[HacktionLab] BarCamp Bradford and accomodation in Bradford

[mp]

[off-topic]

Garcon du Monde wrote:
> 
> i would like to point out that the human body is physiologically
> designed to eat meat.

I thought that the human body was an outcome of evolutionary, chaotic
processes over millennia - not design - and that these process generally
exhibited an omnivorous character of the human body. As such the human
body has historically been fed by both plant- and animal-based food.

Social organisation, such as in the form of religion, has shown that
humans can easily live a healthy life without eating meat or anything at
all from animals. Many Hindu sects have extremely strict forms of
vegetarianism that make Euro-American vegans look like beginners. They
have survived for a very long time and it is pretty safe to say, if we
should use the term design, that Hindu Brahmins have "designed their own
bodies", i.e. interfered socially in the evolutionary process of the
human body, over the last few thousand years, so that they can function
very well on a very strict vegetarian diet.

At any rate, it is a choice that a human can make - that we are
omnivorous, combined with the historical evidence from a variety of
cultures, doesn't mean that we all have to eat _both_ plants and
animals. We can survive without meat, but there are no known - as far as
I know - cultures that survive entirely on a meat diet. The Inuits eat
almost only animals and importantly drink their blood, but it is all
wild animals and they eat everything. However, they do eat some berries
and fireweed. The fibres of plants are really important for human digestion.

If a culture or group of people for a long, long time live solely on a
plant based diet we can even say that they have become herbivores. On
the other hand, in some places people are largely dependant on animal
based food, such as the Inuits, and have lived under such conditions for
a very long time and it might not be possible in an individual's
lifetime for someone from such a culture to fully become a herbivore.

You are what you eat!

-mp/omnivore :)