permaculture

[Lee Flier <lflier@mindspring.com>]

Uwe wrote:

>my former secretary has a cat which is a vegetarian! But there is good
(historical) reason for that. She found that little kitten about one or two
days after it's birth on the roof of her house; somebody left it up there.
So she feeded the baby with cow-milk. As it looks, the milk of a herbivore
altered the cat's taste, and that's why now it prefers brocoli over meat. -
Nowadays, how do many women feed their babies? I think that could explain
the reason why in history there never were any vegan tribes.<

Interesting story about the cat, but it has nothing to do why why there
were never any vegan tribes.  There weren't any because it would have been
impossible to survive. Grains and legumes normally don't grow wild in
sufficient quantity to have fed hunter-gatherer people.  Even in abundant
climates rich in plant life, people ate meat - craved it in many cases,
because those who lived on a diet of mostly tropical fruits didn't get
enough protein.  Warfare in abundant rain forest climates often had to do
with controlling sufficient hunting territory or hog forage - which puzzled
anthropologists for awhile who couldn't figure out why people needed to go
to war when they obviously had so much food.  The problem was that the most
abundant food wasn't by itself enough to sustain them.

And once you get into the more marginal climates like deserts and tundras,
there is very little plant life that's edible for humans.  So the diets of
desert bushmen and the Eskimos of the Arctic are almost exclusively meat.
About the only vitamin C available in the Arctic comes from eating liver,
while the only reliable source of zinc in deserts is the ears and testicles
of animals.  So it would be kinda hard to be vegan in these places.

Also in most other cultures, insects have played an important role in the
diet. Western culture seems to pretty much overlook this important
resource, and I do admit it's a cultural bias that I have a hard time with
myself. :-)

Really the only places where it would ever have been possible to survive as
a vegan would be temperate climates as in Europe and the U.S.  But even
here there is the problem that if you don't eat some of the animals that
are sharing the same food sources as you, then those animals will become
overpopulated and eat all your food, and if you don't do something about
the population both you and they will starve.

People who lived in close contact with the land couldn't survive as vegans.
 It would not have even occurred to them to set this as a goal, nor would
it have occurred to them that killing and eating animals was a "wrong" or
hurtful thing to do any more than it is for lions or wolves.  Of course
when people, animals and plants are all aware of their interdependence on
each other, living, eating and dying are all done with a much different
attitude than they are in our culture.  Tribal people didn't have factory
farms, would have considered such things as abhorrent as vegans do.  But it
seems to me Permaculture is about restoring that awareness and respect,
having a true understanding of where our life essentials come from.  Part
of that awareness for me has been coming to terms with the fact that death
is a part of life, that no life could exist without death and that is the
way it's supposed to be.  I think when I really got into making compost was
when I first realized this, and realized that you don't have to be vegan to
have the ultimate respect for life.

= Lee =


***************************************************************************
Lee A Flier
lflier@mindspring.com
Atlanta and Ellijay, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://lflier.home.mindspring.com