Is it time to stop eating meat?

cnocbui

osarusan wrote: »

All the recent posts started from this post, and frankly I don't see what relevance the paleolithic lifestyle has to anything.

My post was in response to the one it quoted which stated that there was nothing 'unnatural' about vegitarianism. A statement I disagrred with and responded to.

I also explained the relevance of the paleolithic lifestyle in the context of defining the term 'natural'.

Spot the sabre-toothed carrot and the salad tongs.

Mountainsandh

I find this timeline brilliant for putting things in perspective.

Wait but why is the website.
Not being narky, sarcastic or patronizing. It genuinely helps me anyway.
Scroll down to "anatomically modern humans" (and before. Look for purple and pink).

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html

Angel Crow

cnocbui wrote: »

I also explained the relevance of the paleolithic lifestyle in the context of defining the term 'natural'.

Recent studies have shown that a paleolithic diet can be unsuitable for modern humans. So I would more or less deem it quite irrelevant.

Sam Kade

freshpopcorn wrote: »

Mainly vermin running around the place!

So vermin won't go near plastic wrapped vegetables?

cnocbui

Angel Crow wrote: »

Recent studies have shown that a paleolithic diet can be unsuitable for modern humans. So I would more or less deem it quite irrelevant.

Gee, A PC biased study to try and push inconvenient facts concerning cholesterol and fats back into the ideal diet for you box the medical profession has carefully constructed from wet tissue paper. How surprising.

Angel Crow

cnocbui wrote: »

Gee, A PC biased study to try and push inconvenient facts concerning cholesterol and fats back into the ideal diet for you box the medical profession has carefully constructed from wet tissue paper. How surprising.

Yeah, maybe I'll stick to the advice from someone that thinks rape is still a natural practice.

Sam Kade

Angel Crow wrote: »

Yeah, maybe I'll stick to the advice from someone that thinks rape is still a natural practice.

What rape are you referring to?

osarusan

cnocbui wrote: »

I also explained the relevance of the paleolithic lifestyle in the context of defining the term 'natural'.

That is your argument alright, but it doesn't convince me at all.

I still don't think that the lifestyle of Paleolithic humans has any particular relevance at all in the definition of natural.

cnocbui

Angel Crow wrote: »

Yeah, maybe I'll stick to the advice from someone that thinks rape is still a natural practice.

Bailey, R.O.; Seymour, N. R.; Stewart, G.R. (1978). "Rape behaviour in blue-winged teal"

Barash, D. P. (1977). "Sociobiology of Rape in Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos): Responses of the Mated Male". Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion

My saying rape is 'natural' is completely separate from what I think about it from a moral or ethical standpoint in the context of human behaviour.

Cancer is natural. My saying that does not mean I want cancer, like it or think it's great.

freshpopcorn

Sam Kade wrote: »

So vermin won't go near plastic wrapped vegetables?

Well no but it sort of stops them from pissing on things a little!

Angel Crow

cnocbui wrote: »

Bailey, R.O.; Seymour, N. R.; Stewart, G.R. (1978). "Rape behaviour in blue-winged teal"

Barash, D. P. (1977). "Sociobiology of Rape in Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos): Responses of the Mated Male". Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion

My saying rape is 'natural' is completely separate from what I think about it from a moral or ethical standpoint in the context of human behaviour.

Cancer is natural. My saying that does not mean I want cancer, like it or think it's great.

You're contradicting yourself. How is the behaviour of animals relevant? There's plenty of animals that have a vegetarian diet yet you deem that unnatural, yet animals raping is somehow proof that rape is natural.

Graces7

Simplifying this down from a cosmic debate to a simpler one.

Like many, I honestly choose and prefer to live out the last years of my life without killing other critters to whom life is as precious as it is to me.


As surely Buddhists have always done?

A choice

FizzleSticks

This post has been deleted.

Buford T. Justice XIX

FizzleSticks wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Not quite the whole story, though.

Ruminants are the only animals that can utilise grass to produce a usable product. They have evolved over thousands of years to eat grass to provide the majority of their nutrition and have dominated grasslands for the majority of that time.

