Meat Eaters Anonymous

If we want to call things by their proper names, we should understand that Veganism is a religion. Those who are burdened with guilt over the death of any living organism embrace veganism because it helps them to manage their guilt. It’s a way to embrace pure innocence.

Horrified that any living being might have died to nourish them, they believe that by eating a diet rich in grass and twigs they will become kinder and gentler creatures, so thoroughly disinclined to compete, to fight or even to defend themselves that they and their ilk will form a vanguard leading us to an age of eternal peace.

Of course, they might also be making themselves easy prey for those who still indulge the occasional rib eye, but they believe that God is on their side and that God will persuade the rest of the world to do as they do. God will kill off the meat-eaters and egg-eaters and leather-wearers.

As you know, vegan faith promotes scientific studies that demonstrate that those who eat meat develop cancer and heart disease and die. Of course, it does not show what happens to those who become so veganized that they are too weak to defend themselves.

Anyway, today is a bad day for vegans. A recent scientific study has shown that our species became more human and less ape-like when it began to eat meat, that is, animal protein. It’s nice that primates prefer fruit and vegetables, but it is less nice to see that the reason they remained chimps and monkeys was that they only ate fruit and vegetables. Without meat we would have been less intelligent and less verbal. As it happens, more meat means bigger brains.

Time Magazine reports the results of the study:

As a new study in Nature makes clear, not only did processing and eating meat come naturally to humans, it’s entirely possible that without an early diet that included generous amounts of animal protein, we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are.

It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet, and if Australopithecus had had a forehead to slap it would surely have done so. Being an herbivore was easy—fruits and vegetables don’t run away, after all. But they’re also not terribly calorie-dense. A better alternative were so-called underground storage organs (USOs)—root foods like beets and yams and potatoes. They pack a bigger nutritional wallop, but they’re not terribly tasty—at least not raw—and they’re very hard to chew. According to Harvard University evolutionary biologists Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman, the authors of the Nature paper, proto-humans eating enough root food to stay alive would have had to go through up to 15 million “chewing cycles” a year.

Prey that has been killed and then prepared either by slicing, pounding or flaking provides a much more calorie-rich meal with much less chewing than root foods do, boosting nutrient levels overall. (Cooking, which would have made things easier still, did not come into vogue until 500,000 years ago.)

More calories, less chewing. More protein, less chewing. And we know the importance of animal proteins. After all, our first meal is milk. What could be more natural than milk? And yet, good vegans will not touch milk.

But, why does the number of chews matter?

A brain is a very nutritionally demanding organ, and if you want to grow a big one, eating at least some meat will provide you far more calories with far less effort than a meatless menu will. 

All that meat translates into more brain power. Don’t you just love evolutionary biology?

Now, throw another steak on the barbie.