Jainism and Animal Issues 1997

Author(s): Federation of JAINA
Publisher: USA Federation of JAINA

Page 14

Jainism and Animal Issues
consume 94-98% of their diet from plant food. Thus, though capable of hunting, humans have not evolved to be meat-eaters. There is little doubt that humankind came into being sustained on a diet that was almost wholly based on the gathering of locally available plant foods. And since evolution is a very slow process on the human time scale, our biological constitution has changed little over the 40,000 years that the most recent species of modern humans has been around.
Around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, humans all around the world gradually stopped the gathering of food and began to grow it instead. Thus, was born the agricultural revolution. From a predominantly gathering lifestyle, consuming a large variety of wild plants, this dramatic transformation changes the human diet into one based on staple crops. Humans farmed different crops based on their geographic location. In South and South-East Asia it was rice, in Central America and Mexico it was maize (corn), and in Europe it was cercals. The diets of people throughout the world were based on these carbohydrate-rich plant foods, with a scasonal supply locally available fruits and vegetables.
The agricultural revolution also involved the domestication of animals. Animals were kept mostly for the mechanical assistance they provided, and humans began to drink their milk for the first time. However, the peasant agriculturalists, who depended on their bullocks for labor, could scarcely afford to slaughter them. Meat and the other animal products were thus eaten very rarely. In agricultural sociсtics, it was only the very wealthy who could afford substantial quantities of milk, butter, meat, and other foods from domesticated animals. As a result, the diet of humans during this period changed little in actual nutrient content from that of the preceding gatherer one. Despite the dramatic changes that accompanied the agricultural phase of our existence, the vast majority of humans continued to consume an essentially vegetarian diet. After it began, the diet and livelihood of the peasant agriculturalist remained the way of life for almost all of humanity for thousands of years, until just 200 years ago with the dawn of the industrial revolution in Europe. This second drastic change in human society, occurring within only the past seven or eight generations, profoundly altered not only the sources of human food, but the nutrient profile of the human diet as well.
The industrial revolution made possible the first application of modern technology to agriculture, and methods such as crop rotation and fertilizers were developed. Mechanization brought cutting machines, threshers, winnowers and the like to the farming sector, displacing the previously essential role of animal labor in the raising of crops. With these advances in the science and practice of agriculture, food production increased dramatically year after year. Because of the large quantities of surplus grains and the dispensableness of domesticated animals, it was possible for formerly agriculturalist peoples in western societies to feed their crops to animals and then to slaughter and eat the animals, instead of consuming the plant food themselves. Soon animal products, such as meat, milk and butter, became much more widely available. Fueled by the association of animal products with wealth and
prestige that was developed during agriculturalist times, increasingly affluent people in the West steadily increased the number of animals they raised for meat consumption.
The new-found agricultural productivity and growing mcat supply that followed the industrial revolution had dramatic consequences. The human diet, which had been essentially vegetarian for the entire span of our evolutionary history, suddenly, in industrial countries, became heavily dependent on animal foods. Intake of animal protein, cholesterol and saturated fat increased astronomically. Statistics for the United Kingdom show that per capita fat intake in grams per day increased from 25g in 1770 to 145g in 1970, a 580% increase in just 200 years. More recently, as industrialization has spread to other regions of the world, including India, China and Latin American countries, meat consumption has increased dramatically there also.
Not surprisingly, over the past 50 years, livestock industries have grown tremendously in size to meet the surging demand for animal products around the world. In this time, the global number of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats has nearly doubled, to four billion and the number of chickens has more than tripled to 11 billion. There are now three domesticated animals for every man, woman and child on the planet. Now occupying a total of one-quarter of the carth's land mass, cattle and other ruminants now eat more grain than all the people in the developing world put together! In 1990, meat consumption around the globe was four times higher than in 1950. As a group, Americans ate 112 kg of meat per capita per year, the highest level in the world. In fact in an average life span, a North American will cat 21 cows, 12 hogs, 14 sheep or goats, 900 chickens, and 11,275 eggs.
One only has to put these recent developments in evolutionary perspective to see how distorted human food habits have become. From our evolution over millions of years as gathering plant-eaters, to our time as crop-eating agriculturalists, modern industrial man has for the first time adopted a diet based largely on animal foods. If hominid evolution is represented as a 24-hour day, the heavily mcat-centered diet of modern industrial societies have only been consumed for the last four minutes of the last hour! This very recent and enormous change in the diet of much of the earth's population has also been accompanied by an enormous cost to human health, to the environment, and has created tremendous suffering for the billions of animals raised in factory-farm environments to meet the huge demand for meat.
The meat-centered diet prevalent in modern North American society does not, therefore, have a longstanding history. Contrary to current notions of a vegetarian diet as a new-age phenomenon, the adoption of a plant-centered dict only returns meat-caters to the type of food humans have consumed since our emergence as a species. If the current promising trend towards vegetarianism continues, it may be that one day, a much wiser North American society will look back at meat-eating in its true historical context, that is, as a destructive and highly deviant fad.
Tarang Sheth and Tej Sheth, Toronto, Canada
(Tej and Tarang Sheth are authors of "Why be a Vegetarian" (1995), published by the Jain Publishing Company, Fremont CA. They are both medical students at the University of Toronto.)
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