Early Meat-Eating Human Ancestors Thrived While Vegetarian Hominin Died Out

Make of this what you will . . . but it seems to support the premise that humans are omnivores. Before the commentary from Katherine Harmon at Scientific American, here is the story form Science Daily.

Early Human Ancestors Had More Variable Diet

ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2012) — New research sheds more light on the diet and home ranges of early hominins belonging to three different genera, notably Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Homo -- that were discovered at sites such as Sterkfontein, Swartkrans and Kromdraai in the Cradle of Humankind, about 50 kilometres from Johannesburg. Australopithecus existed before the other two genera evolved about 2 million years ago.

Scientists conducted an analysis of the fossil teeth, indicating that Australopithecus, a predecessor of early Homo, had a more varied diet than early Homo. Its diet was also more variable than the diet of another distant human relative known as Paranthropus.

An international team of researchers, including Professor Francis Thackeray, Director of the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University, will be publishing their latest research on what our early ancestors ate, online in the journal, Nature, on August 8, 2012. The paper titled 'Evidence for diet but not landscape use in South African early hominins' was authored by Vincent Balter from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France; Jose´ Braga from the Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier in Toulouse in France; Philippe Te´louk from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon in France; and Thackeray from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in South Africa.

According to Thackeray, the results of the study show that Paranthropus had a primarily herbivorous-like diet, while Homo included a greater consumption of meat.

Signatures of essential chemical elements have been found in trace amounts in the tooth enamel of the three fossils genera, and the results are indicators of what South African hominins ate and what their habitat preferences were.

Strontium and barium levels in organic tissues, including teeth, decrease in animals higher in the food chain. The scientists used a laser ablation device, which allowed them to sample very small quantities of fossil material for analysis. Since the laser beam was pointed along the growth prisms of dental enamel, it was possible to reconstruct the dietary changes for each hominin individual.

Thackeray states that the greater consumption of meat in the diet of early forms of Homo could have contributed to the increase in brain size in this genus.

Australopithecus probably ate both meat and the leaves and fruits of woody plants. The composition of this diet may have varied seasonally.

Apart from the dietary differences, the new results indicate that the home-range area was of similar size for species of the three hominin genera.

The scientists have also measured the strontium isotope composition of dental enamel. Strontium isotope compositions are free of dietary effects but are characteristic of the geological substrate on which the animals lived.

According to the results all the hominids lived in the same general area, not far from the caves where their bones and teeth are found today.

Professor Vincent Balter of the Geological Laboratory of Lyon in France, suggests that up until two millions years ago in South Africa, the Australopithecines were generalists, but gave up their broad niche to Paranthropus and Homo, both being more specialised than their common ancestor.

That is the press release from the University of Witwatersrand - and here is the commentary on that news. I do not agree with Harmon's conclusion, and she repeats the red meat = health problems nonsense (its all in how it's cooked and where it comes from). Even now, children who do not get adequate protein in development are smaller and have lower IQ scores - and there are many other sources of meat than the drug-filled factory cows the meat industry foists on the market.

Early Meat-Eating Human Ancestors Thrived While Vegetarian Hominin Died Out

By Katherine Harmon | August 8, 2012 

---

Early Homo molar; image courtesy of Jose Braga/Didier Descouens

There has been fierce debate recently over whether the original “caveman” diet was one of heaps of bloody meat or fields of greens. New findings suggest that some of our early ancestors were actually quite omnivorous. But subsequently, our line and an ill-fated group of hominins developed very different dietary strategies. One chose meat while the other moved toward more plants.

The hominin Australopithecus, which lived from about 4 million to 2 million years ago, is presumed to be a common ancestor of both the Homo lineage, which emerged some 2.3 million years ago and gave rise to us, and to the Paranthropus genius, which is first documented about 2.7 million years ago and died out about 1 million years ago. Some have attributed the extinction of Paranthropus to an inflexible diet or limited territory, especially in the face of climactic changes.

