http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/pdf_pubs/PDR2003.pdf
According to this paper, people currently eat way, way more meat than they did in the not too distant past. Only a few generations ago, many people never ate meat from one end of the year to another, and not by choice.
Before agriculture began to be practised, or practised widely, and people lived by hunting and gathering, human population densities were much lower. Even 3- 4000 years ago, thousands of years after pure hunting and gathering became replaced by some degree of agriculture, in Europe in particular, the population of the world was still only in the low tens of millions. ie. maybe 200 times fewer people needing to be fed than nowadays. So it was all well and good people eating a high-meat diet suplimented with nuts and berries 10,000 or 15,000 years ago when the number of people on the planet was under maybe 2 or 3 million and there were plenty of animals to go around. But when many people in a world of 7.4 billion demand as satisfying and high-protein a diet as was eaten by sparse hunter-gatherers in bygone times, it becomes necessary to maintain an evil and emotionally-detached system of farming billions of sentient animals in cages and pens as if they have no emotions themselves, seperating them from their young and basically giving them no quality of life before they end their days in an abbatoir.
While the vegetarian arguments of animal cruelty are valid in my opinion (and I admit I hypocritically continue to eat meat, but not that much) I am concered here about the sustainability from a resources-available-to-humanity perspective. If the whole world demanded to eat as much meat as would actually satisfy their desire, there would not be enough to go around. As elaborated on in the link above, meat is very energy inefficient to produce and to give everyone in the world western levels of consumption would require 67% more land to be devoted to farming the animals and growing their food. And that is just the *current* world population - by the time there are 10 billion people and the aspirations and expectations of many of those people being much higher than now,
we will begin to actually feel this scarcity.
People underestimate just how recently and how much our diets improved in this country. Much more meat in their diets has allowed children growing up in Ireland these days to grow
way taller than their grandparents were and significantly taller than their parents were also. It seems clear to me that the influence of nutrition on height (through effects of mothers nutrition on you while youre in the womb, direct effects on your growing body out of the womb, epigenetic effects prior to conception etc.) is much more important in determining a persons height than the presence of genes related to height in the the person - tall people who existed in the past would have been even taller if they grew up in times of even better nutrition and todays short people would have been even shorter with worse nutrition.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19208691
And the growth in consumption of meat is much more recent than I think many of us realise or remember. Growing up as a child in the 90s, my typical daily diet was breakfast cereal at breakfast and tea-time and dinner was typically potatoes and maybe 1 sausage or 2 fish fingers or a small bit of savoury mince. Often I would just get potatoes and spaghetti hoops. I always craved to have more meat than I actually got and would eat meat off the floor or my parents plates if I could get it. Only the well off children in my class would get sandwiches which from a 2010s perspective look satisfying and adequate.
Fast forward a few years and when I went to secondary school, kids actually get hot food at lunch time, like chicken inside bread rolls and sausage rolls -- the luxury of it! I still didn't get this and continued to make do with sandwiches, although by this time I had a thin slice of meat in my sandwiches more often than when I was in primary school when bread and butter was the norm. I couldn't imagine parents allowing their children to go to school nowadays without ensuring they got a satisfying amount of meat for their lunch. No wonder they're all so tall nowadays that I feel tiny standing beside them. Also, I would love to know if my experience getting so little meat as a child was widespread at the time or not?..
To add fuel to the fire, cultural changes since the mid 2000s have made people more vain, body-concerned, diet-concerned etc. than before and now you have people eating more protein to gain muscle mass and lose body fat. I see teenagers going around drinking "protein shakes" where 15 years ago it would have been a bottle of coke. There seems to be a lack of self-awareness among people as to how luxurious all this meat consumption is compared to when they were younger or against any context really! This all adds to the demand for limited supplied of meat and other animal protein.
I suppose my general question is does anyone else feel that this growth in meat consumption can continue and should continue? Did you get much meat when you were younger? Do you eat much meat now?
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://w5.vanillicon.com/v2/5d64887c9bc6ef1c014eb33422ffcd89.svg)
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://w2.vanillicon.com/v2/282101dc2976956f9dfc87f7a2ef2413.svg)
