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‘We’ve Got To Get Ourselves Back To The Garden!’

I’ve been waxing philosophical more than just a little recently. The overarching message has been, we have to start making the inevitable shift from animal- to plant-based protein now to avoid chaos at ‘crunch’ time….

Gorilla Eating Celery - © pbase.comEven our closest cousins have always known that vegan, or at least
mostly ‘mostly vegetarian’, is natural for us ‘higher primates’…

Now, anthropologists have concluded that the earliest humans were vegetarians. It’s as much implied as expressed. The idea is based on tricky new technology. But scientists are convinced… We higher primates were originally predisposed to seek out and consume vegan or at least ‘mostly vegetarian’ diets…

Latest technology…

… Has allowed anthropologists from the University of Witwateresrand (SA) to analyse the diets of humans’ closest true ancestors. And their conclusion is that Australopithecus – who roamed what is now East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania 4 million years ago – “primarily relied on plant-based diets, with little to no evidence of meat consumption.”

And that should be a lesson to us.

Fast-forward 4 million years…

Humanity has been evolving slowly but surely from australopithecus to us. And what our ancestors were eating evolved with them, from their earliest instinctive veggie diet to our heavily animal-focused eating regime.

At the same time, as far as we can tell, the scope of infirmities and weaknesses we’re prey to has expanded, at least as fast as our predisposition to consuming meat.

Even if climate change wasn’t banging on our door, demanding we make a change or perish, that’s compelling evidence that we should be turning toward plant-based foods and away from animal-sources.

Biblical proportions

Much closer to our own time, the reference to Eve tempting Adam with the Apple (a metaphor for ‘original sin’ found in the Old Testament Book of Exodus) conspicuously involves highly-desirable, cloyingly sweet fresh produce. Rather than, say, a juicy, perfectly roasted lamb chop.

But the message would have been the same: We were cast out of our vegetarian idyll into a dietary wasteland of animal-based and processed foods, full of excess salt, sugar and fat. Furthermore, we have been condemned to crave the ‘bad stuff’ rather than the ‘good stuff’, to our ultimate ruination.

My take

Now, we find ourselves at another pivot point in human history. The cosmos has provided climate change as incontrovertible proof that we’ve been on the wrong track, not only with our diets, but with our agricultural methods and our dependence on fossil fuels and the industrialization drive of the past 150 years or so.

Taking the long view – about 4 million years long – how much longer can even the most stubborn of us ignore the message the brilliant poet and social commentor Joni Mitchell sent us way back in 1969?

We are stardust,
Billion-year-old carbon.
We are golden,
Caught in the devil’s bargain.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden…

(By the time we got to) Woodstock – Joni Mitchell (1969)

~ Maggie J.

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