Part 1 of 4 (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Vegetarianism, as a way of life, has been around for millennia - with relatively few adherents.
Recently, however, reports in the news media, have suggested that a vegetarian way of life is healthier. Not surprisingly The Vegetarian Society has capitalized on these reports using them to persuade members of the lay public that their way is better for the animals, the environment, and, not least, for human health - and numbers are growing.
Forms Of Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism has evolved several forms. Generally the person who calls himself a vegetarian does not believe in killing animals and so does not eat meat and, sometimes, fish.
He does, however, eat eggs and dairy produce. This form of vegetarianism, known more correctly as lacto-ovo-vegetarianism, is the most common form.
For a reason I cannot understand, the British Vegetarian Society also allows membership to those who eat chicken, presumably on the grounds that while a cow is an animal, a chicken is a vegetable!
There are also more extreme and restricted diets: the vegan diet whose followers exclude all animal products, but otherwise eat . More restricted again are the Zen macrobiotic diets which consist almost exclusively of cereals and several variations on raw food - vegetarian - diets.
Vegans do not eat or use animal products, animal by-products, or products tested on animals. The term vegan, formed from first three and last two letters of the word veg etari an , was coined in London in 1944 by seven vegetarians who founded the Vegan Society.
There are three main reasons why people become Vegans:
Concern for animals.
Many people turn to vegetarianism because they do not want to kill animals. Vegans take it one step further. Concerned about animal husbandry today, which they say are inhumane, vegans and avoid animal products completely.
Health.
They believe that eating meat and dairy is bad for human health.
Environmental concerns.
They believe that animal farming damages the environment. For example they aver that "Methane from cow flatulence is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions leading to global warming".
Natural Hygiene is a variation of the Vegan diet. Natural hygienists eat a diet of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. There is considerable disagreement within this movement about what constitutes 'natural hygiene'. Some natural hygienists eat animal products; some advocate high fruit diets, while most discourage them.. In the USA raw foods are espoused.
Raw Fooder - one whose diet is raw foods. In theory this could include meat. However, it is usually a vegan diet and can also be lacto-vegetarian, so long as the dairy foods eaten are raw.
Essenes are followers of Jesus Christ, in that they believe that Jesus was a member of the Essene sect, and a raw food vegetarian. The Essene diet is a raw food diet of raw sprouts, wheatgrass, vegetables, and fruit. Use of raw dairy is explicitly authorized by the Essene gospels, so the diet is often lacto-vegetarian rather than vegan. Many Essenes use fermented dairy products, specifically yogurt.
After these vegetarian, but varied diets where many different foodstuffs are combined to provide a 'balanced' diet, come others which which are both more extreme and more harmful to health - even though those who espouse them usually do so because they believe they are healthier. They get progressively more dangerous in the order I have listed them
Zen-macrobiotic is a diet that limits intake to just cereals.
Living Fooder - a version of sproutarianism. It also includes raw fermented foods and raw blended foods.
Sproutarian - one whose diet is predominantly sprouted seeds.
Fruitarian - A fruitarian is one whose diet is at least 75% fruit. The rest is made up of sprouts or green leafed vegetables.
Breatharian - This is more a non-diet as breatharians believe they can survive without eating at all, getting the nutrients and energy their bodies need from the air they breathe.
There is at present a growing trend towards vegetarianism. One of the results of the introduction of the 'healthy' or 'prudent' diet's recommendation to eat less red meat has been the increasing numbers of people who are turning to a vegetarian diet.
Polls carried out in 1988 (1) and 1989 (2) indicated that some three percent of British subjects called themselves vegetarian or vegan - a slight increase on figures obtained during the previous four years.
Motivations given included disapproval of intensive animal farming methods, rejection of animal slaughter, dislike of the taste or texture of meat, and about half of those polled mentioned health concerns (3)
One can sympathize with the moral argument, as food animals are kept indoors unnaturally, while their natural outdoor environment is turned into golf courses. And it may seem difficult at first to answer the question: 'How can you justify slaughtering an innocent animal for food?'
The Road To Vegetarianism Often Starts In College.
