The loudest criticism against The Book of Eli has been directed at the whole Bible thing. For example, one commenter, BrawndoMan, writes:

So let me get this straight… in the post Apocalyptic era, there is only a single Bible. That is, only a single copy of what is probably the most published book in existence, an inert stack of paper, glue and ink which requires no power source or moving parts to exist as a written text. But there are iPods?

I can live with the film’s Bible-worship because in the end it does have the virtue of connecting the roots of Christianity with the ancient Greek cult/philosophy of Epicureanism—to explain this connection would get me into a lot of “spoiler” trouble.

My problem with the film? Its idea of meat. This is from my review of Eli:

The book of Eli opens with a man hunting a hairless, thin cat. The cat is killed by an arrow that’s almost as big as it is. The cat is cooked on a fire and eaten with no enjoyment by Eli, a man on a mission.

According to the film, the humans of the post-everything world survive on dirty water and meat from lean animals (cats, humans, birds).

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Vegetables are not in the picture. But any nutritionist who is worth a dime would know that this kind of diet could not sustain human life for long. Why? The answer:

Proteins contain nitrogen and other elements. When proteins are used to provide energy, these must be got rid of in some way. This is not only wasteful, it can put a strain on the body, particularly on the liver and kidneys.

Excess intake of nitrogen leads in a short space of time to hyperammonaemia, which is a build up of ammonia in the bloodstream. This is toxic to the brain. Many human cultures survive on a purely animal product diet, but only if it is high in fat.[xii] [xiii] A lean meat diet, on the other hand cannot be tolerated; it leads to nausea in as little as three days, symptoms of starvation and ketosis in a week to ten days, severe debilitation in twelve days and possibly death in just a few weeks.

The fact that a film can so easily imagine a world that has nothing left to eat but lean meat shows how much our current and excessive consumption of animals is more ideological than practical. The ideology has completely absorbed reality and almost erased the real history or root of meat consumption, which has less to do with nutrition and more to do with peacocks.

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This excellent academic paper, “Hunting and Nuclear Families,” which concerns the actual value of meat in certain hunter-gatherer economies, convincingly argues that protein from animals played a small role in the evolution of humans. The hunting of big animals had more to do with prestige than providing groups with an adequate or steady source of energy. True, the article is a little old, but much of the information it contains has hardly deteriorated:

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

22 replies on “The Ideology of Meat”

  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.

  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

  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.

  10. Without specifying where these “hunter-gatherer economies” were, your argument is meaningless. What you eat depends entirely on where you live.

  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.

  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.

  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:)…

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