Questioner: We have always been eating meat and drinking milk; it has been there since ancient times. So, my question to you is, is animal liberation or the vegan movement consistent with the ancient times of our land?
Acharya Prashant: There are a few myths that need to be dispelled. Yes, man has had the inclination and the capacity to eat meat for a very, very long time. But even when man was in the jungle, he was primarily an 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. A 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 the thought that it is meat alone that can provide protein, 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.
