Man has eaten meat since prehistoric times. This consumption has increased over time. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), global meat production has quadrupled to around 350 million tons a year in the last 50 years alone.
And the trend shows no signs of slowing down. Current forecasts assume that up to 455 million tons of meat will be produced in 2050.
Scientists have long raised concerns about the environmental impact of this habit, particularly in relation to factorybred animals. Experts still consider this an “inefficient” food source because it takes more energy, water, and land to produce than other foods.
For example, a study on the impact of agriculture found that beef production is responsible for six times more greenhouse gas emissions and requires 36 times more land than the production of plantbased proteins such as peas.
Therefore, avoiding meat and dairy consumption is the best way to reduce the environmental impact on the planet, the study concludes. This dietary shift could reduce global agricultural land use by more than 75%.
Additionally, according to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) sources, 60% of global biodiversity loss is caused by meatbased diets.
The psychology behind meat consumption
Despite this data, many continue to consume meat without remorse. Benjamin Buttlar, a psychologist at the University of Trier in Germany, attributes this to habit, culture and felt needs.
“A lot of people just enjoy the taste. And another aspect is the identity of the food. A lot of traditional cuisines revolve around certain meat dishes,” Buttlar said, adding that the habit of eating animals means not questioning that act too often.
“And most of the time these habits keep us from thinking that eating meat is really bad because it’s just something we do all the time,” he notes.
Added to this is the ease of dissociation due to the fact that a piece of meat does not look like an animal. However, when we’re presented with a different perspective, whether it’s a vegetarian or a vegan or watching an animal welfare documentary, we can feel the need to justify ourselves, Buttlar says, for example by saying that humans have always eaten meat.
Research shows that men are the ones most likely to justify eating meat as something natural, normal, and necessary in the diet.
“You can see that in food trends,” explains Buttlar. “There are far more young women than men who are vegetarians because it is still a male stereotype that men eat meat.
The hypothesis that “flesh made us human”
Scientists have long believed that eating meat helped the ancestors of Homo sapiens evolve more humanlike body shapes, and that eating meat and bone marrow gave Homo erectus the energy needed to build a larger brain about 2 million years ago to form and feed.
But a recent study has questioned the importance of meat consumption in our evolution.
The study’s authors argued that while archaeological evidence for meat consumption increases with the appearance of Homo erectus, this could also be explained by increasing attention to the period. In other words, by a sample bias.
The more paleontologists looked for archaeological evidence of dismembered bones, the more they found. The authors write that the bone growth observed during this period does not necessarily reflect an explosion in meat consumption.
“I was really surprised by this finding,” said Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in the US and a coauthor of the study. “For a long time I have used the narrative that Homo erectus evolved because of increased meat consumption, and these findings have forced me to reconsider my perception of our evolutionary history.”
And the role of plant foods in evolution?
According to Pobiner, who studies the evolution of human nutrition, eating meat may not have been responsible for our brains oversizing either.
“We don’t see a large increase in brain size around the time meat consumption started. Brain size became absolutely larger with Homo erectus, but compared to body size it didn’t get much larger until about 1 million years ago.”
There is some evidence that early humans started cooking food around the same time their brains were getting larger. Heating food releases extra nutrients and speeds up the digestive process by making it softer and easier to chew.
For the researcher, human evolution can be traced back to a healthy diet. “And interestingly, there are ideas that it wasn’t a specific type of food that drove our evolutionary history, but that it was the ability to eat a wide variety of foods that made us so successful and human,” he added added.
Currently, 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plant and five animal species. However, overconsumption of any single food source can cause health problems.
“Numerous studies show that the consumption of animal protein is linked to the development of various types of cancer,” says Milton Mills, a general practitioner and critical care physician in the United States.
Mills, who advocates plantbased eating and runs a website on the subject, disagrees with arguments that vegetarians or vegans don’t typically get enough protein and nutrients in their diets.
“These theories came about 50, 60 years ago when the misconception was that meat was somehow more nutritious than vegetables. It was a grotesquely wrong misconception that certain amino acids can only be obtained by eating meat. That’s right,” Mills said.
How can you change habits?
With an unchanged appetite for meat, the world population could be too large to feed by 2050, when the world is projected to reach 10 billion people.
But how can global meat consumption be reduced? Buttlar believes change must come from the top down. “For example, making meat and meat products as expensive as they should be to ensure animal welfare and climate costs, and lowering the price of alternatives.”
According to Buttlar, it is also important to let people have positive experiences with plantbased alternatives.
“Instead of trying to change habits by saying, ‘You shouldn’t eat meat,’ we should say, ‘Have you tried that yet? tastier and even more beneficial for my health, the climate and animal welfare, then the changeover will come automatically.”
Author: AnneSophie Brandlin