A team of researchers led by Vincent Balter, of École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, decided to probe into some of these debates. They used lasers to analyze the enamel from fossilized teeth belonging to Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus and early Homo specimens, which were all from southern Africa. By assessing ratios of calcium, barium and strontium as well as the number of strontium isotopes, the team was able to deduce both diet and the size of the area that these individuals ranged over. The findings were published online August 8 in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

The ancestral Australopithecus consumed a wide range of foods, including, meat, leaves and fruits. This varied diet might have been flexible to shift with food availability in different seasons, ensuring that they almost always had something to eat. Paranthropus, according to the elemental analysis, was largely a plant eater, which matches up with previous studies of tooth morphology and wear patterns. It also helps to explain the massive jaw structure they possessed, which could have come in handy for tough food stuffs and earned one specimen the nickname “nutcracker man.” Early Homo, on the other hand, went in for a meat-heavy diet—possibly enabled by the use of tools for hunting and butchering.

However, just because a meatier diet was good for our early Homo forbearers does not necessarily it will keep each of us contemporary humans alive longer. Now that we no longer have to fend for ourselves in quite the same way, increased red meat consumption has actually been linked to shorter individual life spans. So next time you’re flummoxed by food choices, don’t be afraid to go a little Paranthropus and hit the salad bar.

 

 About the Author: Katherine Harmon is an associate editor for Scientific American covering health, medicine and life sciences. Follow on Twitter @katherineharmon.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

TEDxBrainport - Mark Post - Meet the new meat

Making meat in the laboratory sounds like a good idea to me, as long as we test it and make sure it does not contain any harmful mutations. Just think of all the suffering that could be eliminated in getting rid of factory farms, and all the land that could be repurposed.

TEDxBrainport - Mark Post - Meet the new meat

What do you think about laboratory-made meat? "Yuck" is likely your first reaction. Terms like 'Frankenburger' and 'Lab chops' might spring to mind. So why would we want to create artificial meat? Because breeding cows and pigs for their meat is inefficient. Only parts of the animal are consumed and meat consumption is outstripping supply.

Post explains that it is relatively simple to take stem cells from an animal and grow them to produce new muscle tissue. Simply add sugar, proteins and fat and get it into shape with a bit of exercise and you have created edible meat. The only problem then is to find a new role for our livestock... 

NPR - Study Suggests Earlier Meat-Eating In Hominids

Yep . . . and for a long time we thought current primates did not eat meat, and we were wrong there, too - male chimps eat as much meat as they can catch and kill, and apparently, gorillas sometimes eat monkeys.

So it's no surprise to me that we ate meat early in our development, and in fact, that may have contributed to our evolution of larger brains according to some researchers (here and here as starters).

This comes via NPR's Talk of the Nation, Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

Study Suggests Earlier Meat-Eating In Hominids

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Zeresenay Alemseged, director and curator, Anthropology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, Calif.

David DeGusta, former professor of anthropology, Stanford University, founder, Paleoanthropology Institute, Oakland, Calif.

August 13, 2010

A new study in the journal Nature suggests that the butchering of animals with tools by hominids occurred nearly a million years earlier than thought. Study author Zeresenay Alemseged and anthropologist David DeGusta discuss the finding and what it might mean for human evolution.

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. Researchers reporting in the journal Nature this week say a pair of fossil bones found in Ethiopia could revise what we know about human evolution.

According to the researchers, the bones have the tell-tale marks of being cut with a tool. In other words, they were being butchered. And based on the age of the fossils, the researchers think the meat-eating occurred nearly a million years earlier than we previously thought that meat-eating actually did occur.

Other scientists are not so sure. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, and they are not convinced that this evidence matches the claim.

That's what we'll be talking about this hour. Our number, 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. And you can join the discussion at sciencefriday.com and also in Facebook.

Let me introduce my guests. Well, first up is Dr. David DeGusta. He is a former professor of anthropology at Stanford University. He is founder of the Paleoanthropology Institute in Oakland, California. Thanks for joining us today.