Most professed vegetarians are in the twenty-six to thirty-five age group with comparatively few under twenty or over forty. The young impressionable student learns a little about ecology.
He reads that animals are brought up in unnatural surroundings and fed hormones and chemical supplements to make them grow faster or leaner, and that those substances remain in the meat that we eat. He also learns that pollutants, pesticides and other toxic substances drain into our waterways and seas, are eaten by fish which again we eat.
He knows that the protein he got from meat and fish is necessary for his health, but he learns that many vegetables such as cereals, beans, nuts, seeds and tubers contain protein. Besides, he can ensure adequate protein if he supplements his diet from indirect animal sources such as milk, cheese and eggs - without having to kill anything.
On top of this, he has been subjected to a great deal of propaganda telling him that a diet lower in meat and higher in vegetables is more healthy. And, lastly, if he buys organically grown vegetables, he will avoid the pollutants. They will cost a little more, but he is saving the price of the meat and, anyway, it would be a small price to pay.
Then he is told that meat production is a waste of the earth's resources. The high quality grain that is fed to animals, which are then fed to us, would be used more efficiently if we did without the animals and ate the grain ourselves.
Not only would that grain feed more of us, the land presently used to rear animals, he is assured, could itself be used to grow even more grain to feed the starving. It soon seems clear to him that in our modern world, where a third of the population is starving, meat production by any country must constitute waste of criminal proportions.
So he becomes a vegetarian. True, he has had to sacrifice the pleasure of eating meat, which he had found to be very palatable, but his conscience is clear and he is assured of a healthier life.
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as that. The student knows a little, but the adage that 'a little learning is a dangerous thing' was never truer than in this context.
Animal Farming Is An Efficient Use Of Land
The human population of this planet is now approaching six billion and, even if every country on Earth enforced a strict and effective birth-control policy today, it is estimated that the total population will climb to fifteen billion before stabilizing.
The Earth's total land area is 179,941,270 square kilometers (69,479,518 square miles). A little simple mathematics tells us that at present, on average, one square kilometer has to support just over thirty-three people. If all of it were cultivated, that would certainly be possible.
The argument fails, however, because not all of it is available for arable cultivation. The main environmental factors that determine plant development and distribution are climate and soil type.
We can discount the whole of the unproductive continent of Antarctica, so that reduces the total by 13,335,740 square kilometers immediately. We can also discount, at least as far as arable farming is concerned, all other ice-covered areas, tundra, mountains, deserts, heath and moor land, areas covered by rivers, salt marshes and lakes, cities, roads, and railways; and to a large extent semi-deserts, savannah, rain forest, low-lying meadow land and areas liable to regular flooding. We have now discounted most of the Earth's surface.
In fact, only eleven percent of the land surface is farmed.
Almost all of the land we have just discounted does support grass or other plant life that we cannot utilize directly. We need a system that converts that grass into a form of food that we can eat.
And we have one: much of the land we have discounted for arable use can be, and is, used for the raising of food animals. Take New Zealand, for example. Here we have a country of 269,000 square kilometers - larger than Great Britain - with a human population of 3 million, a sheep population of 42 million and many cattle.
When I was in New Zealand for three months in Spring 1999, I didn't see one field of grain. It wasn't surprising: as the ground is rarely flat and the volcanic rock on which New Zealand is built is very close to the surface, that country is quite unsuitable for the cultivation of grain. And the same applies to many other parts of the world.
At Present One-Third Of The World's Population Is Starving.
If we all became vegetarians, we would have no use for, and would stop farming, all the land that will support only food animals. But taking all the land that supports food animals, but cannot support arable farming, out of production is hardly likely to ease the problem.
In many areas where animals are farmed, they are the only things that can be farmed. In these areas, therefore, animal farming is the most efficient use of the land.
The vegetarian may argue that land that is not cultivable at present can be made so, but it is an argument that has already been shown to be false. The situation with respect to land use is not static.
As the population has increased this century, so the amount of land available for cultivation has decreased. Where deforestation has taken place to make way for cultivation, soils have been exposed to higher precipitation and temperatures (4).
