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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat. Our mouths, jaws, and digestive system have been coevolving for past few tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years with our diets and food preparation methods. Certainly, vegetables have not been a major source of calories for humans in many tens of thousands of years now (because they don’t have a lot of calories in them in the first place, but also because they are only available in narrow window of the growing season.

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> No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat.

You're not wrong, but IMHO it should be noted that humans don't need a lot of meat to meet their dietary needs. There has probably been excess cultural focusing on it in recent decades.

The necessary daily portions one needs—unless doing body building—isn't a lot to get the required protein and amino acids.

You are essentially right that prepared meat played a big role in our evolution, but we're at a point now where growing seasons are less of an issue due to the global economy, and things like incomplete proteins from eating a single type of locally growing bean can be handled through more diverse sourcing.

If we were really trying to optimize, we might look at tradeoffs WRT locally raised meats vs grains and beans that have to be shipped around due to growing season type issues. But really what we're doing now is shipping meat all over the world, which is like the worse of both worlds.

Anyway, we can get by with a little meat. I'm under the impression that our current diets are pretty weird historically. You don't need meat with every dinner.

>but we're at a point now where growing seasons are less of an issue due to the global economy,

We should go back to a point where growing seasons are more of an issue, due to environment and sustainability.

Grains, legumes and root vegetables would disagree.

The word “vegetables” is typically understood to not include grains, and to not include all legumes.

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