From a naturalistic point of view, the only reliable frame of reference to diet is that in which our ancestors evolved. The discoveries of primate fossils and tools such as spearheads suggest that we started scavenging meat from kills made by carnivores and began hunting a few million years ago - in evolutionary terms, not that long ago. Coming from a much longer vegan period of up to 60 million years, our body has almost entirely evolved on - and thus is adapted to cope with - a plant-based diet. The fact that we started to eat meat is illustrative of our physical and cognitive abilities at the time and our ancestors’ need to adapt to their expansion - especially in the northern regions in the great Ice Ages. Reading into it that meat-eating is ‘the way to go’ holds a vital dimension apart from just consuming moderately. The argument is simply pointless because any acquired practice can be seen as where nature ‘wants us to go’.
In addition, there seems to have been a convenient modern assumption that once our ancestors tasted meat, they lived on nothing else. Having been the prey and not the predatory animal for the most part of our evolution, this reflects wishful thinking more than historical fact. Hunting down an animal was presumably more of a challenge than today’s trip to the supermarket.
The understanding of our past is ongoing, but there is no doubt that the bulk of our diet has always been wild fruits and vegetables, herbs, cambium, roots, bulbs, nuts, seeds and berries. Our physiology in general, our flat teeth grinding in a circular movement of the jaw hinge and our long digestive tracts, testify that it is not natural for our bodies to process the bodies of others, cooked or not.

Were it necessary for humans to eat meat, the question of animal rights would never have been asked. But animals have ethically relevant interests whether they can conceptualise them or not. Similarly, there are human beings who are not able to understand - to ‘contract’ their rights. Should the protection that rights ensure not include non-human animals as well as humans if the principles that uphold them are to be fair and consistent? Indeed, having four legs is a type of argument as prehistoric as the colour of one’s skin. More fundamentally, seeking justification for our conduct by citing examples in nature would only surface a pedophile claiming: “but animals do it too!”, and hold water. As often, such a paradox reveals the basic problem: that we as human beings strive to lead a moral life which as such separates us from the behaviour of the animal kingdom. This admirable achievement is neither wholehearted, nor trustworthy, if we set it aside when it comes to animals shattering our ethical foothold. Regardless of which goods are sold more, shopping for our morals in animal behaviour consequently puts everything up for sale.

With such challenges as climate change and the problems of the third world facing our times, veganism has definitely not become less precedent. In a hopelessly inefficient system, we are converting vegetable protein into animal protein - in a ratio that is in average 10:1. Unlike most other products, and even in times of recession, animal foods are shopped every day by 1 billion Westerners, making it a very heavy industry. Worldwide animal consumption, including the clearing of vast areas of rain-forest to provide land for cattle grazing and crops for livestock, accounts for almost a fifth of all the greenhouse gasses emitted. With all respect, a change of diet has a more beneficial effect on our environment than bicycling home to a cold shower.
Not many centuries ago the continent of Africa offered an abundance of food to its people. But our cradle of life, the place of fertility and vitality for so long, has now become the exact opposite, a symbol of starvation and stagnation. This sudden transition is no less coincidental than it is revealing. Multinationals have replaced the colonialist regimes of the past as we have let macro economics gain maximum power of mechanisms which assert the flow of resources from developing countries to the West. These countries are often deadlocked in huge debt, and hungry for currency their leaders have no alternative than to export to the highest bidder - the possessors of capital. The export includes loads of soy bean that could feed the starving people in whose soil it was grown, but are imported via agricultural subsidiaries to fatten up our steak. These subsidiaries are embraced by the ‘free’ market forces which purport to be the solution for the third world, but are just a quick fix and in fact part of the problem. In the long run, settling with these dogmas is inescapable to steer clear of the downward spiral that also makes so many human lives a living hell. We are not starving because we are many, but many because we are starving.
Obviously, there are many factors at work in the scheme of things, but our inexhaustible appetite for animal protein is undoubtedly an All-Star player on a somewhat Mean Team.

By now, as we have acquired a taste for meat, our relationship to the animal peoples is deeply rooted in an ostensible necessity to use them. Imagine trying to take from the hands of a child, a bag of candy that has sweetened life all along and you get a sense of the emotional impact involved. Project this into a socio-cultural perspective and the implications are enormous. Within deceit and addiction dwells cynicism, and thus to turn a cornerstone of our matter-of-fact killing of non-human animals, our unwillingness to face these problems has to be addressed. Only then can our eyes open in respect - our hearts give in to love - for our fellow living creatures with whom we share this world.