Vegetarians Not Kinder or Healthier

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The latest wave of emotional campaigning against eating beef has hit the headlines again – including comment in The Land in recent weeks – but this topic is at least 28 years old.

Back then, when I was at University and in our shared accommodation house, being a vegetarian meant you were more thoughtful and caring.

Of course now-a-days being a vegetarian is also about reducing the amount of carbon you emit and amount of water you consume – and they don’t mean breathing and drinking less.  

The claim goes that the production of cereals, legumes, fruit and vegetables has less of an environmental impact than the keeping of livestock. 

But there has been much written by scientists including high-profile anthropologist and environmentalist, Jared Diamond, about the overall destructive nature of cultivated agriculture.

Indeed, Professor Diamond claims that hunters lived mostly in harmony with their environment and that it was only with the advent of cultivation that Homo sapiens – our species – became environmentally destructive.   

Until just 10,000 years ago we did live on what is now known as a Palaeolithic diet and papers published in the best medical journals in the 1980s on Palaeolithic nutrition suggest these high meat diets suit us best because we are essentially carnivorous animals.   

Of course there has been as much published since suggesting the opposite, but the science is by no means definitive.
Everyone has an opinion about what foods are best and these opinions are often culturally-based.

Muslims don’t eat pigs; my father won’t eat rabbit, and a Kenyan friend of mine when confronted with a large bowl of chilled prawns once explained to me: “They are bottom dwellers, we don’t eat them, not where I come from”.

There has been a recent push from celebrities to embrace a vegetarian, if not vegan, diet. 

The theme of the Academy Award winning Best Animated Feature Film for 2006, Finding Nemo, is that fishing is evil and even sharks should become vegetarian – though what a vegetarian shark actually eats is not explained in any detail.

The voice-over for one of the main characters, Dory, is provided by well-known actor and vegan, Ellen DeGeneres.  

But whatever the claimed theoretical affinities between goodness and a fish-free and meat-free diet, there have been some evil vegetarians including Charles Manson and controversially Adolf Hitler. 

And there does not appear to be any correlations between how much meat, or fish, a society eats and levels of crime or peace.  Indeed the recent atrocities in Sri Lanka have occurred in a society with many Buddhist vegetarians.

The Australian beef industry is right to be concerned about the campaign against meat but it’s of limited use arguing from a basis of science. 

The war is cultural.

Remembering back 28 years when I was at University, in that share house, I recall after about six months without meat, much thinner and with a few health complications that could perhaps have been solved with some nutritional supplements, I visited the local GP. 

He checked me over, asked a few questions, and then prescribed a good roast dinner.  

I have been enjoying good roast dinners ever since.

Published in The Land

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