"Meathooked" by Marta Zaraska

"From our earliest days on the Paleolithic savanna, when our ancestors were showing off their kills to form alliances and gain social position, meat has always stood for luxury and for riches." (Meathooked, p. 112)

Do you want to learn about the history of creatures eating other creatures' flesh? From the earliest single-cell creatures to modern omnivores and herbivores? Marta Zaraska's book Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million Year Obsession with Meat (published 2016) covers this huge time span. It seems highly relevant to this week's blockbuster news about food -- that meat eaters might not be taking risks as big as they've thought up to now. (For a summary see: Is eating beef healthy...)

My impression of this book: it's half good and half not so interesting. I'm sorry to say that I wasn't impressed much by the earlier chapters covering the first one-celled organisms that started eating each other and then quickly moving onward with the role of meat in human evolution. The author provides much information about the ways that a vegetarian or even in some cases a vegan diet can provide fine nutrition, and that meat-heavy diets can cause various health problems (obviously a few years ago when the author was writing, this was the mainstream view). But there's kind of a boring side to the way she makes her point. There are many many books that do a better job with this subject.

The later chapters were much more interesting, because the author tried to understand why humans love meat so much, and she especially explored the reasons why the vast and varied efforts to promote vegetarian diets have failed in America and in Europe ever since the earliest efforts in the 19th century. Her main point was that promoters of vegetarianism like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg also hated strong tastes and made sure that the diets they proposed were very uninteresting to eat. Vegetables and grains were overcooked and spices were prohibited along with meat. And she repeatedly points out -- MEAT TASTES GOOD!!

Throughout the world today, more and more meat is being consumed: Meathooked has very interesting chapters on how and why this transition is happening. In China the rate of increase is enormous. Even in India with its tradition of a plant-based diet, more and more of the rising middle class are choosing to eat meat, even eating beef (which they sometimes say is water buffalo not sacred cow meat). Rising Indian technology workers and other educated Indians are rejecting the traditional food although it's almost ideal for complete protein without meat, and the taste is great -- "vegetables stewed with spices were served on scented rice, followed by dishes of flavored curd, saffron caramel, and sweet cakes with pomegranates and mangoes." (p. 121)

The health of the planet is very much a matter of concern in the final chapters of Meathooked. The author could easily be working with the current protest movement against the vast human activities that are accelerating disastrous climate change. The way she puts it is that if the growth of meat consumption continues as it seems to be going, we'll need another planet to grow the feed and raise the animals that are required to feed everyone on earth the amount of meat that Americans now consume.

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