Precolumbian vegetarianism. Some points.
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- Опубликовано: 1 сен 2022
- A lousy video that says nothing and which was neither worth the seven and a half hours, nor the mental energy which it took to produce.
An article on ancient Egyptian wheat milling. Using a hand quern which is not a million miles from what would be used in north america.
ancientgrains.org/samuel2010mi...
Sure it could have been a tweet but this is way better!
Your videos are awesome man
I hadn't ever considered this point in the context of eastern North America. I know that in precontact Azteca, corn tortillas and beans were the staple foods adding in vegetables and fish frequently, while meat was a luxury in urban areas. In feudal Japan, the diet was based on rice, vegetables, and fish with the people considering themselves to be vegetarians in the Buddhist style. Your points are excellent and well reasoned as always.
the Nahua consumed various fowl, pocket gophers, green iguanas, axolotls, a type of crayfish called acocil, and a great variety of insects, larvae and insect eggs.
They also domesticated turkeys, duck and dogs as food and at times ate meat from larger wild animals such as deer.
Out of curiosity what was the six nations stance on dogs as a food source? I know some first nations viewed dog meat as a taboo while others saw them as livestock. Also great video as always mate, keep up the great work.
My understanding is that dogs were emergency food.
@@MalcolmPL thanks for answering my questions mate.
It’s why I’m here.
I find it kinda odd that people are idealising first nations societies in that way. I've been vegan for ~5 years now, but this brings up what I feel some people seem to miss when it comes to practising vegetarian/veganism in our current society. It seems like many are of the mind that killing an animal, for (almost) any reason, is 100% bad, 100% of the time, which sometimes leads to people disproportionately shitting on indigenous subsistence hunting. To me, the killing is not the issue - we all die eventually, and sometimes in horrible ways - rather it's everything that goes into industrial scale animal production, especially when profits are the name of the game. They are born and exist in hell on earth, are often mutilated and brutal killed, but in the end, they could very well go through all that, just for their bodies/products to be dumped and POISONED so they can't be used, even by scavengers, if they can't be sold. The injustice is for a life taken to go to waste. And given how awful their lives are, it's just sad and fucking disrespectful.
I agree
yes. indigenous ways of hunting allow the animals to live normal lives, sometimes cut short. the same applies in the other direction. humans function as ordinary apex predators instead of torturers.
It is not true that there are no edible plants available in April or May. Sunchokes, Hopniss, cattail rhizomes, duck potato and even wild leeks would have been available during those times. Although I agree that it wouldn't have been enough sustenance without meat.
Yup, great points! I occasionally make tortillas from scratch from dried corn and it is quite a labor intensive process.
Only very vaguely related, but I used to go out with a Vegan, and we went to a Korean place. She tried to order food with "no meat" but between the language and culture differences, they brought her basically a fish stew. Because it had "no meat" as the folks who worked there understood it. It's always interesting to see how different cultures have kind of different ideas about food that don't translate 100%.
A friend of mine from India who is a vegetarian told me that once on a flight back to India from the US he had a stopover in Hong Kong, and that it was virtually impossible to get anything without meat in it other than plain rice. As you say, different cultures and different ideas about food!
Always so enjoy your videos! Entertaining and always, always a learning experience. I do a fair amount of living history, REALLY ENJOY YOUR VIDEOS, WELL RESEARCHED!
Cattail roots are a plant food available in fall and technically winter but I don't know if they are possible to access once the ice thickens.
You can eat the base of the stem most of the year until fall. IT's juicy and tastes like mild cucumber. The roots however......while edible and really tastey baked over a fire are really tough to dig up most of the time. Those roots grow like a spider's web and are impenetrable with even a modern shovel in many cases. IT's not that you can't get them out.........again it's just energy intense work and the calories gained may not be worth it unless you can find the right conditions to extract them fairly easily. The best edible part of the cat tail is the pollen they give up. High in protein and you just shake it into a sack........really easy to gather. You just have to be there literally at the exact same time the pollen is ready to fall off the flower though which is not easy to time before the wind blows it all away.
