Meat Made Us Human
15th December 2023
Another COP, another call to have meat removed from our diet. The further we depart from what we evolved to do, as individuals and as a society, the less efficient we become. We didn’t evolve to be vegetarian. Quite the contrary, humans are one of the most carnivorous animals on the planet, surprisingly so.
Eating meat is more efficient. Carnivores spend less time feeding than similar-sized herbivores. For example, one of our primate relatives, baboons (Papio cynocephalus), devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding while adult males of hunter-gatherer Ache (eastern Paraguay) and Hadza (northern Tanzania) tribes spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation and feeding. Acquiring and consuming medium-size animals, at a return rate in the range of tens of thousands of calories per hour, is an order of magnitude more time-efficient than plant-gathering. In nature, for humans, plant-sourced calories cost ten times the price of meat if it is available.