From: "Nick" 
Newsgroups: uk.d-i-y uk.education.misc uk.education.schools-it uk.finance uk.food+drink.misc uk.food+drink.real-ale
Subject: Re: 10 Reasons to go veggie
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:53:27 +0100

"The Natural Philosopher"  wrote in message
news:1158713170.9643.0@damia.uk.clara.net...
> Guy King wrote:
> > The message <1158684391.21062.0@damia.uk.clara.net>
> > from The Natural Philosopher  contains these words:
> >
> >> The concept of a vegetable simply did not exist then. It still doesn't
> >> in Africa, much.
> >
> > The UN's FAO reckons...
> > "The main staple foods in the average African diet are (in terms of
> > energy) cereals (46 percent), roots and tubers (20 percent) and animal
> > products (7 percent)."
> > http://www.fao.org/docrep/U8480E/U8480E07.htm
> >
>
> Exactly, They are starving to death on a high starch diet..
>
> My point was that if you take the agriculture away, here is bugger all
> edible vegetable matter. Cereals were not eaten pre agriculture, whhich
> is relatively modern
>
> In order to maximise population they adopted agriculture.
>
> Fat lot of good its done them too. The principle meal in southern africa
> is cultivated maize. A new world grain introduced in the last few
> hundred years.
>
> Prior to that it was millet and one or two other starch products..
>
> My original point being that its the unnaturalness of agriculture that
> allows us to be vegetarians at all. Prior to its adoption, homo sap
> could never have lived on plant products alone, and there is no evidence
> that he ever did.

I don't want to get drawn into a theological argument, but read the first
book in the Bible: it talks about Adam and Eve, and about their children. If
you remember there were two boys, one was a farmer and one a hunter. The
father 'blessed' the hunter (the hairy one, as he thought, but it was his
brother instead). I always wondered what this meant. Were we not meant to be
farmers? Or should we have been hunters.

If you do not 'believe' - just read the story and you will find that it may
be a 'race memory' or something, telling us what sort of diet/lifestyle we
should follow?

Just my two pen'orth....
--
Nick

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