It has been claimed by vegetarians that “physiologically, anatomically, and instinctively, man is perfectly suited to a diet for [sic] fruit, vegetables, nuts, and grains.” But why does he freely and willingly, individually, collectively and communally, eat meat? And why has man demonstratively been eating meat as a significant part of both of his diet and a central aspect of his social behaviour for as long as we have been in the genus Homo? And if we don't instinctively like meat why when we have the choice do we eat it in huge quantities?
It is perfectly true that anybody will find a raw fruit attractive to eat but they will not salivate over a bloody carcase. But this is because man has been an eater of cooked food for over a million years. We need to cook much of our food to get the nutrients out of it that we need, that includes staple plant food as well as meat. Our teeth and guts are not the teeth and guts of a carnivore or a herbivore but an animal which eats cooked food. We can't kill a chicken or a rabbit with our bare hands and then eat it like hamburger. Our teeth are not up to the task. Neither are our guts up to the task of eating raw potato, only a handful of cranks think this is a reason not to eat cooked potatoes. The vegetarian was right, we don't salivate over a freshly killed animal like a natural-born carnivore would do, but neither do we salivate over raw potatoes or cereal grains, that doesn't mean we don't want to eat them when they are properly cooked to our taste.
The earliest stone arrowheads are thousands of years older than the earliest grindstones. Meat was on our menu well before bread or beer. Our ancestors ate enormous quantities of meat, the Cro-Magnon man and his cousins the Neanderthal would have been eating a more meat-rich diet than a modern domestic dog. How do we know? Coprolites: as far as archaeological evidence goes it's the shit.
What a fruit based diet can not do is provide the means for survival in harsh or novel environments. Man the vegetarian is the man who stays near where he knows his food grows and when it is edible, working selfishly and individually like a grazing or browsing animal, never sharing food because sharing food is to feed shirkers. Hunting success has an element of luck, gathering vegetable food is all down to effort and drudgery, sharing food makes sense for hunters but nonsense for grazers. Exploration of new environments and complex social interactions depended on meat for calories, fats, proteins and for the reason to co-operate, share, communicate and live socially. It doesn't take cunning, learned skills or teamwork to outsmart a parsnip. Shit, it doesn't even need opposable thumbs and a brain case the size of an orange. But to turn a Mammuthus primigenius or Bos primigenius (aurochs - the ferocious ancestor of European domestic cattle) into a series of meals for your tribe requires the full gamut of human ingenuity, courage, social skills, tool-making and political skills too on a scale that is entirely and uniquely human.
Everything you admire in the human species is a product of meat eating and hunting: intelligence, sociability, communication, co-operation. Just look at vegetarian animals and see how they live: they don't co-operate, most don't communicate, they use each other as bovine shields - trying whenever possible to keep themselves in the middle of the group to minimize their individual chances of being picked on by predators.
They never share food except via milk. They have no wider social goals, they congregate together merely for protection against predators as did the Atlantic convoys or to allow a thoroughly unliberated form of sexual orgy that would shame a Mormon. They have nothing to teach us that we want to learn.
There are no vegan or vegetarian animals, only some animals which don't tolerate meat in their diet because of their adaptations. No animal is capable of making a moral decision not to eat another animal or to make a contract not to do so. Neither does having a vegetarian diet preclude killing: elephants, buffaloes and hippopotamuses kill (people) and don't eat meat. Also note that India, a nation of hundreds of millions of vegetarians, has nuclear weapons.
The fact that the vast majority of people eat meat surely gives the lie to the idea that it is some sort of aberration or side-effect of capitalism, phallocracy, Yahwehist religion or other leftist psycho-babble codswallop. The exceptional vegetarian people live in agricultural communities with a wide variety of plant foods available, especially high protein grains or pulses. There are no vegetarian pre-agricultural people. Where people farmed plant material which was very low in protein, such as yams and taro, and no or very few animals were available for hunting an alternative source of protein was often relied upon: cannibalism. Interestingly cannibals usually fall into two groups, those who only eat outsiders and those who only eat their own tribal members. This clearly depends upon which rationalization is used to overcome the taboo.
Vegetarianism across an entire community does not exist outside of societies infected with religious or quasi-religious concepts, specifically Hindu, Jain and most Buddhist communities and a few austere Abrahamic sects such as the Rastafarians, Seventh Day Adventists, a few Jews but only a handful of Muslims. It is difficult to argue for vegetarianism when your prophet and perfect man spent so much time describing how animals were to be killed and meat prepared. Sikhs have a very interesting take upon vegetarianism, some Sikhs are vegetarian like their Hindu neighbours and some Sikhs will only eat meat from animals which has NOT been ritually slaughtered, meaning that giving Halal or Kosher meat to a Sikh is being insensitive to their religion. I wonder how many British schools are aware of that.
Human societies vary in the extent to which they rely on meat, some communities only eat a small quantity if they live in areas where plant food is plentiful and protein-rich (especially if they farm it) but no community eschews all meat without some religious or similar memeplex behind it. Refusing to eat meat is not normal human behaviour, and in many times and places it would simply be a recipe for malnourishment or even starvation of the whole community. When everybody walks around carrying spears all the time malnourished people don't tend to hang on to their land very well.
Of course you can no more derive an ought from a was than you can derive it from an is. Meat eating is what made us what we are, that doesn't mean that we have to remain as we were. All I am doing here is counteracting the argument that somehow we were meant to be fruit-eaters. We descended from tropical fruit-eaters, monkeys and apes. Those monkeys and apes which carried on eating fruit are still monkeys and apes. While we are still apes we are also people, that isn't a biological category, it is a definition that is based upon culture, and our human culture is heavily dependent on habits and traits which we developed through many hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, as co-operative tribal hunters and gatherers. Meat made man.
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