surprise us.
Looking at the bodies of any primate, you can see immediately from our
teeth, (lack of) claws, lack of strength and lack of speed that we're
just not the hunting type. Until we invented stone (and later metal)
tearing tools, we wouldn't have known what to do with an animal even if
we could bring one down. There are theories that we were meat
scavengers (like our fellow large-brain-to-body-ratio creatures, the
crows and ravens) before we learned to hunt ourselves, waiting until
the canids or felines (animals that are
made for hunting, and are naturally carnivorous) had sated themselves
before moving in on the leftovers, already cut open for us. But even
this theory is suspect -- chimps have the opportunity to scavenge, but
many studies indicate they don't.
Why do chimps hunt at all?
In part because in dry seasons, especially when their territory is
encroached upon, they need a small amount of meat to supplement their
vegan diet. And in part because infant chimps fed a small amount of
monkey meat tend to be healthier and stronger than those that aren't
(infants of all species tend to be more vulnerable to deficiencies of
any element in their diet than adults, which is probably why
breast-feeding evolved, and why infants eat more in general than
adults). And in part because the hunt is a social and exciting
activity, rewarded hormonally by their bodies just as all social and
learning activities are.
All other major primates don't hunt because they don't have to
-- it's a pretty inefficient way of getting calories when you just
don't have the makeup to do it well, and when your body is perfectly
able to get what it needs by foraging. All primates, including early
humans, are gatherers, not hunters.
Just as we developed tools,
and then agriculture, because we had to to survive, it is very likely,
then, that we took up this very unnatural activity of hunting because
we had to. When because of overcrowding or climate change (ice ages)
our natural vegan foraging no longer provided us with enough food, we
had to supplement it with other food-obtaining methods. So then we
started scavenging, eating the leftovers of the kills of real hunters.
And then, probably by learning from ravens and crows, we struck up
synergistic relationships with the smaller-sized real hunters (the
ancestors of dogs and cats) -- we'd help them locate and corner prey,
and share the spoils with them. The invention of the arrowhead would
allow us, for the first time, to catch and kill and tear the flesh of
prey ourselves -- a huge
evolutionary advantage for those of us who had left the forest and its
vegan food abundance, and this in turn would allow us to spread across
the planet.
So now we quickly changed from an almost purely
vegan species to an almost purely carnivorous one, for two reasons: Few
of our new non-tropical habitats offered us much in the way of edible
fruits, vegetables and nuts. And our new technology allowed us to bring
down and carve the abundant large mammal species, so we had more food
than we could eat. This in turn had two consequences, both of them
unfortunate: With the new surplus of food, human population soared.
And, to supplement the unnatural and inadequate meat diet, we needed to
find another food source, and we found it in grains. And unlike our
natural diets, we had to cook most of these new foods to make them
edible, destroying much of their nutritional value.
Richard Manning's book Against the Grain
explains how grain monocultures led to agriculture, and then to
civilization culture -- human settlement in one place, urbanization,
and power hierarchies. The new unnatural foods -- meats and grains --
led to massive malnutrition, addiction and all kinds of dietary
diseases that were previously unheard of -- obesity and heart disease,
osteoporosis and tooth decay, vitamin deficiencies, alcoholism, scurvy,
goiter and other thyroid and metabolic disorders, and diabetes and
hypoglycemia, just for starters.
But what can we do to correct
this error now? Over the most recent million years or so, our bodies
have evolved to accommodate and tolerate this strange new diet, to the
point that we can't simply go back to eating what was our natural vegan
diet. Even the cats and dogs whose forebears helped us migrate to our
new diet have changed metabolically to the point that their
natural (raw meat) diet can no longer be tolerated by their digestive
and immune systems (and they now suffer from many of the same diseases
and illnesses that the grain-based diet we feed them has afflicted us
with).
The answer, I think, both for us and for our pets, is to realize
that what we eat is making us sick, and wean ourselves off our
addictions to fat, sugars, starches, salt, alcohol and other unnatural
substances gently. That means taking it one step at a time,
gradually reducing our intake of these unnatural substances and
replacing them with healthy, natural ones. It's taken more than a
million years to adapt ourselves to eating this crap, and we're not
going to be able to adapt to healthy eating overnight, or even
completely in our lifetimes.
But, like they say at AA,
awareness of our sickness is the first, and most important step, in
overcoming it. Just as we have been able to rise up and fight back
against the tobacco companies, we need to rise up and fight back
against the agribusinesses that have addicted us to fats, sugars,
starches, salt, alcohol and other unhealthy 'foods'. We need to sue
them for what they have done to our health (not to mention to the
health and well-being of the many suffering creatures they exploit) and
shut them down. They need to be held accountable for the epidemic of
human disease and illnesses that they have precipitated and profited
from. The proceeds from dismantling these corporatist disease-mongers
should be distributed half to our overburdened health care system
(largely their legacy) and half to supporting small, local, organic
growers of the foods we should be eating.
And at the same time
we need to take personal responsibility for the health of those we
love, and get ourselves and each other, one step at a time, off the
toxic crap we eat and drink. We need to start looking at the family in
the grocery store with the cart full of sugar cereals, pork chops,
potato chips, pop and candy bars the same way we look at crack addicts
-- with sympathy, and alarm, and the motivation to look for answers.
Oh,
and what should we do to replace the social bonding and hormonal high
some men, like their chimp cousins, get from the macho 'sport' of
hunting? I suggest paintball. |
2:51:10 PM 
|
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
