More on fruits and meat

The Meat vs Vegetarianism Debate

In nature, monkeys of our lineage or in general are not carnivores like lions or dogs, jumping on the prey and gobbling it up alive, fresh. Eating fresh meat is not strictly impossible (especially the entrails and brain, of course). But it is noticeable that all populations eating raw prefer aged or downright rotten meat, like the Inuits.

The maturation of a product (typically meat, but this applies to fruit) is typically separated into autolysis and ripening (or rotting for fruit). Aseptic autolysis is the rupture or degradation of cell membranes and cell walls, through programmed cell death, without the action of bacteria. Degradation by bacteria means rotting.

The processes are not totally distinct as they occur simultaneously: in mammals, certain bacteria are transferred from the mother to the child, the same bacteria which after death and the cessation of regulation by the immune system, are responsible for the onset of putrefaction.

The online encyclopedia Gastronomiac defines ripening as follows:

Operation consisting of leaving a game animal in a cool place for a variable period of time (up to 8 days, and even more for some amateurs) in order to tenderize its flesh and obtain a particular flavor under the effect of mortification. This aroma is produced by germs in the intestine, which invade the tissues and break down the proteins, producing substances which, in the long run, become toxic. Mushrooms are also involved in the practice of dry curing, where they form a kind of hard green crust on the outside of the piece of meat: they actually help the enzymes in meat tenderizing and add flavor. This crust is then removed.

We no longer push aging to the point of altering the scent as Montagne advocated in the 16th century, until the 19th century when Brillat-Savarin, the inventor of the eponymous cheese, is said to have said that he bothered all his colleagues with the smell of the game he brought in his pockets to have it aged.

This is almost impossible today, and perhaps not without reason:
Foreigners eating for the first time in developing countries often get “turista”, an explosive intestinal reaction to inferior food “hygiene” conditions. This is a way of saying that the intestinal flora has been disturbed and must take a few days to change and adapt.

Our advanced industrial populations live in almost total asepsis, compared to poor countries. The image of Indian children living in slums for years is well known… Even if these countries suffer from epidemics that have long since disappeared in Europe, the immune resistance of these people, exposed all their lives to various germs, vastly exceeds ours.

It is no exaggeration to say that Westerners live on a permanent drip-feed of medicine, and without it infant mortality would immediately skyrocket while life expectancy would stop at 40 years. The time for a new cleaner generation could be raised.

Although monkeys can hunt incidentally, neither their dentition nor their digestive system allows them to eat and digest fresh meat. For tens of millions of years - before their brains developed sufficiently - primates remained opportunistic occasional meat eaters.

So it makes sense that we have adapted to consuming bodies found in the wild, already dead in a hot humid tropical climate thus quickly emitting a strong, attractive scent. In fact, even dogs bury their game in the ground.

So that’s it for the meat. We have all the enzymes we need, we just have to let our friends the microbes do their job.
But while some idiots find eating meat disgusting, some go the absolute opposite extreme, claiming we abandoned fruits and can’t compete with other animals in climbing. Let’s debunk this, shall we ?

Any farmer will tell you how hard it is to protect fruit from birds. One can legitimately ask the previous question for fruit: even if humans are decent climbers with training, can they really compete with birds or other tree species?
Apes have four opposable thumbs, not two, and the proportion of their limbs is much better suited to arboreal locomotion: the ratio of forearms to arms is greater, and the whole thing is longer than ours in relation to the rest of the body, allowing for efficient swinging. The evolution of our morphology shows a shift from an arboreal to a predominantly terrestrial lifestyle over the last three million years.

Apes have four opposable thumbs, not two, and the proportion of their limbs is much better suited to arboreal locomotion: the ratio of forearms to arms is greater, and the whole thing is longer than ours in relation to the rest of the body, allowing for efficient swinging. The evolution of our morphology shows a shift from an arboreal to a predominantly terrestrial lifestyle over the last three million years.

But these reflections cannot determine how adept the original man was at moving through the trees. A good approximation can be reached however, by studying the ‘wild children’ who lived in the forest. Wild children are typically described as climbing trees to escape animals.

We are still - without doubt - adapted to ripe fruit, and often birds are adapted to other fruits than us and only fall back on our agricultural products to the extent that we have greatly reduced the diversity around which these species have evolved. We have ruined nature as a whole, creating an image of scarcity and permanent shortage in a wilderness that is supposed to be abundant.

This abundance and diversity can still be seen in the Kazakh forests, inhabited by omnivorous bears with similar tastes to ours. If our European woods show few edible fruit trees, it is primarily because we stopped caring for them and living in them tens of thousands of years ago, except for some Amazonian tribes.

As far as the ankle is concerned, it has been said that the human ankle is fundamentally different, preventing it from climbing trees effectively as apes do… Some African tribes still climb trees 20-50 meters high, and have shown no special adaptation compared to others who do not climb. But Venkataraman et al refuted this argument in 2013.