While this material analysis makes sense for the context you're talking about, vegetarianism is definitely not a modern idea. Records exist from South Asia for vegetarianism based on the principle of nonviolence from the 6th century BC if not earlier. In part, I'd guess the different climate, ecosystem, & economy in South Asia made ancient vegetarianism easier there.
Doesn't he mean precolumbian vegetarianism though? We know of lots of ancient vegetarianism in the old world, but among American societies we don't know as much.
I'm vegan, but I totally agree with you. Vegetarianism (in cold climates) is a modern idea because it necessitates mass agriculture in a very short growing season. Mass production in a short time was really only possible with fertilizers. Prior to synthetic nitrification, even as recent as the late 1800s to early 1900s, people mined fossilized guano for fertilizer (or used manure, compost, or did seasonal crop rotations with nitrifying plants like tobacco/oats). Even with those fertilizers, 90% of all Europeans (according to PBS online) worked on farms just to produce enough food in the short European growing seasons, and still most Europeans ate meat and dairy. This is all with much easier access to shallow ores for metal toolmaking, a slightly more forgiving climate, and more domesticated animals to pull plows and make manure.
In Southern Asia, or Northern Africa, it's a different story. That's probably why so many vegetarian staple foods come from China, the Middle East and India. They had many areas with year-round grow seasons, and crops like soy, cassava, potatoes, various nuts, higher calorie fruits, rice, and pulses that could easily meet all their caloric needs.
Anyway, just like with you I took a long time to make a point that could have been a tweet. It makes sense that it was difficult for pre-colonial Canadian society to be vegetarian. They had a worse environment for it, very few staple crops to make it worthwhile, fewer domesticatable animals to help work fields, and more difficult-to-access resources for metal tool making.
Far more entertaining than a meeting that could have been an email.
about milkweed- where i am in nc specifically we have a ton of it and it regrows really really quickly so i might try to start making cord before it hibernates for the winter
In my limited experience, I have found it is best harvested in early winter, after the stalks have died and the seeds have dispersed, the slight decay that will have occurred saves the trouble of retting.
I don’t have any advice beyond that.
@@MalcolmPL thank you i wouldnt have known that otherwise. when the kudzu comes by next spring ill try to make cordage as well with it, so far just rudimentary weaving
Loved how you saved the punchline for the very end.
QUESTION
How would I go about getting some of the Native beans, Turtle beans ?, you show in the video...
I got them from an acquaintance. If you google "skunk beans," you might be able to find a seller.
The whole thing. I found the whole thing interesting and thought provoking.👍🏻
Great video! I've never heard anyone suggest there were pre-Columbian vegetarians in North America, but I can imagine how someone could use romanticized ideas about ingenious people to make claims along those lines.
When you said there's no fresh edible plants available between October and June, I immediately thought of wintergreen and the edible berries and leaves they produce. I don't know if this plant grows in or is native to Ontario, but here in Nova Scotia the berries ripen in October and stay on the plant during winter. The leaves also stay green during winter, making the plant pretty easy to spot sticking up out of the snow. I've never eaten the berries, but I have snacked on the leaves raw while camping during the winter. I don't know about the nutritional content of either the berries or leaves. I suppose this is more of an exception to the rule, I don't think it would be practical to survive on. I wonder if there are any other plants growing in North Eastern America like it though?
Just as a note, modern ideas of vegetarianism and veganism isn't necessarily opposed to hunting out of necessity or even just the idea of eating meat; it is about the unnecessarily cruel treatment of animals in farming, especially when alternatives are available, not to mention eco-vegans who are against the farming of animals simply on the basis of the damage it does to the environment.
Also vegetarianism and veganism aren't anthropocentric, I do not understand where you got this idea but it is quite the opposite. We understand that we are a part of nature, and we recognise that the deer is just as much a feeling individual as we are, which is why we are opposed to their mistreatment, just as we would the mistreatment of a human.