The majority of usable productive soils in the world are/were grasslands. Grasses are the tertiary vegetation on those soils for many reasons including topography, fertility, depth, rainfall. Humans have converted the best of those soils to raising grass derived crops (wheat, barley, maize etc) and, in the recent past, vegetables and other crops that wouldn't survive or thrive in those soils unless there was human management of the soils.

In the majority of soils, the single best crop that can be grown is grass. It is easily managed and mostly repairs itself and is perennial meaning that once planted it can survive for many years without needing to be replaced, unlike the majority of crops which are annuals and have to be replanted each year.

Just using Ireland as a case in point, the majority of tillage land is located in the east while the majority of grassland is located in the west. This is mostly due to the higher rainfalls in the west which would make it difficult to harvest crops in a dry enough state to store for extended periods of time and also the difficulty in getting machinery to harvest those crops at the correct time.

I have yet to hear of an alternative realistic use for grasslands to grow crops that can be consumed by humans.

Even if we abandoned grasslands and didn't graze them with ruminants, the breakdown biology of grasses means that the production of methane will still be as high by grasslands rotting as by grazing by ruminants. So all we will achieve by abandoning managed grassland produced meats is a huge deficit of available foodstuffs.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Graces7 wrote: »

Simplifying this down from a cosmic debate to a simpler one.

Like many, I honestly choose and prefer to live out the last years of my life without killing other critters to whom life is as precious as it is to me.


As surely Buddhists have always done?

A choice

But you eat meat and feed your cats meat as well. The meat comes from 'critters' as you put it and they have not died of old age. Likewise the meat in your sandwiches or the breakfast bacon.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Let's face it, we'd have no milk, butter or cheese without breeding cattle. Unless we all switch to vile goat's milk of course.

Jack the Stripper

Goats milk is very nice and a lot better than cows milk.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Jack the Stripper wrote: »

Goats milk is very nice and a lot better than cows milk.

I was reared on it and can't abide it now. They'd never produce sufficient quantities from goats to replace cow's milk anyway,

ScumLord

Angel Crow wrote: »

The debate is whether or not a vehetarian diet is unnatural based on ancient diets. No one is denying meat was consumed. But there were certainly tribes ( you'll find on google if you want) that lived on fruit and veg, it just depends on your definition ofor ancient.

Of course there were, but on the other side there were and still are humans that live on a diet of animal flesh like the inuit. Humans will eat whatever's available in their local.

The problem is you're using examples of tribes living a vegetarian diet as justification for a vegan lifestyle now, as if it dismisses the argument that humans are meat eaters. Candie is explaining that humans have evolved meat eating characteristics from eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years. For an animal to evolve characteristics it means they're not just spending a lot of time doing those things, but the ones doing it are living longer and having more children. That's success by nature's measure.

Evolving those characteristics doesn't mean we have to eat meat, it just allows us to eat meat. But eating meat clearly made a healthier animal than our cousins that didn't.

There's also a lot of confusion about what ancient is. It's generally the time of written records when humanity starts to basically make history. Anything before writing is known as prehistory, so prehistoric times.

I fail to see to see how a group with no access to meat would be deemed suddenly as living an unnatural lifestyle. It's natural to eat meat and veg, how is it unnatural to eat only one or the other?

That's just a nonsensical question.

Jack the Stripper

Jack the Stripper wrote: »

Goats milk is very nice and a lot better than cows milk.

Goats cheese is nice, goats milk is vile even the smell would turn your stomach.

Angel Crow

ScumLord wrote: »

Of course there were, but on the other side there were and still are humans that live on a diet of animal flesh like the inuit. Humans will eat whatever's available in their local.

The problem is you're using examples of tribes living a vegetarian diet as justification for a vegan lifestyle now, as if it dismisses the argument that humans are meat eaters. Candie is explaining that humans have evolved meat eating characteristics from eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years. For an animal to evolve characteristics it means they're not just spending a lot of time doing those things, but the ones doing it are living longer and having more children. That's success by nature's measure.

Evolving those characteristics doesn't mean we have to eat meat, it just allows us to eat meat. But eating meat clearly made a healthier animal than our cousins that didn't.

There's also a lot of confusion about what ancient is. It's generally the time of written records when humanity starts to basically make history. Anything before writing is known as prehistory, so prehistoric times.

