LogFAQs > #930504612

ssjevot posted...

Esrac posted...

I don't see how the meat is acquired matters. We have a lot of people to feed, of course we'd want to breed animals in a way that produces as much meat as we can.

We've been domesticating and breeding animals for their meat for more than 10,000 years, so of course our ancestors were breeding meat for what they could get out of the animals. On top of that, we've been hunting animals for more than 2 million years. Eating meat is entirely natural for our species.

You can argue that we may be eating too much meat, in the same way we're eating too much sugar, but that seems to be a different point than what you seemed to be getting at. Unless I misread you.

You can't make an argument from evolution and nature if the best you can do is we started domesticating animals 10,000 years ago (which is extremely recent in human existence, and certainly not paleolithic which started over 3 million years ago). The nature argument is bad for a pile of reasons, but my entire point is nothing about our current society is like the state of nature we used to live in (which is good since most of us would be long dead based on life expectancy from those times). You can't say we evolved to eat this, and then eat stuff that is nothing like what we evolved to eat.

And like the person above pointed out, raising meat is horribly inefficient so you can't just compromise your own argument to say we have to modify meat from nature to feed more people. These paleo people just come off as completely unfounded because we don't live in the state of nature, we didn't live very long when we did, and the food they are eating is nothing like what people ate when they did live in the state of nature.

We've been eating meat for millions of years. We've evolved with meat eating because it was beneficial for our survival and development. The meat coming from animals we domesticated probably isn't meaningfully different from meat from animals we hunted. It's a different method to get the same kind of resource and one of the reasons life expectancy has gone up.

And of course I can say we evolved to be able to eat meat and then also eat things that we didn't evolve to eat. Saying its natural for us to eat meat doesn't mean we only have to eat meat. We can just as well eat other foods we manufacture, as long as they provide the nutritional and caloric content we need. That doesn't hurt the argument that eating meat is natural.

And producing meat requiring more resources doesn't detract from then statement that we breed livestock to produce more meat to feed more people. We accept the additional cost while trying to get as much as we can from the livestock, because the sheer quantity of eating any food isn't the only factor we consider.

I never said that we should only consider how many people we feed, I said we breed animals to produce more meat because we have a lot of people to feed. But we also want to be able to feed them more than just vegetables and fruits.