Food is weird. I mean, most of the time, I don’t really think about food much. I eat at mealtimes, or other times, if I’m hungry. I try not to eat too much, because I don’t want to be unhealthy. And, I suppose I try to choose healthy things to eat. Mostly, I avoid fried things,white carbs such as sugar, white bread, etc. I try to eat some vegetables or fruits with every meal. That’s about it.
Some people have more detailed thoughts about foods. For example, vegetarians and vegans. I never really knew the difference between the two, so I had to google it. It turns out a vegetarian excludes meat, poultry, and seafood from his diet. Some also don’t eat milk or eggs. A vegan does not eat anything that has anything to do with animals. So, no meat, poultry, seafood, milk, or eggs. They don’t even eat honey.
So, why does a person become a vegetarian or vegan? It seems to boil down to a few reasons. First, it’s healthier to not eat animal products. This seems to be true. Eating meat is associated with coronary artery disease and development of cancer.
The second reason is that eating meat is cruel to the donor. That cow you slaughtered didn’t want to die. I have more of a problem with this claim. Not that it’s not cruel to kill a cow, it kind of is. The problem I have is that this cow would never have lived if he were not being raised to be food. It’s not like we could allow 94 million cows to wander the plains just to be nice. What happens when a 1500 lb bull wanders into a kids birthday party at the park? Or falls into a suburban swimming pool? Or wanders out into traffic. No, if we were not sponsoring these cattle, we would kill them as pests. So, you have to ask yourself, is it better to have lived and been made into cheeseburgers, or to never have lived at all. Not being a cattle, I can’t answer that question. If someone wanted to murder and eat me now, I’d be understandably upset, but I’d still be glad for the life I’ve had up until this point.
The third reason people give for not eating meat is that it requires more resources to feed animals which we eat than to just eat the grain we would have fed to the animals. This is probably true. But, if we got rid of the cattle and 70% of the grain farmers because we no longer need their grain to feed cattle, there would be a lot of people out of work. Not sure if that’s a good enough argument to keep eating steak, I’m just saying.
Thinking about this topic makes me wonder, how did we ever begin drinking cow’s milk in the first place? Who was the first guy who said, I’m really hungry, but I don’t want to kill my cow. I’m just going to drink milk out of the cow’s body. I’m going to subsist on the excretions of a big stinky animal. Then I’m going to take some of it and freeze it and add sugar and chocolate chips and make ice cream. Then I’m going to take the leftover milk out of the cow’s teats and let bacteria curdle it, then I’m going to slice the solid product and melt it between two pieces of bread. Don’t get me wrong, I love butter and cheese and ice cream, I just think it’s kind of bizarre how we made this journey.
Also, why only cow’s milk? Why not horse milk? Or goat, or mouse, or elephant, or cat? All mammals produce milk, right? And theoretically, we could take nutrition from any of them. But, in America, we’re only okay with the excretions from a cow. For that matter, why don’t we drink human milk? I know, we do. But only for the first few years. Drinking human milk after age two or so seems a little weird to most of us. But I would argue that it’s much more natural and therefore not weird to drink the milk from our own species.
Perhaps one day, there will be human dairies, where women go to be milked. These women could make money, and lose weight at the same time. Actually, this is already being done, on a small scale. An article from Reuters in 2011 discusses a cheese shop in New York which offered cheese made from human milk. Other examples included an ice cream parlor in London which purchased breast milk from women and made it into frozen treats. So, we may be on our way.
Linking humans to food might be a slippery slope. For example; I have a half-baked theory that food tastes better the more similar it is to us. Stick with me. I like bread, but the DNA of wheat is very different that that of a human. I like fish maybe more, chicken definitely more than fish, and meat from mammals most of all. And take the humble pig, an animal that has so much in common with humans that we sometimes use pig parts for humans, such as porcine cardiac valves. I love to eat pig! Bacon, ham,sausage, ribs, pork chops. I think you could safely say that pigs are my favorite food.
So how do we extrapolate this? Something even more similar to humans would be primates, including monkeys and apes, and even humans themselves. I imagine I might love a nice human steak. Or sausage- mix that fat in there with the little actual muscle tissue left.
I hope we never get that far. Aside from the ethical issues of cannibalism, there will definitely be health concerns. The fat content alone can’t be healthy. Also, there are weird issues that arrive with cannibalism, such as prion diseases. Like mad cow disease. There is an illness called kuru seen in natives of New Guinea who used to eat the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ceremony. They would contact and pass on the infectious protein that would kill them. See, humans are dirty. That’s not something you want to be eating.
Maybe I was wrong, maybe I do think about food too much.
Now I want bacon 😊
Have you checked out the carnivore diet? It might be healthier than we think. Also, what about the idea of a human milk bar where you could drink directly from the source? Sounds pretty healthy to me.