In solidarity with the Kamal’s cleanse articles, I wanted to share with y’all some lovely discoveries about earthling’s vegetarian history. I was reading some great books on what is called a “Macrobiotic Diet” and, rather than explaining what this system is all about, here’s three interesting tidbits I found out about the history of human eating habits.
First off, overall most of the climates (with the exceptions of really harsh conditions) we were primarily vegetarians — contrary to the images of primates hunting buffalo or other large beasts: “The ratio approximated seven parts vegetable food to about one part animal food, with the exception of unusual or extreme climatic regions or natural environments (like the Arctic, or Greenlandesque regions) such as the polar zones and the high mountains”(49, emphases added).
There is interesting evidence of this if you don’t believe me, and this is the fact that we only have four canines which are the only meat-tearing teeth we have, with the others used for grinding grains and cutting vegetables: “The structure of the human teeth offers another biological clue to humanity’s natural way of eating. The thirty-two teeth include twenty molar nd premolars for grinding grains, legumes, and seeds; eight incisors for cutting vegetables; an four canines for tearing animal and seafood. Expressed as a ratio of teeth designed for plant use and for animal use, the proportion of 28:4 also comes to 7:1 — once again, the proportion of veggie to meat in ancient societies.”
Other great arguments for why we weren’t really meat-eaters are the length of our bowels good friend: “Other examples of comparative anatomy, such as the length of the intestines, show that the human constitution is suited primarily to the consumption of vegetable quality food. If animal food is eaten in the human diet, it is ideally selected from among species most distant in the evolutionary order, especially fish and primitive sea life.”
REFERENCE: Kushi, M & Aveline. Macrobiotic Diet. 1993. (http://books.google.ca/books?id=tQE2P38IJjAC)
IMAGE CREDIT: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/image_full/usa/photosvideos/photos/organic-vegetables
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 8:32 am and is filed under Books, Culture, Food/Restaurants, Health, Review, Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I heard about our vegetarian roots (pardon the pun). It’s a mystery why we ever learned that primates etc. ate so much meat — wherever did our schoolsystem and parents get these crazy ideas. We were victims, and they doubly so. Thanks for this.
So intriguing! Have you ever read Carol Adams? She writes about the sexual politics of meat. In her work, she uses the linguistic term ‘absent referent’ to refer to a process whereby the essence of a being fades into the background and takes on a constructed meaning - for example, an ‘animal’ - a living entity, becomes ‘meat.’ In other words, we become psycho-socially disconnected from the food on our plate and enter into a hierarchical relationship of consumer (us) and Other (meat).
In the same way - and this is truly fascinating - she argues that women, in pornography for example (and perhaps in life in general), go through this absent referent process as well. In an article she wrote in Hypathia, she writes: “Ontology recapitulates ideology. In other words, ideology creates what appears to be ontological: if women are ontologized as sexual beings (or rapeable, as some feminists argue), animals are ontologized as carriers of meat. In ontologizing women and animals as objects, our language simultaneously eliminates the fact that someone else is acting as a subject/agent/perpetrator of violence.”
Anyway enough scholar talk. I think we should read her together….and then you should make me some fabulous vegetable curry. Deal? Great post darling. XO
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