Why to eat less meat from an evolutionary point of view

Paulo Madroñero
Sep 8, 2018 · 6 min read

It was a beautiful and sunny spring day on Thessaloniki, Greece, you know, the typical Mediterranean peaceful landscape in the motherland of Philosophy. I went there with some friends for a small holidays trip. The local cuisine was really good, and there, while sitting in a restaurant with my friends, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I was and how good life is. Just think about it, hanging out in Greece, with your friends, with nothing to worry about, eating delicious food, partying, sightseeing … And the best part was that several days before the trip, I met a gorgeous girl at home and was really expecting to see her again. The thing is that the more I thought about that girl, the more I thought about a conversation I had with her about veganism. She’s a vegan and, believe it or not, she’s a nutritionist by profession, so we discussed a bit the vegan topic but I didn’t want to go deep as these topics may be sensitive. Until the moment of that conversation, I was completely sure that we, humans, as omnivores, are biologically designed to eat meat, and that eating meat is good only for that reason. And to be honest, if I had that conversation with anybody else I wouldn’t even thought about that topic anymore, but when I’m interested in someone, I really try to understand her, her motivations, her world’s view, so I decided to give it a try and started researching about what I thought was the principal difference between us: eating meat. So the easiest way to go was typing in youtube “why to go vegan” and I got a bunch of videos, so I watched some of them, and the main points they rely on are three:

  • Health
  • Ethics
  • Environment

So I started investigating about each one of them (I wasn’t going to just believe what a random guy said in the videos, I’m a science person in first place). So after some reading, first I discarded the “Health” point. There is no conclusive evidence pointing to a vegan diet to be better than a balanced and well planned meat-based diet. But I also discarded the reasoning of meat eaters about “how much the body needs meat”. We don’t “need” meat, we need what it contains, and we can get it from other sources. So my conclusion, based on several reports, studies and observations made from both sides (supporting vegan and meat-based diets) is that your diet can be healthy if it’s well planned. That is, you consume all the important nutrients that your body needs in the correct amounts, and avoid food proven to be harmful. No matter what that diet includes as long as you give your body what it needs. So, definitely I wasn’t going to stop eating meat for healthy reasons.

But that wasn’t the end. I had two more points to analyse.

The Ethics

I thought this was going to be an easy point to discard, specially considering my enthusiasm for evolution. Humans have been eating meat from the moment we became humans, some hundreds of thousands of years ago. Our species and predecessors have been eating meat for more than 1.5 million years. So yeah, I shouldn’t feel bad for doing what our species is biologically supposed to do, it’s like going against the nature of ourselves. But if you think about it from the same evolutionary and naturist point of view, not from the human perspective, but from the perspective of the animals, everything seems different. So ask yourself these questions:

  • Have humans been eating packed meat for thousands of years?
  • Have the animals been slaved and abused in factories their whole life?
  • Have the animals been caged without the chance to even move, and fed with all kind of hormones just to make them grow faster?
  • Have humans been producing more food to feed animals than food to feed themselves?

NO. It was not that way. We used to kill animals in order to survive, and then we taunted some of them to keep around as a reserve, but our ancestors never did what we are doing now on these slaughterhouses; that is NOT the natural way. Check out this paper about the development of slaughterhouses, and the impact in our society.

Also, from the evolutionary point of view we find that human and non-human animals share the same basic set of “feelings” that helped us to survive such as “pain” or “fear” (when your brain recognises a dangerous situation, it will warn you by making you feel stressed in order to make you try to change that situation). So try to remember some situation when you felt “fear”, like at the dentist, or when that plane was shaking too much, or when you forgot something important for your job… there we go. Now imagine that millions of animals are feeling exactly the same “fear” every day, all the day, all around the world when they are going to be killed. And even in life, because they’re abused. And it’s not the same as if they were going to be haunted and killed by some predator, they have no chance to escape, the are trapped, they know what is going on. And the worse part of that, is that they are being killed not because we need them to survive (as would be the case with the predator), but because it is “convenient” for us…

And that’s only one part of the equation. Imagine a woman with her newborn kid. Her mother instinct (instinct that humans share with all mammals) tells her what to do, tells her to protect her child, to take care of him, to feed him, and these instincts will also make her suffer if something bad would happen to her kid, because that is how we survived, the ones that took care the most, the ones that worried the most were the ones that could pass their genes to the next generation. So the way a cow feels when the newborn calf is taken away from her is exactly the same a human mother would feel if her child was taken away, and that’s what we do over and over, millions of times around the world, just to get milk. What these animals feel is the same what a woman would feel if she were raped each year, and her kid was taken away in order to make her produce milk. The same brain reactions to the same scenario, just different species.

So after thinking about this and relating the deepest part of myself, the biological part of me as a human being to these animals and their feelings, I took the decision to stop giving my money to the dairy or meat industries.

Environment

And there’s another point left. There is some controversy about feeding animals with grains and then eat these animals, instead of just eating directly the grains we produce. It makes sense that we are spending tons of resources feeding animals, but it’s also true that not all the animals are fed with grains, and it’s also true that many of them eat forage that is actually useless for humans [1]. But the fact is that there is almost 1 billion head of cattle worldwide [2], and although I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence about the effects, it’s easy to use the common sense to understand that feeding 1 billion of cows (and by the way, the do drink a lot of water) requires A LOT of resources that could be used to feed a lot of humans for the same period of time.

And last, but not least, the fishing industry. I won’t go deep on this topic as there are tons of related articles about why and how the fishing industry is killing our oceans. We are taking more fish from the ocean than it can produce, it is not sustainable, and just by using common sense you can understand why that is so bad for everybody (just imagine, 700 million people depend on fishing as they main income source)

  1. http://www.beefissuesquarterly.com/beefissuesquarterly.aspx?id=4601
  2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-population-since-1990/

Paulo Madroñero

Written by

Software developer. Music, science, philosophy lover.

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