Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory

Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory

Vaclav Smil

Language: English

Pages: 276

ISBN: 1118278720

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Meat eating is often a contentious subject, whether considering the technical, ethical, environmental, political, or health-related aspects of production and consumption.

This book is a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary examination and critique of meat consumption by humans, throughout their evolution and around the world. Setting the scene with a chapter on meat’s role in human evolution and its growing influence during the development of agricultural practices, the book goes on to examine modern production systems, their efficiencies, outputs, and impacts. The major global trends of meat consumption are described in order to find out what part its consumption plays in changing modern diets in countries around the world. The heart of the book addresses the consequences of the "massive carnivory" of western diets, looking at the inefficiencies of production and at the huge impacts on land, water, and the atmosphere. Health impacts are also covered, both positive and negative. In conclusion, the author looks forward at his vision of “rational meat eating”, where environmental and health impacts are reduced, animals are treated more humanely, and alternative sources of protein make a higher contribution.

Should We Eat Meat? is not an ideological tract for or against carnivorousness but rather a careful evaluation of meat's roles in human diets and the environmental and health consequences of its production and consumption. It will be of interest to a wide readership including professionals and academics in food and agricultural production, human health and nutrition, environmental science, and regulatory and policy making bodies around the world.

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Conversion efficiencies of species at higher trophic level feeding on the species used for fishmeal are significantly lower than in salmonid or crustacean aquaculture (Wijkström 2009). Moreover, plant substitutes (including oils derived from soybeans and rapeseed) can replace part of fish oil, and breeding has already lowered the demand for fishmeals and oils in fish feed: global aquaculture production has continued to grow, while the demand for fish-derived feeds has remained flat. But the need.

Of dietary cholesterol, this would translate to a maximum of 400 g of beef a day. Meat’s share of overall food energy supply was inevitably low in early hominins devoid of suitable hunting and butchering tools. It reached its evolutionary peak in Pleistocene hunting societies skilled at killing many species of (now mostly extinct) megafauna, was much lower in early sedentary societies combining foraging and cultivation of crops, and reached its lowest levels in all traditional agricultural.

Hunters may not have been entirely responsible for the relatively rapid extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, but there is no doubt that their actions had contributed to the demise of the largest herbivores in Europe, North America, Australia and large parts of Asia. The long duration of these foraging experiences and the enormous variety of environments they had eventually dispersed to from their ancestral African lands (living in arid grasslands as well as in the richest forests, in climates.

Efficiencies and changes As already explained, meat production in traditional settings – where animals were fed no, or hardly any, phytomass that could be consumed by humans or whose cultivation pre-empted the growing of edible foods – did not create concerns about the efficiency of feed-to-food conversion as does the modern intensive meat production that depends on concentrate feeds that could be either also directly consumed by humans or that are grown on land that could be used to cultivate.

Animals during their (often unnaturally rapid) growth, transport to slaughter and actual killing, and many more are detailed in books that have focused on the negative aspects of modern meat production, including those by Mason and Singer (1990), Lovenheim (2002) and Scully (2011). Some of these abuses can be, as I have also already noted, obviated or alleviated by simple measures. Unfortunately, as shown by the deplorable treatment of animals in some slaughterhouses, a greater human–livestock.

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