Hungry

Recently, someone commented on another friend’s FB stream that humans are physiologically built to be herbivores. One of her arguments was that if you put a 2 yr old in a crib with a bunny rabbit and an apple, the child would eat the apple.

Really?

Ok, let’s all have a good chuckle at THAT logic (and then let’s all admit that if you put a very young child in a crib with ANYTHING, if they can pick it up and put it in their mouth, they probably will-it’s the nature of children and one of the ways they learn about things-duh?) and move on, shall we?

Humans are not physiologically herbivores. If we were, we wouldn’t need to eat certain grains in specific combinations in order to make the complete proteins our body must have to prevent nutritional deficits. Interestingly, those complete proteins are found easily in eggs and meat. We are omnivores. We are descended from scavengers, basically, and developing agriculture and learning to hunt and trap are the results of our massive brains which developed when we started eating…meat…

Oops. That’s the thing that militant vegans don’t want to talk about. Humans wouldn’t have ascended the evolutionary ladder without eating meat. The other thing they don’t want to talk about is that there is a way to eat meat from sustainable, humane, family farms and reject the processed, fast food, grocery store fake and processed crap. To learn more, check this out:

http://thebutcherblog.com/welcome-to-the-butcher-blog-this-is-our-meat-manifesto/

I live in Kansas. I hear all the time online about “grain fed” beef, yet everywhere I go, I see cows munching on grass in areas that are not fit for planting crops, or are part of a crop rotation unit (the farmer moves the cows each year, and plants something different in each plot to keep the ground from being overworked-a very smart thing to do and one way to keep from having to use chemicals on your crops). An girl who was in 4H told me the only time her family ever corn-fed a cow was the year she was showing it at the fair. She purchased feed corn to help it bulk up rapidly before the fair; and afterwards she wrote a paper about how the cow had more digestive and personality problems while eating a mostly corn diet than when it was allowed to graze exclusively on grass. VERY interesting.

My chickens are both for eggs and meat. My chickens are fed a high quality feed, and also flax seeds, oats, some kitchen scraps (greens: the edges of vegetables I chop up for cooking), and they are allowed to scavenge in the garden for bugs and weeds. We have the best eggs EVER. We have the happiest chickens in the world. Even Marvin, our rooster, is only ever aggressive when he feels like his hens are threatened by our presence, and he’s never aggressive to me as he associates me with multigrain mash, his favorite treat. We eat mostly what we can do for ourselves, so we eat chicken, and fish we catch, and I buy meat from the Amish because I know it’s raised in a healthy environment and butchered humanely. 

If everyone could do this-and in most cities you can keep chickens, but not a rooster-reduce the amount of meat they eat, stop eating junk, buy from sustainable sources…we could revolutionize the meat industry in this country. They would be healthier and have more energy, obesity rates would drop, diabetes and heart disease would plummet…But it’s too easy to run through a drive-thru and grab a 20 piece nugget. I know, I know. I’m guilty sometimes, in particular when traveling. It’s hard to eat healthy when traveling, when out of one’s element, not at home, unsure of where to go to find anything resembling a vegetable or whole grain. If you notice, I don’t discourage people from eating grains, beans, or vegetables: in fact, I believe your diet should primarily consist of such things. I just also believe meat has it’s place, eggs have a place, cheese and yogurt have a place. 

I generally have respect for vegetarians if they are willing to respect me. I don’t understand vegans, kind of like I don’t understand people who start in about corn syrup vs. sugar. But that’s a totally different blog post. In the meantime, if you eat meat, please consider trying to research places near you that sell meat from family farms, meat that has been butchered humanely, even if it IS higher priced. Perhaps you can use 1/4th of a pound of hamburger in your spaghetti sauce instead of a whole pound, because this meat will be so much more flavorful. Perhaps you don’t need to have huge chunks of meat each evening for dinner, but the recommended palm sized portion. Just think about it.