The adventures of a Green Van Man

I was on a garden clearance job recently and a customer said to me.

“Nigel what is your secret to looking so fit and Healthy?”

To which I replied.

“There is no secret it is simply plenty of exercise combined with a balanced vegetarian diet!”

When mentioning you’re a vegetarian to meat eaters it is common for them to proudly lift their top lip and show you their canine teeth and then proclaim hey look we are meant to eat meat.

These days I have a well-rehearsed facial expression that condenses my inner frustrations into one simple emoji.

Yes, we do have two small canine teeth but that’s where our similarity with carnivores stops.  I am not going to try and argue that we are not meant to eat meat but simply try and put forward a reasoned argument as to why we should consume a lot less meat.

My explanation starts a very, very long time ago, fire was the latest discovery and the must have gadget was a flint stone axe which was great for intimidating those nightmare neighbours next-door but was also handy in the kitchen for slicing and crushing vegetables.  It’s approximately 2.5 million years ago mobile phones are yet to be invented and the must have real estate was a cave with a view over the valley.

Eating was a survival necessity and there were two choices either forage and gather food like fruits, roots and vegetables which was easy and nourishing or go hunting which might have been exciting but it was very dangerous and many of our distant ancestors would of sadly lost their lives trying to bring back a tasty Sabre Tooth Tiger for tea. 

So, faced with the choice of ‘Gathering’ food or ‘hunting’ the easiest and safest choice was the nuts and berries for tea it stayed like this for a very, very long time. 

Fast forward to today and food is plentiful, packaged, processed and does not bite back.  Our cave man brain which has been slow to adapt to these changes and whispers to us, eat, stuff yourself this might be your last meal!  So, we over consume forgetting that evolution is a slow process and ignoring the possibility that maybe our physiology might not be equipped for all this meat.

Physiology, I hear you say, what’s he talking about?  Well take our closet biological cousins the apps their diet is predominantly vegetarian which means like us they have complex and specialised digestive system suitable for breaking down vegetable matter, this is very different to the short digestive systems of carnivores which evolved for breaking down meat.

What about those canine teeth? Well humans like cows and other Herbivores have a mouth full of flat grinding teeth that have evolved to aid the crushing of vegetable matter.  Now compare this to lions, these chaps like other carnivores have a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, claws and a strong neck which aids with ripping chucks of flesh off their prey.   We don’t share any of these attributes except maybe for our little canine teeth.

Different people have different motivations for being vegetarian for me it’s about being kinder to the environment, healthier and saving money.

Disclaimer:  This has been written for entertainment purposes only if you need dietary advice please speak to a Doctor or Dietician and not a white / green or and other coloured van man or me.