Edit: the above goes for most vegans, however there are a subset of vegans who do it purely for the dietary and health benefits, and who would just as happily eat meat if it was healthier, but even in that case I would not say it was anthropocentric, but egocentric.
Good talk... thank you
Great video. Your 3 sisters garden looks lush. I've read about indigenous peoples pounding shagbark hickory nuts with a massive mortar and pestle. They would form the resulting paste into balls that could be rehydrated in water to make hickory milk. Iirc the black walnut as shown in the video was not gathered as commonly as hickory nuts just because it's so famously hard to crack without some pretty sophisticated tools. Some tuberous crops like Jerusalem artichokes are optimally harvested in early spring, while shoots and leaves are abundant in April/May, at least in zone 5b canada. Our native bur oak acorns will have been a significant food source too, I'd expect. The landscape can look barren and devoid of food but if you know where to dig and the ground is thawed, there are always roots and tubers available. All this being said, it would not be fun trying to live off exclusively plants in a subsistence situation.
E: amaranth among other now forgotten oilseed and grain crops will have been significant in surviving hunger gaps also.
I've cracked large quantities of black walnut with a rock. It's not that hard, and if you like the flavor I encourage you to give it a try.
So it is the same for the hickory nuts are delishous... But hard to get out the shells
Acorns was also used as flour, but it has to be a leached, to be editable. My parents made cakes from them ONCE
I know it's not much to do with the overall topic but when you were talking about sources of animal fiber for clothing, you jogged my memory that out here in the salish sea they had a breed of dog that they bred for wool and sheared like sheep. It was apparently pretty high quality stuff but the breed went totally extinct bar a couple specimens kept in museums. Just some interesting trivia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Wool_Dog
Excellent video
same for Ojibwe
Even more true for Ojibwe as they were less based on agriculture.
Quality content
I've just "found" your channel and so far I'm really impressed with the work you have put in to your content....I cannot imagine the time you have had to use in order to glean all the information you kindly share with us.
As for the subject matter of this particular video the end summary was correct! Vegetarianism in its modern context is indeed a modern phenomenon, today it's a political issue disguised as an ethical lifestyle....if 'civilization ' collapsed then the vegan and vegetarian folk would soon become extinct as a great deal of them rely on modern agriculture and transportation, if I could hazard a guess I'd say 99% of them do not grow their own food, have zero comprehension on permaculture therefore they would succumb to their own ethical/political stance.
I am no expert on the history of your continent or your great folk....I do have some knowledge on pemmican (have made several batches myself, to varying successes). My understanding is that the northern folk in America would make pemmican as a winter sustenance. Meat, fat, maybe some berries depending upon the opportunity to gather and dry them. As with all the different races folk adapted to their environment, we northern Europeans would only usually eat vegetables in season (pre modern agriculture) the occasional burdock, dandelion (foragable foods) other than that it was meat.
Sorry for the ramble! Looking forward to visiting your older videos and also newer ones!
Best wishes from merrie olde england!
You do miss one major point: Western vegetarianism/veganism is a modern phenomenon, very much so, but not exactly so for the rest of the world. Some minor spiritual or religious sects throughout history have used vegetarianism or veganism to live to their ideals, and in India vegetarianism (basically veganism + dairy really) was heavily encouraged for the masses and required for higher religious members in various hindu (Hatha Yoga, Vaishnava), Buddhist, and Jain societies, probably for millennia.
I've started to listen to 16min videos and at 5min in realized it was a tweet that had already wasted my time: i was really irritated. Your video (this one), you joke, could have been a tweet, yet it left me wanting more. Your videos are like walnuts: energy (info) dense and enjoyable to eat (consume). Thank you!
🤠👍🏿
I can't say I agree entirely on this. The future of global biodiversity, prevention of antibiotic resistance, and preserving natural habitat is a global shift to a plant-based diet. I value veganism primarily as an ethical stance that rejects the exploitation of animals for any purpose when it is not necessary, but even a non-altruist has good reasons to go vegan for the aforementioned reasons. It's interesting we'd mention indigenous peoples in this considering 91% of Amazon deforestation is to make room for cattle ranching. A plant-based alone wont singlehandedly solve all of these issues, but there is no climate change or population growth solution complete without a shift to plant-based eating.
(sources in the replies)
Cal, the present situation, global warming and the state of the Brazilian economy are all beyond the scope of this video. The title says precolumbian, and that is what I am talking about.
As a long time vegan I wholly agree with every point
I’m a farmer, and I think even in the modern day, people’s survival depends on animals being killed.
I do not raise animals, but the very act of farming requires animal life to be harmed. And in addition to that, animals are often directly killed by farmers so that a crop won’t be eaten or otherwise ruined.
I’ve had the same feeling as yours that veganism & vegetarianism are the result of being dissociated with the procurement and/or lowest stages of production of food. I think that is even true in traditional Buddhism, where those who produce food have a different set of standards than monks. And in Hinduism, vegetarianism is mostly (although not exclusively or universally) associated with the upper castes.
Yeah. Even setting aside the direct action of farmers. Tractors kill mice. The only way around that is doing everything by hand, which in the current economy would make a lot of food prohibitively expensive unless you have the land and the time to do it all yourself.
@@MalcolmPLeven then, if one had a homestead and produced all their own vegan food, how would it constitute a diet that will fulfill the nutrient requirement of the body and brain? You would certainly be growing an assortment of particular crops (many of which have evolved in other continents) in order to replace the various animal nutrients such as DHA [an essential omega 3 acid for brain cognition] you would have to grow chia seeds or flax seeds which would require an obscene amount of land space and labor time to require a significant lasting quantity and you would have to order shipments of b12 and creatine and carnosine and other supplements and even then it can result in health damage. Being vegan gave me memory loss. I became anemic, an iron deficiency which damaged my brain. Plant iron is not the same as Heme iron found in meat . I'm not vegan anymore as my memory is working again
I feel like acorns were more popular than anyone would like to admit. Also a decent amount of work but they're easy to gather and high in calories plus WAY easier to process than most nuts. YOu do have to soak the tannins out of the nuts and there are various traditional ways to do this fairly easily BUT..........acorn flour is very calorie and nutrient rich. Still..........it's only available in late fall. Humans as vegans or mostly plant based in nature is a silly modern concept. It only happens when meat becomes hard to get.
I love acorns. One of the traditional methods of leaching tannins involves using the wet earth. It's not accurate to say that abstention from flesh is a modern idea, as it's very much praised in truly ancient oral histories, even by men who themselves hunted deer. The intact Indian historical narratives, that is, the actual Indians, who valued animal skins and furs as any people did, cite both ethical and health concerns. I have in my mind the words of the hero Bhishma and also those of Rama, in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, both of whom hunted deer and also advocated vegetarian diets, or even followed them at parts of their lives.
I agree with you, acorns would probably be a mainstay of any northeastern diet. From my experience, I can say that the tannin leaching would be worthwhile and efficient in the large batches needed to feed a village. If stored properly, acorns (and many other nuts) can be processed and eaten most of the year. I just cracked some butternuts that are 1.5 years old, and they taste perfectly fresh.
Mate, your mental perambulations on so-called primitive reasons for doing things and their context in today's society are second to none. Until industrialisation allowed us to dig stuff out the ground and make non natural products every single thing we did was closely tied to nature. In a very short time we have forgotten this.
Veganism in a society without access to nutritional supplements is medically impossible, as there is no natural, vegan source that can provide sufficient amounts of vitamin B12. This is a nutrient that only herbivorous animals can enrich in a sufficient degree that consuming them can provide a human with the necessary levels.
