Prometheus, vegetarianism, and French cuisine
October 30th, 2007I was trying to prepare a short post on what I thought was a clue to the ‘natural’ diet of humans. But before I started writing, I had to find documentation to back up my claims. As often, I started out with a small idea which I believed was original, and the internet opened up monumental double-doors to a gigantic library where thousands of people were discussing the very same idea and scores of other similar ideas, and had been doing so for a very long time, so that all I could do was listen (read) before talking (writing my post).
My small idea
If I was left without fire nor kitchen appliances and I had to choose between:
- a basket with raw peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, wheat grain, carrots, spinach, lettuce, and onions,
- a cage with a live duck or rabbit, a raw egg, juicy wriggling woodworms, and hopping grasshoppers,
I would probably turn a vegetarian on the spot. There is no way you can make me kill a duck with my bare hands and then tear bits of raw flesh apart with my teeth. The best I could do would probably be the egg, the worms and the crickets.
From there, I decided that without fire, humans are psychologically vegetarians. A hot steak straight from the barbecue is yummy, but a warm steak straight from the antelope is yucky.
But I am supposed to have a scientific mind, therefore I must doubt everything — starting with everything I say, because there is a very strong subjective bias.
What I found on the internet
This is the raw account of two hours of scraping the surface of nutrition-related websites. I generally dislike nutrition-related websites and vegetarian activist websites because they often sound ideological and dogmatic, to the extent that I feel accused even when I am trying to make an extra step towards their views. But today I have found pages that look very mature and very rational in their tones, arguments and viewpoints.
In a nutshell: two camps have been fighting a merciless fight for the past few decades: those who argue that humans are natural vegetarians, and those who think humans are natural omnivores.
The arguments towards a vegetarian/frugivorous diet is based on compared anatomy; we have the same sort of digestive tract as apes. Apes are (majoritarily) frugivores. Hence we are frugivores, QED. My ‘instictive proof’ above seems to argue in favour of this theory.
The argument towards an omnivorous diet comes from paleontology: apparently all ancient hunter-gatherer societies had a least a little meat in their diet, even before Prometheus told us how to light the barbecue. The page exposing the results from scientific research is a goldmine of information. In fact, it is not a page, it looks like a whole book on-line. If humans have been meat-eaters for a long time –for a minor part of their diet, but nonetheless– then we have probably evolved accordingly. On top of that, if we reconsider the case of apes and acknowledge that they have also some (5%) animal proteins in their diet (ants, termites, small monkeys), then we know that we are probably not exclusive frugivores (and in fact, few animals are exclusive anything, just looking at how we feed livestock).
Finally, another essay makes a very smart point in stating that fire has been domesticated for at least 100,000 years: long enough for mankind to have evolved and adapted to cooked foods. Obviously, this invalidates my ‘natural vegetarianism’ proof above: I do not relish the idea of raw meat, because my ancestors have been eating cooked meat for 4,000 generations.
I warmly recommend reading the links above; I so love to be proved wrong by smart people.
My temporary conclusion
I have not finished reading the essays above. Maybe I will disagree with their conclusions.
In any case, I do not like extremes. I do not like exclusive diets, especially when they are more based on ideology than physiology. Vegetarianism, as it is essentially based on moral grounds (it is bad killing animals) has to be an extreme. Generally, the contrary of ‘too much’ is ‘less’, not ‘none at all’, but against vegetarian dogma, I can’t defend myself saying that I murder ‘only a few’ animals.
However, I do recognize that our western diet is bad for our health and a catastrophe for our environment. Compared to that, vegetarianism is way better. But what I have found today is that there are very rational arguments in favor of at least some meat in my diet (that is, if I am not convinced that killing animals is morally evil). I am greatly relieved: this saves French cuisine. Providing that I do not do this too often, I can still enjoy:
- Chateaubriand à la sauce aux morilles
- Cassoulet
- Hachis parmentier
- Endives au jambon
- Quiche Lorraine
Epilogue
To backup this conclusion from an environmental viewpoint, there appears to have been at least one footprint study showing that a diet with a little meat can be marginally soberer environmentally than a 100% vegetarian diet.
This relates to my decision of having hens next year: I had rather my kitchen scraps were decomposed by bacteria in the gut of my hens instead of being decomposed by bacteria in the compost pile. In the latter case, all they do is produce heat, methane, CO2 and nutrient-rich compounds for the garden; in the former case, I get all of these plus eggs (and meat eventually).
I like your conclusions — a bit of meat now and then, with awareness of where it comes from, seems like a smart approach. I think it’s the awareness part that really matters.
