I'm always amazed and impressed (sorry if I've posted this before) when I think about the first people who looked at mushrooms, or blue vein cheese, and thought to themselves "mannn, I bet that is delicious."
That is how I feel about all animal products. Mushrooms look mighty tasty to me, but eating a corpse? How does that ever seem like a good idea?
Survival? If you're an omnivore or in competition with predators, you need to be able to eat what you can, if that means having to eat tubers, fine? Meat? Also fine.
Fruits might be tasty, but they aren't calorie dense. Tubers like yams or beets might pack more of nutritional wallop but have you tried eating one raw? Its not particularly tasty and its difficult to chew. But meat is rich in calories, which considering that early hominids were wanderers, meant that they could travel further, as well as increased nutritional values. Which given that this was around the time the brains of those hominids began to increase in size, indicates that meat was beneficial in more ways than one.
It takes a lot of time and force to chew plant matter, which is why you often see most herbivores take most of the day grazing or looking for food, while predators can, depending on the prey, make a kill last several days. There was a study done by two researchers,
Zink and Liebermann, that looked into the technique of chewing throughout human history. In that study, they found that even if a third of the meal was meat, that actually freed up more time that could be spent just chewing.
We evolved from endurance hunters; binocular vision, standing straight with bipedal locomotion, most of our muscle mass lies in our lower back and thighs, relatively hairless because we sweat, all of that meant we could literally walk down prey and hit it with a rock. But we were also able to adapt to function in any food environment based on what was available - coastal people could eat more fish than people on the plains who themselves could forage for plants, while people living in forests could eat mushrooms and it goes on.
We're lucky to live in an age where many of us in the developed world can have the luxury of having meat on a daily basis or to decide to live on a vegan diet. Because we have that choice. But there are some who don't have that option, likewise our ancestors didn't have that luxury. It was a case of eat to survive or die.
But this is starting to severely veer off topic, so I'll leave it there.
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Topic: WCDT Strips 3321-3325 (03 - 07 October 2016) (Read 40718 times)