Acharya Prashant: There are a few myths that need to be dispelled. Yes, man has had the inclination and the capacity to eat meat since a very, very long time. But even when man was in the jungle, he was primarily herbivore. And this is born out by scientific analysis of the fossils being dug out and many other kinds of equally rigorous scientific evidence. It is obvious that for the inhabitant of the jungle, the hunter-gatherer, it is far easier to pluck a fruit than to chase and catch an animal, and then kill it, and then eat it.
So, it is a myth that our ancient-ancient forefathers were all carnivores. They did have meat when it was probably available, and that is likely to have been quite sporadic. Man comes actually from a primarily vegetarian-herbivore background. The argument that man has always been a meat-eater needs to be studied and refuted. The current splurge in meat-eating is not more than two-hundred years old. It came along with industrialization and the popularization of thought that it is meat alone that can provide for protein or calcium or many other important nutrients to the body. It was obviously a highly unscientific belief, but it got popularized.
Now, since the last thirty, forty, fifty years, as we are progressing, there is tons of scientific data to conclusively prove that not only are we not historically prolific meat-eaters, but also that meat-eating, or milk consumption, has a highly deleterious effect on the human body. But then, this data is now fighting against a huge mountain of habit and vested financial interests. You know of the size of the global meat industry; you know of the size of animal agriculture. They are one of the biggest industries on the face of this planet.
So, now, even as it becomes known that probably mankind took a wrong dietary turn quite recently, just around two-hundred years back, in opting for a primarily meat-based diet, yet the momentum of the last two centuries is making it difficult for most people to correct their mistake. And, of course, added to that is the heft of the meat industry, the financial power, the political power they possess, the kind of control over media that they have, and all the levers that they can pull