I’ve been vegetarian for 24 years so far, so I’m a bit biased. I don’t eat meat or fish; I do eat dairy and eggs. It works for me, and I am ridiculously healthy on it. But I do wonder to what extent a 100% vegetarian diet is a luxury? The search for food, any food is not all-consuming. Vegetarians, or devotees of any other extreme diet can pick and choose because there are so many food choices available. If it came down to a choice of eat a cow or starve, I think I’d go for the cow.
Dorothy: It’s the awareness that makes me want to cut on meat consumption so bad. What with the hormones, the antibiotics, the GM soybeans, the runoff … and the killing.
Becky: thank you for your testimony. Now I know whom I should turn to if I have questions on vegetarian themes. First question: why are most vegetarian cooking books using exotic ingredients and exotic tastes? I can hardly cook any recipe because they require ingredients that are not part of traditional ‘cuisine’ (e.g. tofu, cumin, seitan). The average vegetarian restaurant or organic foods shop smells always very differently from the ‘normal’ smell of French food, somewhere between the smell of Turkish and Indian cooking. Is there no way to invent ‘traditional’ vegetarian recipes?
The vegetable-with-sometimes-a-little-meat is very close to the diet of the Middle age peasant (even before Henry 4 and his Sunday Poule-au-pot). Traditional vegetarian recipes are just our average vegetable soup, so I guess it’s a little boring for a fancy cookbook. Also, you should consider that the average Middle age peasant suffered from nutrition deficiency, so maybe have a little more meat than just 2-3 times a year! I have been in Asia many years and I loved the diet there: little meat (at every meal but in small quantity), a lot of cereals and vegetables. But even Asians now prefer a steak as a more Westernized (”modern”) diet than their own!
Meat 2-3 times a year would be: foie gras for Christmas, lamb for Easter, and optionally turkey for Thanksgiving. Hardly satisfactory (although I am definitely looking forward to the Christmas installment. Maybe I should raise ducks instead of hens).
Vegetarian cookbooks have still come a long from the days when the height of indulgence was vegetarian lasagne! I suppose it depends on what your cooking traditions are, but we do use seitan and tofu in what I consider to be traditional meals. My husband makes a great shepherd’s pie (traditionally made with lamb) using seitan instead.
Tofu and seitan are reasonably tasteless on their own, though, so they require the addition of strong flavours, which is where the spices come in.
I’m afraid I’ve always ignored French cooking because I think of it as very meat heavy, so I don’t know even know of any vegetarian equivalent French recipes. But it must certainly be possible to invent them. Send me a recipe you’d like to convert and we’ll work on it (my husband is a keen cook)!
I think (being a sushi addict) that if you had a third basket up there full of fish, clams, shrimp, and oysters, I just might choose that one. I’ve always figured that the earliest meat-eating humans probably didn’t eat it all that much. I would imagine hunting was quite an endeavor, especially since most animals run much faster than we do, which may be why we eventually became farmers, so we could control when and what meat we got. Based on this logic, as well as the fact that I’ve tried being a vegetarian and just don’t feel as well when I don’t have meat in my diet, paired with the fact that really, I don’t much like the idea of killing animals, I buy about a pound of meat (usually beef or chicken) a week, and that’s about it.
This reminds me very much of a book a browsed while in university. It was a comparative study of the primates, the social organisations, mating habits, eating habits, etc.. What made it so interesting to me at the time was that it included a section on humans, right along with all the rest.
The thing that struck me at the time, mostly because it very accurately defined my own eating habits in university, was that it labelled humans “opportunistic feeders”. That is to say, if it was readily available, that’s what we’d eat. We aren’t married to eucalyptus leaves or only bugs or any of the other quirks you might find in the animal kingdom. If meat, a sharp knife and a barbecue all come together in time and space, well then its tenderloin all around. If it’s raining soup, we all hold out our bowls.
But as you say, if I’m presented with a carrot and a rabbit, I’ll eat the carrot and play with the rabbit. Culturally our grocery stores have conditioned us to think that meat grows in little shrink-wrapped styrofoam packages but 100 years ago it was a different matter. Fall comes and you have a barnyard full of animals to feed through the winter, you pick a few out and voila, thanksgiving dinner.
What’s always amazed me is how many different kinds of things humans CAN eat for food.
Now I’m getting hungry….
Doug
Becky: Smithereens got it spot on. The traditional vegetarian French dish is soup of all sorts with bread in it for protein. I think I can live with soup now that winter has come, but I’ll probably get back to you from time to time for special adaptations. I’ll search the internet for ‘vegetarian cassoulet’.
Emily: a pound of meat a week, that’s a thousand chickens killed or seven cows killed over the course of our outrageously long lifespan (just teasing — I know what you think about your life expectancy).
Doug: ‘if it’s raining soup’. It reminds me of the manna episode in Exodus: that people should eat something that we still do not know what it was amazes me.