Dr. DAVID DeGUSTA (Founder, Paleoanthropology Institute): My pleasure, Ira.

FLATOW: Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged is director and curator of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences, and he joins us from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Thanks for being with us today.

Dr. ZERESENAY ALEMSEGED (California Academy of Sciences): Thanks for having me, Ira.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Dr. Alemseged, you are the person who has made these claims about the bones. It sounds exciting. Tell us what you've actually found.

Dr. ALEMSEGED: Well, the claim is made by myself and by the Dikika Research Project, which is a (unintelligible) research project being conducted in Ethiopia.

What we found is the evidence for the earliest - the find, which consists of the evidence for stone-tool-inflicted cut marks dating back to 3.4 million years ago, and this pushes the earliest evidence for meat-eating and of stone tool use by one million years back.

FLATOW: And...

Dr. ALEMSEGED: And the implication being that the species Australopithecus afarensis probably used tools to consume meat.

FLATOW: And the evidence are bones, you say, with evidence of cut marks from tools on them. Which kind of bones are you talking about?

Dr. ALEMSEGED: The bones are a rib bone from a large mammal, probably a big cattle-like animal, and then a small (unintelligible) femur fragment, which is probably from an antelope. And these two bones preserve evidence for cut marks, for percussion marks, which a pounding mark when you use a hammer stone to extract the bone marrow and then probably sharp-edged tools to extract meat or the flesh of the bones.

FLATOW: So pushing this age back of the first meat eater would put it about the same time as the famous Lucy skeleton?

Dr. ALEMSEGED: Yes. This takes us back to the era of Australopithecus afarensis, famously represented by the fossil Lucy, as well as the fossil Selam, which also was discovered only 200 meters away from where we found this bone.

FLATOW: Dr. DeGusta, you're not convinced yet. Why is that?

Dr. DeGUSTA: Well, first, I think before we get into the specifics, I think we should commend Dr. Alemseged and his team for the fieldwork they do at Dikika. By all accounts it's an extremely difficult place to work. So I think we all need to respect, you know, the blood, sweat and tears that they put in to recover the fossils from there, even though I strongly disagree with them, as do others, about the interpretation of these two fossil fragments.

FLATOW: What is the disagreement here?

Dr. DeGUSTA: Well, the key question is who or what made the marks, because we know that there's a variety of natural agencies, including animals, crocodiles, trampling, contact with other rocks, there's a lot of natural agencies that can make marks on the bone.

So from what has been published, I and others think it's much more likely that these marks are the result of the known ability of these natural agencies to damage bone rather than the previously unknown tool-using abilities of Australopithecus.

And I think that's certainly sort of the most parsimonious position here, because it can be difficult to determine unambiguously whether a single mark is due to an animal's tooth or to a stone tool, and they really only have two fossil fragments.

He said bones, but these are just fragments. One was about four inches by one inch, and so you can think of, if you imagine an animal the size of a cow, and you've got one fragment that's, you know, a couple inches long, that's not very much to go on to interpret how that animal was butchered or if it was butchered.

FLATOW: Dr. Alemseged, how do you answer that criticism?

Dr. ALEMSEGED: Well, I understand fully the skepticism, and actually, it reminds me of the type of skepticism that I had a year and a half ago when we made the discovery at Dikika.

But then after going through the details and then after the scanning electron microscope analysis, I was convinced because the type of agents that Dr. DeGusta mentioned are not represented in these fossils.

For example, if this agent were crocodiles, we would have found the typical fang, such as the bisected tips, the puncture marks and the furroughs.

And also, when you look into the scanning microscope images, you don't see the type of density and frequency of micro-striations, which are the very fine lines that you'd see in stone tool-inflicted cut marks.

Dr. DeGUSTA: Well, actually, crocodiles do produce those micro-striations, and...

FLATOW: Dr. DeGusta, let him finish, please.

Dr. DeGUSTA: Sure.

Dr. ALEMSEGED: So the features that we have on these bones, on these marks, are clearly indicative of stone tool-inflicted cut marks. So we have eliminated all the other agents, including the trampling, which would have included lines that would have been perpendicular to the main axis of the cut mark.