These processes deplete the soil's organic matter; the soils harden and turn to desert. In 1882, desert or wasteland covered an estimated 9.4 percent of the Earth's surface. By 1952 that area had increased to nearly twenty-five percent. It is a growing trend and one which, once it has happened, is very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
In many areas with naturally low productive capability, irrigation is used to increase agricultural productivity. But irrigation carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Semi-arid soils are characteristically salty.
The irrigation water, from essentially the same area, is also usually saline. Without adequate drainage, the irrigation water seeps into the soil and raises the water table. This brings the underlying water nearer the surface where it evaporates more freely, leaving behind the salty chemicals.
In time, the salts of sodium, magnesium and calcium clog the pores in the soil and leave a whitish bloom on the surface. This process not only destroys the soil structure so that yields fall, it leads eventually to a level of salinity where no plant can grow. Kovda estimates that between sixty and eighty percent of all irrigated land, that is millions of acres, is being transformed into deserts in this way.
Most of the world's surface is not covered by land, but by the oceans and seas. At present, millions of tons of fish are caught or farmed each year. As well as not eating meat, many vegetarians don't eat fish. If vegetarianism really caught on and everybody on the planet stopped eating fish, the two-thirds of the population who are not starving at present would soon join the third that are.
The British Situation
The prosperous, well-fed United Kingdom has a total land area of some 88,736 square miles (229,827 sq km) and a population of 57,537,000 (1991 Census). Arable and orchard farming occupy thirty percent while permanent meadow and pasture, which support food animals, covers fifty percent of the total area. But all of that is woefully insufficient - we still have to import one-third of the food that we need.
The UK's major livestock production is sheep, which are reared in almost every part of the kingdom. If we all became vegetarians, the mountains of Wales and Scotland would become largely unproductive, as would the moorlands of central and northern England. We would not eat the 720,000 tons of fish caught each year - over 12.7kg (28 lbs) per head.
If we all became vegetarians, how much more food would we have to import? and where would it come from?
The USA and Canada, who are net exporters of grain, might seem to be the answer to the latter question, although our food import bill - already £6 billion per annum - would rise alarmingly. If they too became vegetarian, however, they too would need to import.
No: if we all became vegetarians, make no mistake, we would starve.
A Fishy Problem
For many lacto-ovo-vegetarians, the killing of animals is a problem. On moral grounds some are tending to change to eating fish - although the logic whereby the killing of fish is considered correct if the killing of land animals is not, escapes me.
They are encouraged in this change by the belief that the eating of fish is what has allowed the Japanese to live longer and that it is good for them. Wanting to be healthy themselves, they buy sea fish like cod, sea bass, red snapper and haddock. But these are not the 'healthy', omega-3-oil bearing fish that doctors are advising us to eat.
Fish stocks are declining. Cod used to be a cheap fish. It is presently £7.70 per kilogram, - over £2 more than farmed salmon. As prices reflect the laws of supply and demand, this can mean only one thing: there is a shortage of cod.
Cod is not the only fish that is scarce around Britain, so are haddock, wild salmon and monkfish. It is the same story worldwide. The one fish that is plentiful now is the North-Sea herring. This does contain omega-3 oils and, with the mackerel, is good for us. It is also the cheapest fish on the market, yet the British have almost stopped eating it.
The fish for which we have rejected herring is tuna from the Pacific and other exotic species: tiger prawns from India and sailfish from the Caribbean. This change reflects a growing and disturbing trend. With the North Sea almost fished out and now highly regulated, third-world fishermen, hungry for foreign currency, are plundering their own declining stocks in other unregulated oceans.
With fish becoming increasingly difficult to catch in quantity, modern fishermen and their equipment are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Cornish fishermen are using four-mile-long drift nets to catch tuna in the northern Atlantic. The nets are called 'walls of death' because of the numbers of dolphins and other unwanted fish they catch.
The Japanese fish for tuna with lines up to sixty-five miles long with thousands of baited hooks. In the North Sea, trawling does more damage than pollution.