Vegetarianism (as effectively practiced by many people throughout history simple due to a widespread inability to afford meat) would be feasible, but only with available lifestock that could provide milk and eggs on a regular basis, which pre-columbian societies in the Americas didn't have as far as I know (except for llamas in the Andes?).
A hypothetical pre-industrial vegan society would inevitably develop an ultimately fatal B12 deficiency within a few years, and would likely also be deficient in multiple other macro- and micronutrients depending on the specifics of the consumed plants. The beans+maize combination and the nuts are a reasonably good source of reasonably balanced proteins, but apart from that all the mentioned plants would lead to a serious protein deficiency if used as a main source of food. Same would likely go for iron. The inavailability of fresh plantmatter during part of the year would also result in a major deficiency in many vitamins, including Vitamin C, leading to scurvy. Something that could perhaps be mitigated by the use of dried berries and the like, but providing adequate amounts of these would be a major additional effort, perhaps impossible due to a simple lack of sufficient natural ocurrences of berries to meet the demand for vitamin C year-round on their own, requiring cultivation and major additional resources dedicated to this issue.
On the other hand, a fresh animal can supply all micro- and macronutrients necessary for human survival on its own and in sufficient amounts, as long as the internal organs are consumed too (and some of them raw). I don't want to understate the importance of plant-matter in hunter-gatherer or half-settled societies, but generally, while it is an important contribution to a balanced and healthy diet (almost exclusively carnivorous diets in some arctic peoples are definitely linked tosome health issues), it is not anywhere near as essential to human survival as meat is.
Vitamin B12 dissapeared in most plant sources due to modern farming practices such as pesticide use. It is true that B12 is not produced by plants, but by certain bacteria. The soil used to be rich in B12, but the bacteria which produces it is not allowed to thrive in the soil modern factory farms, so our grocery store vegetables lack it. It does, however, exist in the digestive tracts of herbivores, which is why they still have it. The story is similar for most other vitamins and minerals, as long as you eat a big variety of vegetables, you're good. Remember, animals don't produce their own minerals, they eat them from plants, or bacteria produce them. The real solution is to phase humanity towards permaculture. And in terms of availability of essential vitamins from certain foods, I think in our hypothetical sustainability oriented vegan society if we have well connected enough transportation, people in good climates can mass produce what we need more of and dry/store it in some way when the seasons are over and transport it to the less habitable areas. Of course, we are far away from this reality currently, but permaculture is still something which is just as needed today.
@@KnzoVortex do you have a source for that?
It is my undestanding that B12 concentration isn't simply a matter of having the right B12-producing bacteria, but of accumulating sufficient amounts of B12 from the very low concentrations available in plant matter, something that humans, not being high fiber herbivores able to ferment cellulose, will never be able to do even given the right bacteria, because we simply cannot eat and ferment the amount of plantmatter that would be needed for that the way a ruminant can. This is basically the same reason why many other nutrients (note I did not say all of them!) are more abundantly found in animal sources than in plants; a herbivorous animal of course represents the accumulation of ten times its own biomass in plants, and will of course have a highly elevated concentration of many of the micronutrients that are rarer in plants (well as proteins, due to the fundamental biochemical differences between animals and plants).
Of course I was referring to pre-columbian societies, not our modern one. As should be needless to say, I am well aware we are able to ship a great variety of plant foods nowadays, just as we are able to compensate for the inherent shortcomings of a vegan diet through supplements. But pre-columbian Americans could do neither, hence they most certainly were not able to survive on a vegan diet. For the same reasons, there never were populations of permanently vegan humans before the advent of modern dietary supplements and cross-seasonal availability of food ajd vegetables through international trade.
