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.
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14 Comments:
So humans evolved to have canines and other meat tearing teeth within the last three hundred years? Sometimes people can be completely ridiculous.
PeteRepeat42 at 10:51AM on 08/11/08
Reminds me of a vegetarian or vegan that I saw on a daytime talk show who swore that her golden retriever preferred a diet of broccoli.
bobbob at 11:19AM on 08/11/08
@ PeteRepeat ... The canines are to eat more apples and sunflower seeds.
I agree w/Raphael, more bacon for the rest of us omnivores. Vegans don't know what they're missin ... bacon fat!!!!!
mepm231 at 11:21AM on 08/11/08
LOL, yeah, and I guess we developed slings, bows, arrows and spears with such efficacy in order to hunt down the ever elusive carrot and the fleet footed cabbage...
simon at 11:24AM on 08/11/08
Oh, and I forgot the boats, nets and fishing lines needed to catch tofu.
simon at 11:27AM on 08/11/08
I wonder why "ask a vegan" features always give the most ridiculous vegan free range. As someone who eats maybe 95% vegan (and no, that other 5% does not include bacon), I will say that Ryann Berry's answers struck me as absurd, too.
I'm sure that early humans ate whatever they could, meat and vegetables both, in differing proportions depending on the climate in which they lived. It's just that you don't need bone and stone tools to pick blackberries, so anthropologists aren't going to find tools designed for gathering. I believe that many waste heaps reveal both plant and animal matter.
Today, humans don't need meat (or eggs or dairy) to survive. Back then, humans needed high-calorie, high-fat food sources, whether they be from seeds, eggs or bones. Rewriting evolutionary biology isn't relevant when discussing why veganism appeals today – I don't know about you, but I am certainly not about to forsake modern conveniences for pre-agricultural cave-living. Different times, different diets.
KarynMC at 12:06PM on 08/11/08
My mother always told me if I couldn't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
I broke her rule here because I'm saying something, I'm sorry... but I won't reveal what I was thinking about this author...
Suffice it to say, Rynn Berry does not appear to have their facts straight...
ronzoni at 12:51PM on 08/11/08
Its the same argument Creationists use against evolution. Ignore the facts and blame peoples biases for making stuff up. That will help sway people to your side of the argument.
ESNY1077 at 2:54PM on 08/11/08
According to AWF.org: "Baboons are opportunistic omnivores and selective feeders. Grass makes up a large part of their diet, along with berries, seeds, pods, blossoms, leaves, roots, bark and sap from a variety of plants. Baboons also eat insects and small quantities of meat, such as fish, shellfish, hares, birds, vervet monkeys, and small antelopes."
I think we can all agree that we don't want to eat grass or insects and most will agree we don't want to eat monkies, so if you substitute Cows, Chickens, and Sheep for those...
seadkdc at 3:25PM on 08/11/08
haha, seadkdc FTW
simon at 3:55PM on 08/11/08
@bobbob: It's like that scene from Futurama.
Leela: "Animals eat other animals. It's nature."
Free Waterfall Junior: "No it isn't. We taught a lion to eat tofu."
Lion: *cough* *pause* *cough*
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSounds/2ACV15/06.mp3
wunami at 10:52PM on 08/11/08
Thanks, KarynMC, for proving that not all vegans/vegetarians are extremists or delusional.
It just bugs me that every time this topic comes up, vegs are viewed as deprived people who clearly haven't discovered bacon.
piccola at 11:26PM on 08/11/08
"It just bugs me that every time this topic comes up, vegs are viewed as deprived people who clearly haven't discovered bacon."
It's just a little backlash to combat the holier-than-thou attitude of the grass munchers, their attitudes are so tiresome! They keep trying to teach pigs to sing, and it's annoying the pigs!
Hilfy at 4:17PM on 08/13/08
That's what you call "backlash" to something "tiresome"? Please. Meat-eaters never say anything new. There are maybe 20 things that meat-eaters say to vegans again and again and again. If you think vegans are tiresome, try being one and see how tiresome the meat-eaters will become. You know why meat-eaters never have much to say besides "backlash"? Because they never even give veganism a second thought. It's always reactionary, intuitive based on everything you learned from society.
I am not going to argue for a change in history because I don't see how that could possibly be relevant to veganism. It would be like trying to argue that war never happened until 2000 years ago as an argument for peace. Who cares?
ciuma at 11:29AM on 04/04/09