But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.

And if you go back even more when humans were still "wild" meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.

[–] bric@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a crucial part of our diet. It's amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you're a hunter gatherer you don't have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you're going to grow. That's the niche we evolved to fill, it's why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn't take a lot of meat to meet a person's protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.

[–] TheFriendlyDickhead@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am vegetarian for over 5 years. You realy don't need any meat. That just some public believe the meat companies planted in our heads. For a vegetarian lifestyle your don't even have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. In general it's way more healthy if you do it right. The only thing is that it's usually harder to cook something tasty, because you can just throw meat in anything and it tastes like something.

[–] bric@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

But what you're missing is that being vegetarian wouldn't be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You're relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you're relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It's not meat company propaganda to realize that human's evolved to eat meat, it's evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn't even registered yet, so even though we're living in a modern world, we're still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That's why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn't something that we evolved to deal with.

None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it's great that we've reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I'm saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm