Red Shift: Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?
15th July 2024
Every now and then the New Yorker will turn from Wokery and do what it used to do best, some interesting and very well written piece that leaves you better for having read it. This is one such.
In 1966, at a meeting remembered in anthropological lore as the beginning of hunter-gatherer studies, seventy-five experts assembled in Chicago to synthesize our knowledge about foraging peoples. More than ninety-nine per cent of human history was spent without agriculture, the organizers figured, so it was worth documenting that way of life before it disappeared altogether. The symposium—and an associated volume that appeared two years later, both titled “Man the Hunter”—exemplified an obsession with hunting, meat-eating, and maleness. “Man” was meant to cover all humans; “hunter” was shorthand for anyone who subsisted on wild food. The book devoted an entire section to the role of hunting in human evolution. “Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species,” a chapter began. “It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual human organisms and of the population who compose our single species.”
The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that “all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters.” But contributors to “Man the Hunter” showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only eleven—less than a fifth—relied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.