Gregory F. Tague: An evolutionary case for veganism
Meat eaters dissociate their empathic and disgust emotions from the reality of what’s put in their mouths. This dissonance occurs in how the meat is presented or the language used. Such stilted attitudes against living creatures arise from culture and education.
GREGORY F. TAGUE: Genetically, morphologically, and behaviorally humans are similar to great apes since we are apes. Michael Wilson (2021) believes there are adaptive peaks. For gorillas, it’s body size and guts for fermentation. For bonobos, it’s the moist forest. For chimpanzees, it’s foraging in broad areas with culture. For orangutans, it’s an arboreal life feeding from fruit trees. Presumably, we are to accept that the adaptive peak for humans is in the farming of animals that is driving poor health and climate change. As Peter Andrews and R.J. Johnson (2019) fear, we are developing physiological and psychological adaptations to eat highly processed supermarket foods. In the long run, that’s not sustainable.
In order to survive, all animals must eat and find new and better ways to harvest food, minerals, and water. Human behavior could be constrained by culture in how food preferences of a group can counteract resources in spite of availability (e.g., a perceived need for meat over plentiful plant foods). For great apes, diet is correlated to habitat and the consequential structures of morphology, like dentition, and physiology, like digestion and behaviors to survive and reproduce. A vegetarian or even vegan-like culture is part of our prehistoric roots and should once again be embraced…
Chimpanzees can spend half the day eating with even more time allocated for food resourcing. There are about 180 types of vegetation covering 140 tree and plant species. Commonly consumed are 155 or so plant types consisting of fruits (50 percent), leaves (about 25 percent), buds (about 25 percent), supplemented by seeds, flowers, stalks, inner plant tissue, along with tree bark and resin. In all, about 230 different plant foods are eaten. Insects, bird eggs, birds, and small mammals are also eaten on occasion.
Mainly as folivores, gorillas fuse around one male with several females in leaf-rich locations and feed among about 230 different plant foods. Among lowland gorillas, those in the higher eastern areas can show dietary similarity to mountain gorillas. Eastern lowland gorillas with small and scattered populations, who range in nether regions, feed more on fruits and insects. Gorillas seem to range more widely than chimpanzees, utilizing a variety of vegetation to feed and nest…
Orangutans rely on a multifaceted compound diet of fruits, nuts, leaves, bark, sap, shoots, stems, honey, fungi and other such foods, including insects. Orangutans closely inspect and eat up to about 400 different foods, mostly plants… Though rare, orangutans have been seen to eat small mammals, but this could be driven by food stress or the physical requirements placed on a lactating female…
Briana Pobiner (2020) indicates that meat and fat would not have dominated hominin diets before 2mya but for passive or marginal scavenging. The many allied hominin species who predate us and prepare for our entry were not obligate meat eaters. By 4.2mya, hominins had already developed, compared to chimps, larger, flatter cheek teeth and smaller canines, even in males (Warren, et al. 2019). Enamel thickened. These evolved adaptations were for grinding and crushing foods like nuts, seeds, and fibrous material found close to the ground as opposed to nutriments in trees…
Neanderthals might have eaten rotten meat stored underground or in water as an alternative to cooking. This practice of preservation and preparatory digestion, although offensive to most modern humans, demonstrates how there is a cultural ecology of food that can change… Neanderthals, generally, were not specialized to a particular environs or taxa, says Robert Power (2019), but lived on a subsistence strategy of the best foods, counting many plants but still animals… Data shows that anatomically modern humans are not born hunters and eaters of meat. Our australopith prehistory is not one of excessive consumption, and there was little meat eating, if any, in some species…
The evolutionary case for veganism is about shifts in cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs that are advantageous to humans, ecosystems, and animals. Cultural leaders have an obligation to teach a food ethos that centers on the health of a person in a larger, ecological environment. The authors of the classroom ethics report confirm their findings in a follow-up empirical study (Schwitzgebel, et al. 2021) attesting how education can be a powerful influencer on the unidirectional behavior of young people in terms of making positive changes to their health, the global climate, or animal lives.
Other scholars conclude that meat eaters dissociate their empathic and disgust emotions from the reality of what’s put in their mouths (Kunst & Hohle 2016). This dissonance occurs in how the meat is presented (e.g., a dismembered and headless corpse elicits less revulsion) or the language used (e.g., free-range rather than slaughtered or beef rather than cow). Such stilted attitudes against living creatures arise from culture and education…
We compete culturally, but that’s where cooperative change can begin. Some social networks, like communities of vegans, can break maladaptive conformity, like meat and dairy eating, to construct a better outcome among differing groups who are willing to accept the improved change in food ecology. Instruction of young people is the linchpin in any vision of a vegan culture. One study (Wilks, et al. 2020) reveals that children are more geared to saving many pigs over a human life than any adult is inclined.
The goal of “humanity” should not be to desensitize children to other life forms. We tend to be influenced to learn from those who share our beliefs (Hilmert, et al. 2006). Because of partisan politics in some countries, there are worries about who shapes the beliefs of children according to whose values. Adults, nonetheless, should not be under some obligation to inculcate children to prioritize humanity over other forms of life. As we can see from many recent events, whether deforestation, habitat loss, environmental catastrophes, or pandemics, that is a very costly proposition. SOURCE…
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