This is because their ankles are so extraordinarily flexible that their feet can make angles of up to 45 degrees with their shins. You can clearly see this in the video. This is a level of flexibility comparable to wild chimpanzees, who climb trees in the same way. They plant their soles flat against the trunk, which allows them to hold their bodies closer to the trees and reduce the energy needed to climb.
By comparison, most people can only bend their feet 15 to 20 degrees. If you or I tried to match the bending of a Twa climber, our ankles would break catastrophically and we wouldn’t be walking, let alone effortlessly climbing a thick vine.
But the secret of the Twa is not in their ankles, which are indistinguishable from others. Instead, the team found that the Twa’s flexibility comes from calf muscles (gastrocnemius) with unusually long fibers, much longer than those of the Bakiga, a group of neighboring Ugandan farmers who do not climb trees. The team found the same differences in the Philippines. Tree-climbing Agta hunter-gatherers have much longer gastrocnemius fibers than non-climbing Manobo farmers.
Moreover, the calf muscles of non-climbers are identical to those of chimpanzees. Furthermore, the muscles of the female climbers, who traditionally do not climb, are identical to those of the Manobo.

The same could apply for most so-called “key” differences between us highlighted every now and then. The adaptations that have taken place all appear to be slow, multiple and gradual, and almost always present to varying degrees in our cousins for millions of years already. This proves our ancestors were excellent climbers, and contrary to legend, vines do not make supports (sorry Tarzan), brachiation (swinging from one branch to another with the arms only, as monkeys do) as all children around the world know, is still part of our instincts. Ergo we never quit the trees completely, never really suffered the competition from other animals, which never pushed us in the Savannah to hunt big games as many claim.

We did not descend from trees and abandon them, to start hunting a good million years before our brain could grow enough to compete with much superior predators. In fact, according to some, to be anything but a prey…
Fruits were and still should be the bulk of our food (even though degenerate civilized men substituted them with grains, it’s still carbohydrates, not animal fat and proteins). It appears that men are still quite good at moving quickly from branches to branches (brachiation), with a little bit of training.

Hitler’s Insights in Food

Hitler predicted a great many tendencies, and his insights covered a lot of areas too. A true polymath. But among the most chilling, awe-inspiring pieces of gold one can find in his Table Talks, are his numerous attacks on cooking. I laid them here, they deserve praises and commenting, to put in perspective at the light of our instinctive diet experiences several decades after, how remarkable he was there too, even if he wasn’t always the first to make them.

When I was a young man, the doctors used to say that a meat diet was indispensable for the formation of bones. This was not true. Unlike peoples who eat polenta, we have bad teeth.
It occurs to me that this has something to do with a diet that’s more or less rich in yeast. Nine-tenths of our diet are made up of foods deprived of their biological qualities.
When I’m told that 50 per cent of dogs die of cancer, there must be an explanation for that. Nature has predisposed the dog to feed on raw meat, by tearing up other animals. To-day the dog feeds almost exclusively on mixed bread and cooked meat.
Country folk spend fourteen hours a day in the fresh air. Yet by the age of forty-five they’re old, and the mortality amongst them is enormous. That’s the result of an error in their diet. They eat only cooked foods.
Everything that lives on earth feeds on living materials. The fact that man subjects his foodstuffs to a physico-chemical process explains the so-called “maladies of civilization”.** If the average term of life is at present increasing, that’s because people are again finding room for a naturistic diet**. It’s a revolution. That a fatty substance extracted from coal has the same value as olive-oil, that l don’t believe at all! It’s surely better to use the synthetic fatty substances for the manufacture of soap, for example.

At the very least, our heavy emphasis on other proteins (and fat) sources than animal meat would please him immensely. For decades after the war however, gains in lifespan came nearly entirely from modern medicine, but constitutional health steadily decreased, as indicated by the heightened tendency to get sick, quickly loose teeth without at least semi-regular dentist check-ups (an issue generations born before WW2 simply did not know), and most importantly the slow reduction in the West, for about 20 years now, of the health-adjusted life expectancy: the average number of years a person can expect to live in full health, that is without suffering from disabling or debilitating illnesses. We may come to the point, where the most advanced medical clutches can not compensate anymore for our organisms’ rate of degradation. What could happen for our current generation, if the medical infrastructure were to fail, due to EMPs, or a shortage of oil (vital to produce drugs) due to geopolitical reasons, or a global economic crisis ? I let you ponder.

The monkeys, our ancestors of prehistoric times, are strictly vegetarian. Japanese wrestlers [ - Sumotoris - ] , who are amongst the strongest men in the world, feed exclusively on vegetables. The same holds true of the Turkish porter, who can move a piano by himself. At the time when I ate meat, I used to sweat a lot. I used to drink four pots of beer and six bottles of water during a meeting, and I’d succeed in losing nine pounds ! When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water from time to time was enough. When you offer a child the choice of a piece of meat, an apple or a cake, it’s never the meat that he chooses. There’s an ancestral instinct there. In the same way, the child would never begin to drink or smoke if it weren’t to imitate others. The consumption of meat is reduced the moment the market presents a greater choice of vegetables, and in proportion as each man can afford the luxury of the first fruits.
I suppose man became carnivorous because, during the Ice Age, circumstances compelled him. They also prompted him to have his food cooked, a habit which, as one knows to-day, has harmful consequences. Our peasants never eat any food that hasn’t been cooked and re-cooked, and thus deprived of all its virtues.

