It’s such a Western idea that meat is the best source of protein, disregarding the fact that the majority of people get their proteins from cereal grains and not meat. I think it says a lot about the priviledge that members of developed countries have
I’ve always found it deeply ironic how people dismiss veganism as “privileged” while failing to appreciate what most people in the world actually eat. Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet, while an estimated 4 billion live primarily on a plant-based diet. In the Chinese-Japanese, Australian, Hindustani, Central Asian, Near Eastern, Mediterranean, European-Siberian, South American, North American, Central American and Mexican regions, every single staple food is vegan; staple being defined as a food that is eaten regularly and in such quantities as to constitute the dominant part of a person’s diet and supply a major proportion of their energy and nutrient needs. In fact, just 13.5% of food eaten globally is composed of meat, milk, fish or eggs.
Meat consumption used to be largely a class issue in Western countries until relatively recently, even though European meat consumption in general has always historically been higher than the rest of the world. All of the cookbooks in early modern Europe described the meals of the rich. Rich people were usually the ones eating meat at every meal, and everyone else ate mostly bread.
It was the overall wealth gained by imperialism,colonialism, and general exploitation of the rest of the world that raised the standards for whole populations of Western countries, like the US, making us globally “rich” by comparison, and giving poorer people in these countries more access to meat and dairy. Therefore, simply eating meat became less of a status symbol, so the elites started to focus on more difficult to obtain foods from colonized countries, like vanilla (which is now ubiquitous, but was quite the delicacy back in the day), and uphold certain kinds of meat, like lobster, caviar, etc., as the new status symbols which artificially inflated their prices.
When Italians first started immigrating to America during the Industrial Era, they were shocked that even poor Americans were eating much more meat and dairy on a regular basis than people back in Italy. So they started creating new, decadent recipes to incorporate as much of these “elite” foods as they could as a sort of status symbol in their own right. Now, what we consider to be Italian food – rich, meat laden pasta dishes drowned in cheese and sauce – looks nothing like traditional Italian food.
Not to mention the fact that most of the world is lactose intolerant: it’s estimated that only about a quarter of the world’s population can digest dairy after childhood (comprised of almost entirely white European/white North American people).
medranochav 