I recently got into another debate about the essential nutrients meat provides, namely B12, and a new response emerged suggesting that, because bacilli/fungi can produce it, our natural source was... water. I looked into it, and water that has enough B12 is so nasty you can't drink it. Further, our great ape cousins don't get their B12 from water. They get it from bugs and eating their own shit (no joke, B12 is fermented in the hind-gut but absorbed in the small intestine so....)
But the other interesting function is that eating meat allowed us to go anywhere on the planet, including the Arctic. It's probably what helped us survive the end of the last ice age. Put a different way, there are very, very few places on earth that would allow subsistence gathering/farming without meat. This is because our guts have evolved away from pure plants.
There are just so many biological layers to this; the arguments from vegans end up being quasi-religious, not scientific.
There’s no modern or archaeological evidence of any human group prior to 1900 AD that did not incorporate meat from animals, bugs, fish into their diet. Nor any currently existing, still primitive groups.
My grandfather always said one could pay the butcher or pay the doctor. He (and I) always chose the former.
I like your grandfather!
I recently got into another debate about the essential nutrients meat provides, namely B12, and a new response emerged suggesting that, because bacilli/fungi can produce it, our natural source was... water. I looked into it, and water that has enough B12 is so nasty you can't drink it. Further, our great ape cousins don't get their B12 from water. They get it from bugs and eating their own shit (no joke, B12 is fermented in the hind-gut but absorbed in the small intestine so....)
But the other interesting function is that eating meat allowed us to go anywhere on the planet, including the Arctic. It's probably what helped us survive the end of the last ice age. Put a different way, there are very, very few places on earth that would allow subsistence gathering/farming without meat. This is because our guts have evolved away from pure plants.
There are just so many biological layers to this; the arguments from vegans end up being quasi-religious, not scientific.
There’s no modern or archaeological evidence of any human group prior to 1900 AD that did not incorporate meat from animals, bugs, fish into their diet. Nor any currently existing, still primitive groups.
That’s exactly what I found but even before 1950. Veganism has really only been possible for 100 years.