@@Ornitholestes1 For whatever reason I though the memo was that we were discussing the future possibility of getting B12 from simple, natural, non-supplement means say for sustainability or self-sufficiency reasons, as opposed to discussing if hunter gatherer societies of the past Native American societies could have done the same. From what limited research I've done, it seems it is not possible to get sufficient B12 from most plant sources, though whether this is due to modern sanitation and to what degree B12 was there before isn't totally clear. It can however be abundant in certain types of algae, foods with nutritional yeast (including marmite), mushrooms, and seaweeds, and you may be able to get what you need without supplements if you eat enough of these, though admittedly it might mark a relatively significant change in your diet. I'm not exactly sure if this would be a worthwhile endeavor in the long run being that we can now produce much more convenient vegan B12 supplements, but I suppose in some odd case where a person with a vegan lifestyle would want to live without supplements, maybe they want to live far off the grid for a time or something, this is how they would do it according to the science. Of course, growing or harvesting large quantities of mushrooms or algae would probably not be enough to sustain the American continent pre-industrialization, thus it would be infeasible for most Native American societies to live this way
I do think shifting away from animal products is one of the things we should strive for as a broader society, both for our health and our survival within climate change, though broader societal systems should be acknowledged as the largest culprit of our lifestyles, though individuals and communities will have to do the work to change it. Lab grown meat will also throw a huge wrench in this whole thing as once it is optimized, it will entailing no animal death, no factory farm effort including the production of the massive amounts of feed needed to feed livestock as well as everything else, it will have zero risk of carrying harmful bacteria, and will be ridiculously cheap.
@@KnzoVortex I absolutely agree, conventional lifestock agriculture needs to go, there is really no alternative. The situation nowadays is very different from hundreds of years ago, and continuing to rely on meat production the way it is still done at the moment is both unnecessary and untenable.
I don't think we need to eliminate 100% of animal products everywhere (lab-grown alternatives could offer a promising way to avoid that, as could alternative, more sustainable forms of lifestock, such as insects), but we definitely need to cut traditional animal products like meat and dairy to a small fraction and, most importantly, stop the enormous scale of ruminant farming that causes the majority of anthropogenic methane and nitrous oxide emissions, as well as eutrophication of our freshwater and soil, and the massive waste of resources that is the farming of animal feed in place of food that humans can eat directly. There are many good reasons large parts of the world have never started consuming meat on the scale we Europeans and Americans do.
If hunting wild animals is an option. Eating concentration camp animals is disgusting though
Battery farms are a terrible institution. Growing up near some, and having done quite a bit of reading on battery farming, I can say that they contain a lot more meaningless awfulness that most people never think of.
I’ve often thought about not just Native American peoples, but human evolution in general. I think this idea that humans were incredibly successful. Hunters is a bit of a misnomer you know I don’t think the average person with a permit of bow in a primitive arrow was all that successfully a hunting deer or loose or whatever you know maybe they could occasionally get an arrow into a year and follow it for a couple of days in the year was eventually waking up that they could call Pat to death I just don’t see Primitive hunters being all that successful, but I think there was a lot of what I would say meat gatherers, protein, gatherers people, eating stuff, like turtles and crayfish and clams, and that sort of a protein fish in small ponds or creeks or whatever I also think there was a fair amount of scavenging oh, you know is it in a region where there’s a lot of wolves I could see a lot of hunters being much more successful at taking a deer carcass away from a wolf pack then then the humans catching a deer on the road so I think there’s a fair amount of scavenging of food, and obviously with a bigger population of animals, they would be a bigger population of sick animals which might be easier to catch. I also think there there was a fair amount of exploiting animals, which are not necessarily in an open environment you know beavers may be quite hard to catch when they’re swimming around a little beaver pond, but you take away the dam you bust up their lodge and then the beavers are fairly easy to get to the same with bird nest. There’s a lot of birds that you know are hard to catch on their own but when they’re six week old baby birds are not as hard to cats or there’s also animal like birds, it molds and are much easier to catch when they’re molting like geese and I don’t know if ducks molt…
The other point that I think it’s important to note is very often early on, in human history, wars were often fought over food and resources and less about territories so if you were in a village and you were hungry, and you know the village next to you had just caught a moose, you would go to war over that
I mean, veganism and it's merits today are purely economic. Some people use it to justify a moral argument, which I think makes a bit less sense, but from your perspective, like you said, there's no contradiction about loving animals and also thinking that they're tasty. I personally choose to be more or less vegetarian based purely on the fact that capitalism takes all of these factors and turns it into a theory of value. And we're literally destroying our ecosystem to farm beef. Hunting is quite different though.
