Film/TV Jan 18, 2010 at 4:05 pm

Comments

1
It would explain why meat eaters today won't quit their endless blogging about the mere fact that they are meat eaters.
2
This is great. Thanks!
3
Richard Dana, in "Two Years Before the Mast" (1840) proved, to doubters in his time, that one could subsist on nothing but meat for long periods. No doubt there was plenty of fat, as they were eating cow while loading rawhide onto ships in California.
4
Indeed, a great post.
5
I enjoyed a recent NYTimes style article on a new lad-fad called "New Age Cavemen," one of whose regimen involves:

...eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture.

...exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

The surprising consensus of the paleos is that the city is a paradise.

“New York is the only city in America where you can walk,” said Nassim Taleb, an investor who gained a measure of celebrity for his theories, described in “The Black Swan,” that extreme events can roil financial markets. “People treat walking like exercise,” he said, “but walking is how humans become humans.”

Mr. Taleb, who rejects the label “caveman” in favor of “paleo,” avoids offices (including his own) as much as he can. He prefers to think on the go. Dressed in a tweed coat and Italian loafers, this paleo man is a flâneur, sometimes walking miles a day, ranging from SoHo to 86th Street.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashio…
6
Modern Americans eat more meat than any other recorded society in history -- until literally a couple of years ago, when Mexicans surpassed us (and also surpassed us in obesity rates, coincidentally enough).

Americans eat literally dozens of times more meat per person than the poorer countries of the world:

http://bit.ly/meatbycountry
7
They shoot kitties in this movie??? Hollywood is fucking NUTS.
8
There were two meals served in a movie that represented an undisclosed period of time but clearly close to a week in my estimation but very possibly more. One included the aforementioned hairless cat and one that I cannot recall any disclosure of it's contents.

There was a much heavier urge in the movie and that was about regularly drinking clean water.

A feature length movie with two meals, one of which happened to be cat, is not honestly the basis for a lengthy blog post about the evils of eating meat.

Besides, a post-apocalyptic world has so many dangers more pressing that will end your life long before liver/kidney problems from eating meat.

Be honest and tell us at the start that your post is either a thinly veiled rotten argument against eating meat or complete tripe written by someone with no analytical abilities whatsoever.
9
@8, the bird in the sky. thats three. the hero is offered human meat but refuses. that is four.
10
Without specifying where these "hunter-gatherer economies" were, your argument is meaningless. What you eat depends entirely on where you live.
11
I'm guessing the Uraguayan rugby team was pretty lean. And the folks who ate them to stay alive lasted over ten weeks.
12
Oh, and @6, you might want to visit Barrow sometime. Not a lot other than meat for calories that far north of the Arctic Circle!
13
We eat more meat than any other culture ever? Better tell the Inuit and other Alaskan natives and see what they have to say about that. Hate to break the bad news but the farther north you go the fewer veggies are available for much of the year with those pesky long nights, short days, and really cold weather.
14
Well, Charles is right about one point, namely that human life can't be sustained for any lengthy period of time on a lean-meat only diet. It's a mistake people in survival situations frequently make, thinking they can just trap a few rabbits, or ducks, or other small game that tends to possess very low body fat and get by, for the reasons stated.

But hunting larger (and presumably more fat-laden) animals served a number of purposes other than mere posturing: it eliminated potential threats either directly or by diminishing their food sources; and it provided pre-agricultural societies with a ready, plentiful and, perhaps most importantly, easily transportable and storeable food source, which supplemented whatever plant-based foods could be foraged during the year.

But more important than even these, hunter-gatherer societies made use of literally every ounce of the animal: the hides (cured using the animal's own brain) provided protection from the elements; the bones could be fashioned into weapons, tools, and utensils, the sinews became bowstrings or lacings; the fat could be rendered into a serviceable lamp oil.

In short, it wasn't just about the meat, but as much about using the entire animal as a resource to provide an array of raw materials necessary for the group's survival.
15
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
16
You mean you had to actually see the movie before you figured out how idiotic it is? Here's what should have been your first clue: it has the Bible in it.
17
@16, i actually liked the dumb movie.
18
Charles, you've actually been making sense lately, and have posted more interesting material. I'm pleasantly surprised. Keep it up.
19
Charles, you've actually been making sense lately, and have posted more interesting material. I'm pleasantly surprised. Keep it up.
20
@15, I think about that short-short story all the time. "What a strange thing it is, to be meat's dream."
21
what got me was why there seemed to be a "light" shining every time he reads if the book is "the kind of book that it is" and he "is what he is"...trying not to spoil anything here:)...
22
loved that cat was served to the mouse/rat:)...lol
23
Your link to the Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones article is dead. It can be found here:

http://www1.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/Papers/…

Hunter/gatherer societies do not correspond to a narrow logic beyond the fact that they subsist in a given ecosystem from which they glean and hunt, and that they are in fact (obviously) part of human community.

Status and legitimacy are certainly intertwined with the act/success of hunting, and various modes of redistribution exist in the remaining contemporary hunter/gatherers and in historical instances that we have written and oral histories of. But it can best be said that how it works within a given band...

depends on who they were and how they did it...

24
Which makes sweeping generalizations about the communal act of distributing the spoils a compelling literary device; and fair game in the discussion about the evolution of human communities...

but pretty unconvincing comparative anthropology...

Please wait...

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