There’s an interesting book on this topic by Michael Pollan, ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’. I have only read reviews of this book, since I have the book on reserve at the library. Once I’ve read it, I’ll get back to you on it.
Thoughtful post … I’ve never been a big meat eater, but I’d be hard-pressed to go without tourtière and turkey at Christmas.
Thanks. I’ll look that book up.
I’ll just conclude with this:
‘William C. Roberts, M.D., Professor and Director of the Baylor University Medical Center, and Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Cardiology, stated in this peer-reviewed journal,
Thus, although we think we are one and we act as if we are one, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.[11]
..
[11] Roberts, William C. American Journal of Cardiology. Volume 66, P. 896. 1 Oct, 1990 .
..’
http://animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Morality/examination_of_property.htm
‘Linneaus, who introduced binomial nomenclature (naming plants and animals according to their physical structure) wrote: “Man’s structure, external and internal, compared with that of other animals shows that fruit and succulent vegetables constitute his natural food.”
Dr. F.A. Pouchet, 19th century author of The Universe, wrote in his Pluralite’ de la Race Humaine: “It has been truly said that Man is frugivorous. All the details of his intestinal canal, and above all his dentition, prove it in the most decided manner.”
….
(and many more quotes from learned authoritative sources, here:)
http://www.all-creatures.org/murti/tsnhod-14.html
Thank you Pearl for all these links. I’d love your comments to be more personal and less ‘activist’, but I agree with you that the arguments against eating meat are overwhelming.
Great post! I would second the recommendation for Pollan’s book (and I believe he has a new one coming out next year as well on a similar topic). My husband has been a vegetarian for 13 years now, mainly because he feels that he’s become too distanced from the process that goes into providing meat (and the meat business nowadays is rather brutal on the environment). I find that I have to eat meat occasionally, but we’re really trying to eat more locally and thoughtfully overall. It’s tough to do on graduate student and postdoc salaries, but we feel healthier and happier for it!
From what I have read, the perfect food move is to cut on meat and start buying organic at the same time. Apparently, the financial net result is balanced. I will do just that and I will start to grow and raise my own food in addition.
I believe that the natural diet of humans was whatever they could get their hands on at the time. Out there picking berries and fruit, and trying to figure out a way to make some of that last through the winter, harvesting grains and nuts, catching the occasional rabbit or squirrel, and eating it raw until they figured out that fire thing. Sushi, sashimi, ceviche, carpaccio. Of course the opportunistic human would avail themselves of eggs when they came across them: bird or turtle, it didn’t matter. It was a lot easier to dig roots and pick fruits and seeds than it was to chase down a mammal. Catching fish was not that hard, nor picking shellfish off the rocks during low tide. Hence, people on the coasts started eating fish as a protein source. Anyway, that sort of diet, full of UNPROCESSED whole foods seems to create the most healthful situation. My humble opinion.
My educated guess is that your humble opinion is absolutely right.
By the way, we continue to be opportunistic eaters when we pick any old thing from the supermarket shelf or from our fridge (much easier than growing your own stuff). But these junk foods are too new to our diet for us to have evolved accordingly. Maybe after ten thousand years eating burgers, the genetic predispositions to metabolize hydrogenated fats or saturated fats without getting cancer or atherosclerosis will have spread over the whole population.
Link correction: http://venus.nildram.co.uk/veganmc/polemics.htm –
http://web.archive.org/web/20031206180418/http://venus.nildram.co.uk/veganmc/polemics.htm
or http://tinyurl.com/3e24sm .
The content of this page should be of interest to you.
“The ‘Beyond Veg’ web site purports to be a thorough and scientific challenge to vegetarianism based on hard scientific facts and experiential evidence (anecdotes). It attempts to use paleontology, primatological evidence, evolutionary biology and comparative anatomy to rubbish the naturalistic vegetarian hypothesis. This article is intended not only to counter many of the claims of the authors of ‘Beyond Veg’, but also to reveal the authors terribly erroneous and unscholarly approach to science in pursuit of their dietary dogma.”
Dear Pearl. You seem to know your subject much more than I do. I thank you for the long comment but cannot publish it in extenso as I believe here is not the right place. Do you have a blog or a page I could link to and recommend?
As for counter-arguments against beyondVeg, there are bound to be (and I published your shorter comment above). I will definitely have a look at the links you mention, as I always love a good rational controversy (that is, as long as people do not start calling each other names).
Mandarine, first of all, I apologize for misspelling your name in my comment still under moderation. You have already linked in your article above to a page I have published (with the author’s permission) - http://www.iol.ie/~creature/BiologicalAdaptations.htm , thank you. I think that the short cites in my comment that you are holding back can clear up a lot of confusion regarding the role of meat-eating in our past, as expressed on this page, and I therefore respectfully ask that you reconsider. Merci.