Natural Food

One argument sometimes offered as a justification for meat-eating is that it’s “natural” for us humans to eat meat and therefore okay. We’re “made” for meat-eating, it’s sometimes said. Or the human body is “designed” to eat meat, as indicated by our teeth, etc.

Barring a really crude creationist picture of human development, I think it’s only fair to point out that the critics are right in one sense. It seems likely that our distant ancestors’ switch to meat-eating provided a catalyst for human evolution. Anthropologists have suggested that meat provided nutrients that were unavailable from plant material at the time, and this allowed our brains to develop in the way they did. Thus, those humans who ate meat would have had an edge in the struggle for survival, and were able to evolve into intelligent sociable creatures. Thus, we are, congenitally, fitted to eat meat.

Granting all this, though, it by no means follows that we must eat meat today in order to get the nutrition we need to thrive. Nutritionists are virtually unanimous in agreeing that a properly balanced vegetarian diet can provide all we need to be healthy. And of course there are many indications that those who eat meat sparingly or not at all tend to be healthier than their carnivorous counterparts. Since scarcity of nutritious plant-based food is no longer an issue, at least in the prosperous parts of the world, it’s difficult to argue that we need to eat meat.

Just because something might have been necessary for survival at one point in our evolutionary history, it doesn’t follow that it’s okay to do the same thing under vastly different circumstances now. In our present situation, meat-eating, in addition to being unnecessary, involves the infliction of prolonged and intense suffering on literally millions of our fellow creatures. Under these circumstances it’s pretty difficult to see the justification. Things would be different, however, if meat-eating were to become necessary for human survival because of changed circumstances.

If our end is survival and flourishing, and there are two means that equally enable us to pursue that end, isn’t the moral course to choose the end that involves less suffering for our fellow creatures?