The next time someone tells you you shouldn't eat meat, tell them you're just protecting your brain.NPR writes that when ancient people began eating meat, the calorie rich food allowed their brains to grow bigger while letting their stomachs grow smaller. The need to develop tools to hunt and butcher meat also caused our brain to grow smarter.
Cooking our food saves the most time of all. Raw meat could take as much as 6 times longer to chew and digest. (Cooking vegetables also makes more calories available and digestion easier.) Our brain requires constant calories to run and it can only use food that has been completely digested into pure glucose. So, having a rich source of calories that can be digested quickly is beneficial to our brain.
This means that humans became the great thinkers they are today by cooking and eating MEAT. Which means, if we had never eaten other animals, we probably wouldn't have the time nor mental capacity to protest moral wrongs like...eating animals?
Hah, try hitting a vegetarian with that paradox.
Warning: Eating a moderate amount of meat keeps your brain functioning at top capacity. Eating huge amounts of meat will not actually make you smarter and only runs the risk of making you look like THIS GUY --->
I think I'll have a steak with a side of steak and maybe some salad (chicken or taco) to go with it. To drink, I'll have bacon grease. Then I'll be the smartestest guy ever! Thanks for the advice.
ReplyDeleteBeing a vegetarian for most of my life has not negatively affected my intelligence but it has arguable been a by-product of my intelligence (High IQ link to being vegetarian: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6180753.stm.) A static view of history isn't defensible. What constitutes just war in a sedentary, highly populous society experiencing major ecological reversal is not what constitutes just war in a fully mobile, low-population community or in an advanced industrial society. The same can be said about the relegation of women to domestic duties. Societies without birth control and with high mortality and high levels of hand-to-hand combat can more easily justify fixed and oppressive gender roles than we can. Your argument could only be defensible (and then only arguably) if vegetarianism were related to contemporary malnutrition, which it is not.
ReplyDeleteVegetarianism is an ethical position because it extends the moral realm to other conscious beings who's suffering and killing is no longer necessary for our survival. It bases itself on a materialist plateau - the overcoming of biological (thousands of years ago for most of us) and economic (only a few centuries for most of us and not yet for others) necessity. I'm not under the impression that putting a halt to the meat industry will save the life of animals in the forest just like I know not killing my roommate isn't going to save the lives of Afghani civilians but it's a moral choice - I would argue a duty - not to participate.
- Rodolfo
That cheeseburger is trying to seduce me. I just saw it wink at me.
ReplyDeleteI've done it both ways and, for now, I feel better about going meatless. No quarrel with the Free Rangers, though; I just like to keep it simple.
ReplyDeleteWell, there never was and there never will be a justification for killing animals. Period.
ReplyDelete