Fish are very good at renewing themselves - if they are allowed to do so. But few will let them. Despite international agreements and quotas, in the northern seas, no one, with the possible exception of Iceland, is managing their fish stocks properly and the problem of over-fishing is spiraling out of control.
Fishermen's methods have been likened to farming. But they are centuries behind: where the farmer sows and reaps, the fisherman, like the primitive hunter-gatherer, only reaps. He does not use his resources nearly as efficiently as the land farmer.
Without fish, we would be hard pressed in this island for sufficient high-quality food. We need fish, but we will only exacerbate the problem of over-fishing if we switch from meat to fish - from efficient animal farming to inefficient and wasteful fishing.
The Killing Of Animals For Food Is Not Morally Wrong
A question frequently posed by vegetarians is: how can you justify killing an innocent animal for food? This question may seem difficult to answer at first but really it is not.
Would it be reasonable to ask a lion to justify his killing of an innocent gazelle? Of course not: it is natural for the lion to kill the gazelle and that is justification enough. And what of a gazelle's right not to be eaten? Put this way, you can see that such questions are really meaningless. The same is true for us, for we are not a vegetarian species.
We Are Not A Vegetarian Species
Vegetarianism is unnatural.
This is not a modern finding. The Bible gives us evidence of this, and clues that vegetarianism was not regarded with favor. In Genesis , Chapter Four, Eve bears Cain and Abel. 'And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.'
That 'but' in the middle of the sentence is the first clue to disapproval. This disapproval is confirmed by verses three to five. Abel and Cain bring offerings to God: Abel of his sheep and Cain, the fruits of the ground. God, we are told, had respect for Abel's carnivorous offering, but He had no respect for Cain's vegetarian one.
The Bible, however, can only give an indication of the feeling of the time in which it was written. It does not provide a convincing answer to the question of what we really should eat. Are we a carnivorous, omnivorous or vegetarian species?
The answer to that question lies in our past, but not the immediate past.
The way we live now is based on advanced agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals. This is a very recent invention: we cannot have adapted to it yet. To determine what foods are likely to make up an ideal diet for us as a species, we must look further back, at our evolutionary history.
For the food we have adapted to and should eat now is not a matter for current dietary fads, it is determined by what we have adapted to over millions of years and is coded in our genes.
We can trace Man's evolution from remains found in Africa and other parts of the world of early hominids dated as long ago as five and a half million years (5) . We have fossilized bone records of both man and animals. We have found stone tools and implements that must have been used for killing and cutting flesh or for grinding plants. We even have found hominid feces.
These findings have led to a great deal of speculation. Are we a carnivorous, omnivorous or a herbivorous species?
We call our ancestors and the various modern primitive tribes, 'hunter-gatherers'. In the world today, some tribes live exclusively on meat and fish. Others live largely on fruit, nuts and roots, although meat is also highly prized. It is obvious, therefore, that we can survive on a wide variety of foods.
But Which, If Any, Is Our Natural Diet As A Species?
There are three possible combinations of diet we can consider:
The vegetarian hypothesis has it that we were wholly dependent on plant foods and that meat never played an important part in our evolution. It is a hypothesis that has had fervent support in the USA.
Fossil Evidence
The first evidence lies in the fossil sites. Where hominid remains are found, so also are animal bones - at times in their thousands. If we were not meat-eaters, why is that?
Secondly, although modern hunting tribes do eat plants, they have fire. Without it, there are very few plant foods with sufficient calorific value that we could have digested.
There were fruits, of course, but there is not one prehistoric site in all Africa that indicates forests extensive enough to have supplied sufficient fruit to meet the needs of its inhabitants.
Indeed, there is agreement that our ancestors did not dwell in forests at all but on the savannahs where there were vast plains of grass. However, grass is of no value to our digestive system. Even to live off fleshier leaves would require the much more highly specialized digestive systems of other primates.
Compare the shape of the gorilla against that of the man. The area between the chest and the legs of the gorilla is much greater than the same part of the man. This is because the gorilla, a herbivore, needs a much larger digestive system. The walls of all plant cells are made of cellulose, a form of dietary fiber. There is no enzyme in the human digestive system that will break it down.
