Serious Eats
Vegan Author Rynn Berry Claims Historians Have a 'Carnivorous Bias'
Make my tofu well done.
The trolls came out to play when the New York Times' City Room blog gave commenters a chance to ask Rynn Berry, author of The Vegan Guide to New York City, about "shopping, eating, and living a vegan lifestyle in New York."
Now Berry has responded to the questions asked, but what particularly stood out was his absurd answers to the question of whether, historically, humans and prehumans were omnivorous and ate meat:
This is laughable caricature of human evolution. The annals of prehistory have unfortunately been written by historians and anthropologists who have a carnivorous bias, however unwitting.
Look, I'm a liberal arts-educated left-winger, and I totally buy into interpretive literary theory, whether it be post-structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonialist, deconstructionist, whatever. But it's laughable when Berry, a vegan dining guide author, suggests that evolutionary biology, history, and anthropology are wrong and need reinterpretation because their authors supposedly had a subconscious promeat, antivegan prejudice that tainted their assessment of the composition of the diet of early and modern humans.
Berry continues:
A few anthropologists have risen above their biases; one such is Jared Diamond, a professor of anthropology at UCLA... our earliest ancestors lived on the wild fruit, nuts, seeds and tubers that they gathered. Mr. Diamond puts it succinctly: “I doubt the usual view that hunting was the driving force behind our uniquely human brain and societies. For most of our history, we were not mighty hunters but rather sophisticated baboons.”
And what food makes up the bulk of baboon diet? Fruit, of course; so for most of their history, humans were fruitarians.
Berry's just twisting the words of others, picking and choosing, to justify his absurd theories to suggest that veganism is more "natural" or historically correct. But hey, he can continue to eat like a sophisticated baboon—it just means more bacon for me.