It’s not impossible that one of the causes of cancer lies in the harmfulness of cooked foods. We give our body a form of nourishment that in one way or another is debased. At present the origin of cancer is unknown, but it’s possible that the causes that provoke it find a terrain that suits them in incorrectly nourished organisms. We all breathe in the microbes that give rise to colds or tuberculosis, but we’re not all enrheumed or tuberculous.
Nature, in creating a being, gives it all it needs to live. If it cannot live, that’s either because it’s attacked from without or because its inner resistance has weakened. In the case of man, it’s usually the second eventuality that has made him vulnerable.

Indeed we saw the confirmation of those early intuitions: all but the most advanced terminal stage cancers proved remissible, in so far as people access a wide variety of food and stick to discipline as if they life depended on it… Because it really does. But usually people at such a stage, or before for that matter, like for AIDS, reject the most wondrous signs of healing to keep cooking, even when it comes with the come-back of symptoms, and near-certitude of death. It has been said that cancers can be fought back with the will to live: this can’t possibly negate the reality of feeding shit to your body thrice a day, but at the same, we know for a fact that such a will is decidedly rare in most people, some desire - to fit in in a social group - can and do override the most basic instincts, that of survival, no question asked.
While Hitler was wrong in rejecting meat wholesale or that children would never hunt instinctively (we saw them do just that, with delight and without weapon), meat absolutely has very limited appeal for healthily calibrated bodies. I mean that it can be delicious, the best food in the world - as all food should be if they smell the best - but very rarely so, once in a while, a few times per month at best, and more so fish or reptiles. I am not aware of Hitler’s opinion of fish and seafood in general, let alone insects. Wild raw meat is no poison, and the body will definitely default to it for a significant amount of time if need be, however to conclude that the Ice Age made cooking a necessity is a fallacy: Many Ice Ages and Interglacials succeeded for the better part of the last million year. It stands to reason we adapted to them.
Moreover, people used to move, a lot: why on Earth would a tribe stay at a place with nothing to eat but animals which quickly enough would prove unsavory, relatively costly to catch compared to fruits, and weakening your folk the longer you keep on such an unbalanced diet (as proved by Inuits, until recently total raw foodists yet age very fast) ? [Animals would flee. But super-intelligent big-brained Neanderthals would not ?]
As I said, we underestimate the amount of food a wild forest would provide, mostly because we ceased to live in them and maintain our ecological role in this obligate co-dependent symbiosis when we started cooking, so even dense forests are no primate forests anymore. In the span of a few millennia, we must eat fruits for them to persist, through our feces, since beside bears (that we proceeded to genocide) no other animal in Europe presents the same balanced, omnivorous range of appeals plus active metabolic needs as us. Lastly, I strongly believe paleoclimatic modelization (let alone vulgarization material) are vastly erroneous , painting a picture of the Ice Age as a kind of barren, sterile no-man’s land frozen half of the year. This could not be further from the truth.
Ice ages are defined by winter cold enough compared to hotter seasons, so that ice does not thaw entirely, but either sustain itself or pile-up over the years. A good part of Swedes, in particular edges of hills and mountains, are in that situation, and forests do not shy from nearing glaciers. The same occurs in Switzerland, owning to its topology. It is a matter of temperature averages, and most of Sweden isn’t barren half the year, but demonstrate hot summers hot enough to discard cloths altogether. The part of Europe not under glaciers knew climates varying between modern day Sweden, Switzerland or Norway, with inland masses (and coastal areas, depending microclimates) had a lot more of the typical continental climate (unlike the current temperate one), with strong winters and hot summers, and an overall temperature lower than today… as if suddenly placing France into Ukraine or Poland. Hardly deserts !

Cooking started for vastly different reasons, to know more once could use the search bar, and read first the required articles indicated above the table of content, to ensure a coherent approach following the logical order of pages.

Those who adopt a vegetarian diet must remember that it is in their raw State that vegetables have their greatest nutritive value. The fly feeds on fresh leaves, the frog swallows the fly as it is, and the stork eats the living frog. Nature thus teaches us that a rational diet should be based on eating things in their raw State**. Science has proved, too, that cooking destroys the vitamins, which are the most valuable part of our food. It has not yet been established beyond doubt whether cooking destroys merely certain Chemical particles or whether it also destroys the essential fermentive juices. [ - in modern terms, enzymes - ]
Our children to-day are much healthier than those of the Imperial and Weimar Republic periods because mothers now realize that they contribute far more to the health of their children if they give them raw vegetables and roots to chew than if they give them boiled milk.

So, as we saw, this national-naturalist movement - here in its instinctive paleodiet aspect - appears as the sole, true inheritor of Hitler’s dream, the heir to its unfinished plans for the future of the Aryan race, its health in particular.