For some reason I got to thinking about the human history of eating meat. So many of the people we talk to can’t imagine not eating meat and this is potentially a real problem for future generations. To a large extent people are victims of our collective past. From the reading I did, here are ten things about meat eating that I found interesting.

  1. Science estimates that our ancestors began eating meat about 2.5 million years ago which is less than half the time humans have lived on earth.
  2. Eating meat was likely a response to climate change (a little ironic). Scientists think that the earth got hotter around 2.5 million years ago making human’s traditional plant foods harder to find. Trees and other fruit bearing plants were replaced by grasses.
  3. Because early humans were not hunters, they likely scavenged already dead meat from the increasing numbers of grazing herbivores that had benefitted from the changing climate, that and the leftovers from skilled hunters like the sabre toothed tiger.
  4. The advent of basic tools around 2 million years ago fostered an increase in meat consumption. Human teeth were designed for crushing plants not tearing flesh and so tools such as knives allowed ancient man to eat raw meat.
  5. The first evidence of humans cooking meat is from roughly 800 000 years ago which means of course our ancestors ate raw meat for the first 1.7 million years of the practice.
  6. The consumption of meat is thought to be what triggered our species’ amazing brain growth. This is because of it’s high calorie and protein content. That said scientists agree that it could have been peanut butter or any other “good” food that allowed our big brains to flourish, it just happened that animal flesh was readily available.
  7. Before eating meat became a thing, the human intestine was much longer allowing bodies to absorb more nutrients from a basic plant based diet. This meant that a lot of energy was used to digest leaving less for brain function, putting humans at the level of other primates. Big brains need a lot of energy and the high calorie and protein meat diet allowed this biological change to occur.
  8. In 2014 the average Canadian ate about 90 kgs. or 200 lbs. of meat, including beef, veal, lamb, pork and poultry. According to the U.S.D.A. the recommended amount is 36 kgs. per person per year.
  9. While beef consumption in Canada and the U.S.A. has dropped over time, the consumption of poultry has gone way up leaving overall meat consumption relatively stable over the last few decades.
  10. The United States has the highest per capita meat consumption in the world (119 kg / person / year in 2020) while India has the lowest at around 10 kgs. / person / year.

Ten Things I learned About Human Meat Consumption
Tagged on: