Blog - Joyful Curmudgeon - Blog
A Mary T. Hoffman Commentary from All-Creatures.org

 

"Joyful Curmudgeon" An oxymoron?
No! I see all the beauty of God's creation and I'm joyful.  At the same time, I see all the suffering and corruption going on in the world, and feel called to help expose and end it so that we may have true peace and compassion.

 

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The Carnivores’ Myth – 24 November 2008
By Mary T. Hoffman

There are those who argue that humans were meant to be meat eaters; but their flawed arguments simply don’t stand up to reality. You know the ones, as Howard Lyman lists them in Mad Cowboy:

“We evolved as hunters. We have canine teeth. You can’t fight Nature – we have blood lust.”

Yet, the answer is, as Howard F. Lyman points out in his book Mad Cowboy, “not new to science; it was given long ago by Plutarch, who pointed out that man ‘has no curved beak, no sharp talons or claws, no pointed teeth…on the contrary, by the smoothness of his teeth, the small capacity of his mouth, the softness of his tongue and the sluggishness of his digestive apparatus, Nature sternly forbids him to feed on flesh.’ Plutarch was right. Like our cousins the anthropoid apes, whose diet consists mostly of fruit and nuts, our digestive system is twelve times the length of our bodies (it takes meat five days to take this voyage and pass out of the body; vegetarian food, one to two days), our skin has pores for evaporation, and our stomach acid has roughly 5 percent the strength of the carnivores’. Obviously, we have neither claws nor powerful carnivorous jaws, but have molars for grinding and predigesting our grain. Like herbivorous animals, we have alkaline saliva and the enzyme ptyalin to predigest grain. The teeth we call our ‘canines’ have only the name in common with the long, sharp, piercing teeth of dogs or tigers. If you don’t believe me, try using your ‘canines’ to tear the living flesh of a moose. I have challenged many people to do so, and not one has come back with the moose in his mouth.”

“Do we have blood lust? Well, does the idea of tearing a chicken or cow apart with your hands and teeth and sucking its warm blood appeal to you? People eat their meat packaged and disguised precisely because the reality of eating flesh disgusts most of us.”

“Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

Reading this, I thought about how the skyrocketing cost of “disease care” is obviously related to carnivorous eating habits, and how the answer is so simple: Go Vegan!

For health articles, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/health.html 

For great-tasting vegan recipes, photos, and information, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/recipes.html   

Go on to: SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST – 25 November 2008
Return to: THE GOD OF THE LIVING – 23 November 2008
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