And with the cell walls intact, the nutrients in the cells cannot be digested. Passing unaffected straight through the gut, therefore, all the nutrients in the plant would be ejected as waste.
Studies conducted on monkeys have led to the suggestion that the seeds of the grass could have supplied us with the energy we required (6). However, if this were the case, why is it that we cannot eat them now without cooking them first?
Seeds, the staples such as rice, wheat, maize and beans, play an important part in our lives today. All of them, however, must be cooked before we can eat them in any quantity. Seeds and berries are a plant's reproductive system.
Many are designed to attract animals to eat them but there would be little point in this if the seeds were digested. No, they are indigestible - deliberately, designed to pass through the animal to be defecated and take root elsewhere. Two means only are available to make them digestible: cooking and grinding.
Before fire was harnessed, the only means by which the seeds could have been rendered digestible would have been by pounding them and breaking down the plant cell walls, but no archaeologist has ever found a Stone Age tool for this job.
If chewing were the method used to do the job, a very large proportion of the seeds would escape and, passing through the body undigested, end up in the feces. Hominid feces, or coprolites as they are called, have been found and studied in detail (7).
Older coprolites from Africa contain no plant material. Relatively recent ones from North America have included just about everything that could remotely be called edible: from eggshells and feathers to seeds and vegetable fibers. But these remains occur only after the Paleoindians had mastered fire, and even then, seeds had passed through undigested and unharmed. Thus there is no doubt that seeds cannot have been a natural part of their diet.
Homo erectus began to appreciate the value of fire around 350,000 years ago (8). It is true that if our ancestors had started cooking grain then, we could have evolved and adapted to it by now. However, cooking grain is not as easy as cooking meat. You cannot hang it in a chunk over the fire or lie it in the embers. To cook grain and other seeds, you need a container of some sort. The oldest known pot is only 6,800 years old. In evolutionary terms, that was only yesterday.
For any reliance on cooking, you also need a controlled fire. Although hearths have been discovered that are 100,000 years old, these are relatively rare. European Neanderthal coprolites from around 50,000 years ago, before the use of fire, contain no plant material whatsoever.
It was not until Cro-Magnon's colonization of Europe, some 35,000 years ago, that hearths became universal. However, even then they were used merely for warmth, not for cooking plants. At the time, Europe was in the grip of a succession of ice ages.
For some 70,000 years there were long, cold winters and short, cool summers. Cro-Magnon and his Eurasian ancestors cannot have eaten plants - for most of the year there weren't any! He ate meat or he died. And he ate that meat raw.
Fats And Brain Size
The evidence was already overwhelming that we could not be a vegetarian species. However, in 1972 the publication of two independent investigations really nailed the lid on the vegetarian hypothesis's coffin. The first concerned fats (9).
About half our brain and nervous system is composed of complicated, long-chain, fatty acid molecules. The walls of our blood vessels also need them. Without them we cannot develop normally. These fatty acids do not occur in plants.
Fatty acids in a simpler form do but they must be converted into the long-chain molecules by animals - which is a slow, time-consuming process. This is where the herbivores come in. Over the year, they convert the simple fatty acids found in grasses and seeds into intermediate, more complicated forms that we can convert into the ones that we need.
Our brain is considerably larger than that of any ape. Looking back at the fossil record from early hominids to modern man, we see a quite remarkable increase in brain size. This expansion needed large quantities of the right fatty acids before it could have occurred.
It could never have occurred if our ancestors had not eaten meat. Human milk contains the fatty acids needed for large brain development - cow's milk does not. It is no coincidence that in relative terms, our brain is some fifty times the size of a cow's.
The vegetarian will be dismayed to learn that while soy bean is rich in complete protein, and grains and nuts also combine to provide complete proteins, none contains the fats that are essential for proper brain development.
Although the eating of fats today is believed by some to be a cause of heart disease (erroneously, see The Cholesterol Myth), we know that our ancestors ate large amounts of fat. Animal skulls are broken open and the brains scooped out; long bones likewise are broken for their marrow content. Both brain and marrow are very rich in fat.
Continue to Part 2
References