So without having eliminated this, obviously, we wouldn't have claimed that these bones were inflicted these cut marks were inflicted by stone tools.

Dr. DeGUSTA: Right, well, there's a specific point here and then a more general one. The specific one is actually (technical difficulties) on the NPR SCIENCE FRIDAY website (technical difficulties) comparison between the marks on these fragments and crocodile damage that was documented previously by Dr. Jackson Njau. And I think it's a pretty good match, but people should look for themselves.

And regardless, Dr. Alemseged and his colleague, they don't actually discuss the possibility of crocodile damage at all in their text. So to me that's a major oversight.

It also takes us to a more general question this find raises, because as Zeresenay explained, based on these two fragments, they're claiming that the early human species, Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy's species, had developed butchery using stones.

Okay, well, literally right next to their site, just a few miles away, is the famous site of Hadar, where Lucy was found, along with hundreds of other afarensis fossils and literally tens of thousands of animal fossils, same age as Dikika, same kind of early human, same place.

And yet in 40 years of research at Hadar, they've not reported a single butchered specimen, even though they have thousands more animal bones at Hadar than at Dikika.

And the same is true at all the other afarensis sites because afarensis is actually a well-known species at multiple sites, and it's not found with butchered fauna anywhere else. It kind of makes you wonder, don't it?

FLATOW: Dr. Alemseged?

Dr. ALEMSEGED: All right, let me answer. First of all, I agree with Dr. DeGusta that there was no cut marks found at the (unintelligible) Hadar site, even though there are thousands and thousands of bones.

But the discovery that we made, in a way we owe it to the new techniques that we employed at Dikika. In 2009, we started what is called 100 percent collection strategy, whereby at selected localities we collect all the bones that we have at that site.

Dr. DeGUSTA: (Unintelligible)

FLATOW: Dr. DeGusta, let him finish.

Dr. ALEMSEGED: Let me finish. As you know, the standard way of doing paleontology involves collecting fossils from the skull, from the mandible, from the teeth, and then the extremities of the long bones. Why? Because they are taxonomically valid. They are easy to identify as an animal.

We don't collect, normally, the ribs and the shafts, which we did, and if you are to expect cut marks, where do you find them? You don't find them in the head. You find them on the shaft and on the ribs, where you would expect animals to butcher, to eat or to extract meat.

So that's the point. However, looking for 40 years does not guarantee finding it. The difference between searching and discovering is that. We found it. We discovered it (unintelligible) searching.

Dr. DeGUSTA: The point (unintelligible)...

Dr. ALEMSEGED: So you can search for 40 years. It doesn't guarantee that you find them, and you find them when you find them. So that's a big I don't think that's a good argument. I think we owe it to the new technique of collecting our fossils.

FLATOW: What about, Dr. DeGusta, the new technique that he's talking about?

Dr. DeGUSTA: Well, first of all, it's not new. The Middle Awash Project, which is also right next to Dikika, has been employing 100 percent collection of selected localities since 1990, and at other places where bone modification is suspected, or you're interested in it, there's also been 100 percent collection, previously.

And in fact, as I read the Nature paper, 100 percent collection was not actually employed at the particular locality of Dikika 55 that yielded these two cut-marked fragments, because they say in the paper that the only other two bones from that locality that were collected was two pieces of giraffe.

So one of the problems that I and other have with this paper is from the specific locality where these two fragments are from, we only have two other fossils that we can compare them with. So we don't know if the other fossils from Dikika 55 are do we see carnivore chewing? Do we see crocodile damage? Do we see trampling on those other pieces? That may be very informative.

Now, it's possible that I may have misread the Nature paper, but as I read it, they actually only collected four fossils from Dikika 55...

FLATOW: Dr. Alemseged, 30 seconds to rebut here.

Dr. ALEMSEGED: Yes?

FLATOW: Go ahead, I gave you 30 seconds to answer that, Dr. Alemseged.