There are actually a lot of wild edible plants available starting in early spring, including cattail shoots and growing point nodes, but I don't think anybody could survive as a vegan on them as they are low protein. As far as nuts, I believe that chestnuts and white oak acorns would be a much more practical food source than harder (and smaller) walnuts and hickories. I have seen a traditional Cherokee recipe for use of hickory nuts that pounds them up shell and all and makes a "milk" of the resulting paste. Of course before Europeans got here, chestnut trees were huge and everywhere throughout the east of the country, and both the indigenous peoples and the deer could have lived well on them, plus whatever meat or fish was available. No, vegetarianism would not be a viable option for primitive peoples.
I think you simply missed the cultural context in which vegetarianism took place. It never appeared in places like Siberia or Canada, but rhather in fertile temperate regions.
One example would be ancient Greece, with thinkers such as Epicurius or entire schools such as Pythagorian school. They refused to eat meat because they felt slaughtering was immoral, akin to homicide. They felt that one who killed and ate animals wasn't very far from cannibalism and could become a killer of men. They also felt that meat was too rich which would harm yoour health.
As it turns out they were right.
Buddhists had similar views, as did hindus. Of course those cultures were primarily agricultural.
One interesting bit about leather would be Japan, where cattle was kept and raised for work, and harming or killing them was strictly forbidden. Once they died of their good death their wkin was made into leather which was in high demand for making armor.
There is a moral contradiction. And equating a living sentient being with non-sentient living beings is dishonest.
I'm curious, why do you consider the comparison dishonest? What makes a tree less morally valuable in your eyes than a deer?
It's not a contradiction, at worst it's an oversight, or a fallacious argument, but it's just not a contradiction. Either way who cares, you gotta eat meat.
Plants value their lives. They feel pain and elation. Personally, I love plants, and I also love to not die of starvation. Where is the contradiction? I have tried to live on only milk, fruits, and nuts, and I can tell you it's not easy, even with the convenience of readily available variety foods. Gardeners don't hate plants, and honest hunters didn't hate animals. When faced with hunger, who do you expect to let their family suffer for no reason? We have to eat life to maintain life, and nothing comes from thin air. We can never divorce ourselves from the cycle of nature; the food we eat seems to be an unavoidable reminder of that, and it is to our benefit that we consider it with thoughtfulness and respect. No one should support cruel and unnatural animal slaughter factories, if they are considerate of the world, but what is the use in judging from an armchair, as though divorced from the natural world, how others have had to live? There's no compassion in it, it just looks like you want to feel morally superior, and I'm saying that as a vegetarian for years. Blessed be the hunters
@@MalcolmPL the tree doesnt have an individual experience theres no central nervous system to experience things as most animals do. because animals are like us in the sense that they experience pain and have individual thoughts and experiences that means it isnt okay to exploit them when unnecessary.
Trees have a lot more going on than people give them credit for. They might not be thinking, but they react to external stimuli and interact with one another through chemical signals. Their experience of the world might be nothing like ours, but they certainly have an experience.
It would have had to been a threaded tweet to back up everything as well as the video. Excellent points. I feel that not only is vegetarianism a modern idea, but it is one that can only exist in realiy with a certain level of affluence.
What? Shaolin Monks and Hindus have been eating meatless diets for thousands of years lol. Yes, all those cool Kung Fu masters at the Shaolin Temple do not eat meat.
@@gabfortin1976 I was specifically referring to people who live in the climate and geography discussed in the video.
@@daveburklund2295 Ah my bad