Steak - Mark Schatzker [25]
As a species, we are in near universal agreement on this matter. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s population is willing to suffer through life as a vegan. Not a single major religion promotes veganism. There are parts of the world where people eat very little meat, but that is almost always because there is very little meat to be eaten. In every society, the rich eat more meat than the poor, but the poor nevertheless spend a disproportionate amount of their income on meat. They eat what’s good for them.
The human brain stands as its own compelling argument for our need for meat. When parents raise their children as vegans, they put them at higher risk of slow growth and mild cognitive impairment. The human brain is extremely large, relatively speaking, about five times bigger than it ought to be, if you go by the brain-to-body mass ratios of typical mammals. A big brain is expensive, physiologically speaking. Like the engine in a sports car, it consumes a lot of fuel even when idling. Getting that much fuel from plants is a tall order, especially given our short digestive tracts. Somewhere along the road of evolution, a trade-off seems to have taken place. As our brains got bigger, our ancestors supported them by getting rid of their slow-moving, energy-hogging digestive tracts. This substitution has occurred elsewhere in nature: South America’s capuchin monkeys are accomplished and intelligent hunters, and have big brains and small guts. So do dolphins. Cattle, by comparison, have small brains and enormous guts. From a design point of view, a cow is a grass-fermenting vat perched on four legs, while a human is a big, brain-stuffed head perched on two.
Some anthropologists believe it was the turn toward meat eating that set humans down the evolutionary road to intelligence. Consider this: humans still forage for plant food much the way chimps do. They go out and pick it. Hunting is a different story. While chimpanzees—our closest living relative among primates (our DNA is 98 percent identical)—hunt, they are known as “opportunistic” hunters. They will set out in search of ripe fruit, but if they happen to come across a colobus monkey or a newborn antelope hiding in the bushes, they will rip it apart with their bare hands and eat it with skin-tearing, bone-crunching glee.
Humans, by comparison, do not start their day looking for berries and just happen to kill a moose on the way home. Humans set out to find big game, and once they do, they stalk it and kill it. Humans hunt game with advanced tools, like spears or a bow and arrow (or, more recently, the Remington Model 700 BDL hunting rifle, which can fire a 7-millimeter-wide bullet at a speed of 3,110 feet per second). A hunt is a highly social event. It calls for strategy, planning, and cooperation. It requires some understanding—intuitive or learned—of how a hunted animal behaves. And it requires communication. If one human is trying to explain to another human the concept I’ll step out from behind that tree and start shouting. When it runs in your direction, jump out from behind the bush and throw your spear at its chest, at which point Larry here will toss the net over its head, whereupon, if your spear hasn’t found its heart or lungs, all three of us will commence bashing its head in with rocks, it certainly helps to have the benefit of subject-predicate sentences and at least a basic vocabulary.
When a human kills a big animal, he does not keep the meat all to himself but shares it with the rest of his tribe. While this gesture may seem altruistic and noble, a mark of the beginnings of civility—perhaps even the earliest stirrings of Scandinavian socialism—big-game hunters got something in return for their generosity: prestige.
The late anthropologist Marvin Harris coined a term for the human craving for meat: meat hunger. Ancient humans, who lived a calorie-burning outdoor lifestyle, would have experienced epic bouts of this longing. Being ancient, they’re not around to describe the intensity