Dr. ALEMSEGED: Yeah, we collected all the fossils that we had at the selected localities that we identified for 100 percent collection, and again, he mentioned that the 100 percent collection was - they were collecting for 30 or 40 years. That (unintelligible) argument. Searching is different from discovering.

FLATOW: All right, that's about all the time we have for now. I want to thank Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged and Dr. David DeGusta, debating this find. If you ever thought that scientists agree with each other all the time, here's a good answer to that. Science is an ongoing problem and a solution.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. Don't go away.

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Tags: meat, nutrition, evolution, humanity, NPR, Talk of the Nation, Earlier Meat-Eating In Hominids, Zeresenay Alemseged, David DeGusta, Nature, Ira Flatow, Science Friday, carnivores, brain development, primates

TED Talks - Graham Hill: Why I'm a weekday vegetarian

A very brief (less than six minutes) talk from TreeHugger founder Graham Hill on why he is a weekday vegetarian. This is not a bad idea. While I consider myself an omnivore, there are many days that I do not eat meat of any kind - partly to not eat meat as much, and partly to have a more diverse diet.

Why I'm a weekday vegetarian

We all know the arguments that being vegetarian is better for the environment and for the animals -- but in a carnivorous culture, it can be hard to make the change. Graham Hill has a powerful, pragmatic suggestion: Be a weekday veg.

About Graham Hill

Graham Hill founded the eco-blog and vlog TreeHugger.com, to help, as he says, "push sustainability into the mainstream," with a design-forward style and an international, wide-ranging team committed to transforming complex issues into everyday concepts. It's been called "the Green CNN." The TreeHugger team was even asked to join the Discovery Communications network as a part of their Planet Green initiative, and Hill now makes appearances on the green-oriented cable channel.

Before Treehugger, Hill studied architecture and design (his side business is making those cool ceramic Greek cups). His other company, ExceptionLab, is devoted to creating sustainable prototypes -- think lamps made from recycled blinds and ultra-mod planters that are also air filters.

If you would rather read than watch/listen, here is the transcript:

About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian?" After all, I'm one of the green guys. I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. I started a site called Treehugger. I care about this stuff. I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. Cruelty, I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat, are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined, cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do.

I also knew that I'm not alone. We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So what was once the special, little side treat, now is the main, much more regular. So really, any of these angles should have been enough to go vegetarian. Yet, there I was, chk, chk,, chk, tucking into a big, old steak.

So why was I stalling? I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. It was either you're a meat eater, or you're a vegetarian. And I guess I just wasn't quite ready. Imagine your last hamburger. (Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. And I'd commit to doing it later. And not surprisingly, later never came. Sound familiar?

So I wondered, might there be a third solution? And I thought about it. And I came up with one. And I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. It's called weekday veg. The name says it all. Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. On the weekend, your choice. Simple. If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits, in terms of environmental damage and health, are red and processed meats. So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember. And it's okay to break it here and there. After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake.

The program has been great, weekday veg. My footprint's smaller I'm lessening pollution. I feel better about the animals. I'm even saving money. Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight.

So please, ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals, what's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Tags: TED Talks, Graham Hill, Why I'm a weekday vegetarian, vegetarianism, meat, Environment, ethics, culture, TreeHugger.com

Is It Possible to Be a Conscientious Meat Eater?

I've been wrestling with the possibility of going meatless in my diet, or of at least cutting out beef. Pigs and cows create the greatest environmental impact, and if Americans alone would cut back on eating these foods to once a week, it would have a huge impact on the environment. I'm already doing that, but considering the elimination of all meat, including fish from my diet.

This article posted at AlterNet argues that there is no good meat-based diet, including a diet based on locally raised, grass-fed meat. Not sure I buy into this, aside from the ethical issues of eating sentient creatures (which is my 2nd biggest issue).

Is It Possible to Be a Conscientious Meat Eater?

By Sunaura Taylor and Alexander Taylor, AlterNet. Posted February 18, 2009.

