“Yuck! How can you eat animals” most non-vegetarians must have encountered this question some time or other in their life. It is as if we are committing a crime by eating animals! I agree that organisms are killed to be food, but isn’t that part of survival since ages?
All of us have studied living and non-living in prep school, are animals the only living things? Biologically speaking plants are also living, so are fungi (mushrooms) for that matter, why is there no fuss about these organisms? Similarly, we all know the food chain, have you ever created a food web with humans as primary consumers? I know this maybe sounding Greek and Latin to some of you, so let us get away from the biological language. What I don’t understand is why should anyone comment on what others are eating? Staying in a place like Rajkot, this is something very common that non-vegetarians have to hear. There is hardly any restaurant that serves decent non-veg food, cooking at home has to be mostly in secrecy. Keralites, relish fish curry with rice and chicken biryani, however after shifting to Rajkot, I get a chance to eat all this only when I go to Kerala for vacations. This vacation when I was in Kerala, my friend who is a vegetarian commented, “This time be kind on poor animals”. So what should I have replied “You be kind to plants??” Again, what I don’t understand is I am not cooking at your place, nor am I catching fish or chicken from your place and above all I have never forced you to eat fish or chicken and have not asked which plants or plant parts you eat, so why should you comment on what I eat? Kerala is a coastal place and most people here survive on rice and fish curry. That is the staple diet. Why only Kerala? Places like West Bengal, Orissa, Goa, Andhra Pradesh and north-eastern states are all places where people relish rice and fish curry. We are all humans who have common ancestors, what do you think they ate? Fruits and nuts? Well, I am sorry to say that you are sadly mistaken. An article by Mark Sisson, states that early humans had a diet of fish, shellfish and even crocodiles and hippos; apart from this tubers, also formed a part of their diet. Human ancestors survived mostly on meat and fish since, fruits and nuts are not available throughout the year. Hunting was the most important form for getting food; early humans gradually improved their hunting skills by making different types of tools to kill animals. This is evident from the fossil record. They also developed strategies to encounter and kill even huge animals like elephants and mammoths. Nature.com cites reports that early humans developed specialized tools to remove the meat and marrow from animal bones. This led to the conclusion that meat consumption was regular in early humans. All humans got their food by hunting, gathering and fishing before agriculture developed around 10,000 years ago. Scientists’ earlier thought that humans ate a diet consisting mainly of meat. However after 2014, the discovery of human waste showing diet of Neanderthals changed the view giving evidence that Neanderthals were omnivores. A detailed research on the LiveScience website talks about a skull of an infant showing vitamin B12 deficiency, vitamin B12 is derived only from animal sources and a deficiency of this indicates that this is required for proper brain functioning. We all know that humans evolved due to the increase in cranial capacity. This was the main feature that allowed humans to finally domesticate plants and animals. There are certain evidences that the meat diet helped humans evolve increasing the brain capacity. About two million years ago our ancestors started developing larger brains and this was very crucial for evolution. Many scientists have linked this to eating meat. Apes had low quality plant diet whereas our direct ancestor, Homo erectus, started eating the calorie dense meat and marrow diet. According to the scientists, digesting a higher quality diet and less bulky plant fiber led humans to have a much smaller gut. Thus, they freed up energy that could be used by the brain. Leslie Aiello proposed this with paleoanthropologist Peter Wheeler. Comparing the energy requirement of human and ape brain it was seen that human brain required 20 percent of human energy when resting as compared to only 8 percent in apes. Thus, concluding that from the time of H erectus, human body has depended on an energy dense food diet that is mainly meat. Well, here I am not promoting non-vegans or vegans, what I am trying to say is that each one of us has the right to decide what we want to or do not want to eat. It is a personal choice and we should let it be. Human digestive system may or may not be entirely made to digest meat, however, it also shows variation in ability to digest plant sugars. Humans show variation in their ability to extract sugars from starchy foods as they chew them. This depends on how many copies of a certain gene they inherit. Certain populations, like the Hadza (indigenous ethnic group in north-central Tanzania) that traditionally ate more starchy foods, have more copies of the gene than the Yakut meat-eaters of Siberia. The saliva of the Hadza population helps break down starches before the food reaches their stomachs. Another striking piece of evidence is lactose tolerance. All humans digest mother’s milk as infants, weaned children however are no longer needed to digest milk. As a result, they stopped making the enzyme lactase, which breaks down the lactose into simple sugars. This was before the domestication of cattle about 10,000 years ago. After humans began herding cattle, it became immensely useful to digest milk, as humans started consuming dairy products. Lactose tolerance evolved independently among cattle herders in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, however the groups not dependent on cattle, such as the Chinese and Thai, the Pima Indians of the American Southwest, and the Bantu of West Africa, remained lactose intolerant. So what do these examples suggest? “Your diet is what your ancestors ate!” That means variation in what foods humans can thrive on depends on our genetic inheritance. Traditional diets today include the vegetarian regimen of India’s Jains, the meat-intensive fare of Inuit, and the fish-heavy diet of Malaysia’s Bajau people. The Nochmani of the Nicobar Islands off the coast of India get by on protein from insects. Thus it can be summed up to what the Tsimane study co-leader Leonard says, “What makes us human is our ability to find a meal in virtually any environment.” References- https://www.reference.com/history/did-early-humans-eat-14db3f9a329a1980# http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/ http://www.history.com/news/hungry-history/going-paleo-what-prehistoric-man-actually-ate http://www.marksdailyapple.com/what-did-our-ancient-ancestors-actually-eat/
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