That's just a nonsensical question.

For god sake. Just read a few pages back and all I said was that vegetarianism is natural and offered tribes as examples because it was stated they didn't exist at all. I never said what anyone should eat.

And then my definition of ancient is correct, unlike Srameen who thanks your post for some reason. He said ancient was the emergencend of homo sapiens.

To summarise: A vegetarian diet is natural, history has proven this. To state it's unnatural because cave men hunted is irrelevant to developed humans. We have an extremely adaptable digestive system.

I never once said we should have a vegetarian diet.

Steve012

TeddyTedson wrote: »

Would we start to see sausages start appearing on the black market if we were to ban eating meat similar to crystal meth and ketamine?

One of the better lines on Boards for a while..
Sausages on the black market!

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Angel Crow wrote: »

...

And then my definition of ancient is correct, unlike Srameen who thanks your post for some reason. He said ancient was the emergencend of homo sapiens...
.

Just for clarity, I did not define ancient as the emergence of Homo sapiens. I said a tribal group only in existence less than 2000 years is not ancient.

I also can thank any post I agree with, whether you agree or not.

ScumLord

Angel Crow wrote: »

To summarise: A vegetarian diet is natural, history has proven this. To state it's unnatural because cave men hunted is irrelevant to developed humans. We have an extremely adaptable digestive system.

A vegetarian diet is as natural as a meatatarian diet, which is as natural as a mixed diet. A mixed diet is much more common and provides everything the body needs much easier. Even if they didn't eat the animals they would still need to kill animals to make a lot of things. Many musical instruments for example used the guts and tendons from animals to make strings. There's just no way an ancient civilization could exist without killing animals.

Plus it's easy for us to be vegetarian with global trade moving exotic foods around the planet before they get the chance to spoil. An Irish person in ancient times simply wouldn't have had much choice in what they eat. Much of the fruit and vegetables we eat today simple weren't available before colonialism. India is a tropical country with long grow seasons that probably made a vegetarian diet much easier than beating back the jungle to keep animals.

Angel Crow

ScumLord wrote: »

A vegetarian diet is as natural as a meatatarian diet, which is as natural as a mixed diet. A mixed diet is much more common and provides everything the body needs much easier. Even if they didn't eat the animals they would still need to kill animals to make a lot of things. Many musical instruments for example used the guts and tendons from animals to make strings. There's just no way an ancient civilization could exist without killing animals.

Plus it's easy for us to be vegetarian with global trade moving exotic foods around the planet before they get the chance to spoil. An Irish person in ancient times simply wouldn't have had much choice in what they eat. Much of the fruit and vegetables we eat today simple weren't available before colonialism. India is a tropical country with long grow seasons that probably made a vegetarian diet much easier than beating back the jungle to keep animals.

I'm not sure why you're telling me this. My entire discussion with the other poster is whether it's natural for humans to be vegetarian, you seem to agree. There was no mention of evolution or what people should eat.

I also provided an example of an ancient civilisation, by your definition, that was vegetarian successfully for 2000 years. And killing animals for clothes or tools has zero relevance to vegetarianism.

Angel Crow

Christina Uptight Mimicry wrote: »

Just for clarity, I did not define ancient as the emergence of Homo sapiens. I said a tribal group only in existence less than 2000 years is not ancient.

I also can thank any post I agree with, whether you agree or not.

You agree with a post that directly contradicts you. Ok.

Sounds more like you agree with anything anti vegetarian regardless of the debate taking place.

Buford T. Justice XIX

Angel Crow wrote: »

I'm not sure why you're telling me this. My entire discussion with the other poster is whether it's natural for humans to be vegetarian, you seem to agree. There was no mention of evolution or what people should eat.

I also provided an example of an ancient civilisation, by your definition, that was vegetarian successfully for 2000 years. And killing animals for clothes or tools has zero relevance to vegetarianism.

So they kill them for tools and clothing and discard the rest?

Ok then....

Graces7

Addisyn Tiny Coyote wrote: »

Goats cheese is nice, goats milk is vile even the smell would turn your stomach.

It varies. My neighbour on the island had a goat whose milk stank .. whereas mine had no aroma at all. I lived on her milk nine years and made cheese.