The "new meat movement" is against industrial meat production, but not against eating meat. Their thinking is problematic.

You may have noticed an onslaught of articles recently on what is being coined as the "new meat movement." The most recent is an article in Newsweek, "Head To Hoof: A butcher helps lead a new carnivore movement."

These articles almost all support the idea that cruelty to animals is wrong and that factory-produced meat is unjustifiably bad for the environment. However, they are not opposed to meat in and of itself, they are simply opposed to industrial meat.

These "conscientious omnivores," believe it is possible, and preferable, to eat meat the old-fashioned way -- on small, sustainable and local farms, with farmers who love their animals and perhaps even have pet names for them.

The backlash against industrial meat has been brewing for many reasons. Ever-increasing knowledge of the industry's effect on the environment, human starvation and animal welfare, is making it harder for even the most ardent omnivore to consume meat without guilt.

The much-quoted report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, "Livestock’s Long Shadow -- Environmental Issues and Options" (Nov. 29, 2006), did a lot to raise awareness about the animal industry's devastating effects on the planet and global warming.

More and more, people are also realizing the troubling connections between human starvation and eating animal products. It takes approximately 16 pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat (thus feeding one or two people on meat versus approximately 16 people on grain). Much of this grain is grown in developing countries, where a large percentage of their land is used for cattle-raising for export to the United States, instead of being used to grow staple crops, which could feed local people directly. In a world where a child starves to death every 2 seconds, it seems impossible to justify such waste.

The animal industry is partly responsible for the destruction of the Amazon and other forests, for our world's diminishing water supply, for the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases, and basically every other environmental problem. People are also more readily accepting that the animals themselves deserve a life free from cruelty and that factory farms give them anything but.

Vegans and vegetarians have been saying many of these things for years, but it seems that people have only started listening now that there is simultaneously a proposed solution to this problem: "happy meat."

"Local," "grass-fed," "sustainably produced," "humanely raised" and "free-range" are just a few of the benevolent-sounding phrases that greet conscientious shoppers in the meat department. Animal-rights activists jokingly call these products "happy meat."

Many of these products tout pictures of smiling pigs, happy farmers in green pastures and stickers that say "humane." For many people who care about the environment and animal welfare, choosing to eat "humanely raised" meat seems like an option that honors traditional farmers and diets while also solving the ethical problems of environmental degradation and animal suffering.

But it solves neither of these problems. This meat is high-priced, and its production is an even less-efficient use of land and resources. It is often marketed as luxurious, an indulgence to be lingered over. It is inherently not adaptable to a national or international solution. Local organic meat is for an elite few, and not a practicable alternative to the massive crisis of industrial meat production.

For the first time in history, an entire civilization consumes meat as a staple. How can America truly produce enough of this "happy meat" (not too mention happy milk and happy eggs), to feed this country even a fraction of the animal products we currently consume?

Truth be told, this meat is a marketing gimmick, an ideological pose, which assuages the ethical compulsions of those who consume it even though it does nothing to kick America's cheap meat habit, and perhaps contributes to the growing international fetishization of meat as a class signifier.

Articles on the "new meat movement" never pose questions like, "could all of America's animal products be grown locally?" And they never mention what the vast majority of Americans who can't afford the prized local animal products will be consuming if all factory farms shut down -- they'd be vegan.

These farms are described as ethical because of the fact that they are small, sustainable and have kinder animal-husbandry practices. As many people have pointed out, these farms can individually produce meat in a way that is arguably just as "green" as eating vegan.

Read the rest of the article.

I disagree with some of the arguments (the absence of a meat-based diet would not make us vegan, there are still eggs and dairy isn't going anywhere), but they are correct that an environmentally friendly meat industry is not tenable for the whole society.

I haven't decided what I am going to do yet, but this another useful piece of information.

Tags: Health, food, meat, ethics, AlterNet, Is It Possible to Be a Conscientious Meat Eater?, Sunaura Taylor, Alexander Taylor, vegetarianism, vegan, omnivore, industry, environment