Ask a Vegan

[voyager]

Another NYT feature, this one = beef bourguignon with beans standing in for meat and veg broth for beef broth.   I wrote this up before under Supper thread.   Like it's muse, it is good on day one and fabulous after several.

[Orik]

On 12/1/2020 at 2:14 PM, Daniel said:

 

I would argue, though with nothing more than my strong sense of common sense, if we were carnivores, we wouldn't need to cook the food.. We would be using our sharp claws and fangs to rip apart tendons and flesh with much gusto.. Instead, we have to create utensils, cook to soften, season with plants, all just to help the body digest this foreign substance.. And then of course we get all of the diseases that as a result of our bodies still not being able to properly process it all.. 

Quote

Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology article), Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition, until finally they had no choice but to domesticate both plants and animals -- and became farmers.

 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247

[Stone]

I believe the advent of cooking and eating meat is one of the factors that led to homo sapiens rise and we're specifically adapted for it.  We lack the large "gut" necessary to fully digest plant materials and the jaw muscles for chewing lots of plants.  And, of course, we can only get full protein from certain plants or by eating others in combination.  Seems like a lousy way to build an herbivore.  We can still eat raw meat, but cooking it partially breaks it down allowing us to extract the nutrients quicker as it passes through our bodies.

[joethefoodie]

1 hour ago, Stone said:

We can still eat raw meat, but cooking it partially breaks it down allowing us to extract the nutrients quicker as it passes through our bodies.

And strangely, it even makes some stuff taste better.

[mongo_jones]

i have not ready this thread since the first page or so. is daniel still a vegan? i'm confused by his instagram feed.

[joethefoodie]

9 hours ago, mongo_jones said:

i have not ready this thread since the first page or so. is daniel still a vegan? i'm confused by his instagram feed.

Looks like they might have become omnivores again?

[Sneakeater]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/07/how-early-humans-quest-for-food-stoked-the-flames-of-evolution

[voyager]

Interesting.  Thanks.   Of particular importance, the distinction between fermenting, not putrefying

[small h]

What I can't find in that article is any support for the authors' assertions that ancient humans were seeking "delicious" food and not simply food that would keep them alive. Their proof seems to be that cooked food tastes better than raw food. But (according to me) that's not even true. I prefer a lot of things raw, like carrots, and oysters.

[Sneakeater]

Because how would they know what would keep them alive?

[small h]

Trial and error. This guy ate food X and lived. This guy ate food Y and died.

[Sneakeater]

Evolutionary biology doesn't think like that.  (And we don't know that early humans and their predecessors were able to think like that, either.)

Giraffes didn't "try" to develop longer necks.

ETA:  And plants certainly didn't "choose" to develop sugar-filled fruits and berries that animals would eat and thus transport the seeds contained therein because they saw other plants doing it and thought it was a good idea.

[Sneakeater]

That's not to say that evolutionary biology is definitely right in all cases.

Just that evolutionary biologists are going to analyze things like evolutionary biologists.

[small h]

Yes, I was being only semi-serious. But I don't see how we can make the leap from "they ate this" to "they sought this out because it tasted good." Because all we really know is that the people who ate cooked meat had a better survival and reproduction rate than those who didn't. It's certainly possible that these survivors preferred cooked meat to raw, but the article doesn't offer any evidence of this other than "here we are, humans who eat sour things and cooked things." That we are omnivores certainly worked in our favor. If I had a hard time finding food (as I assume a lot of early humans did), pickiness about what I ate - or the inability to make use of a lot of different foods - would not serve me well. I also think that cooked meat, in addition to being more digestible than raw, probably also keeps longer, lowering the risk of food poisoning.

I'm reminded of an article I read in NYMag a long time ago, about people who restrict their calories almost to starvation level because they think it'll help them live longer. Do they LIKE doing this? I very much doubt it. They're just interested in not dying as soon. (I realize this is not a great comparison, because the guy who's the main focus of the article seems insane.)

[Sneakeater]

It’s not a great comparison cuz our collective culture and level of self-consciousness is infinitely more highly developed than our precursors’.   (Note that that’s not to say our BRAINS are more highly developed.)