DIET: THE RELEVANCE OF THE PAST TO THE PRESENT
When it comes to eating the contemporary, animal-based, high-fat diet, many people tell me: "That was the way our human and pre-human ancestors ate." ... "The Jews always sacrificed animal and ate them." "Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes." "Mohammed allowed the eating of meat except for pork." ... And so they conclude, "This is the way we should eat."
To varying extents, these assumptions are all false, as I will demonstrate below. ...
THE HISTORY OF DIET, A TUNNEL BACK INTO TIME
Foodways is the historical discipline which focuses on food as a way of penetrating into the past. ...
GATHERING AND HUNTING
... Some of these early ancestors occasionally went hunting and had occasional feasts that included meat, but for the most part they prospered on a rich diet of seeds, roots, and herbs they gathered, plus the occasional ant or grub. We can study them by digging through their dumps, referred to by anthropologists as bone piles, by looking at their teeth, which show the wear marks that come from eating gritty, raw vegetables, and by looking at modern day gather-hunter societies such as the !Kung San Bushmen of southern Africa.
Generally we read of pre-agricultural humans being hunter-gatherers. It is more appropriate to call them gatherer-hunters. One scholar estimates that 75 to 80 percent of their diet was plant-based, which is the case of the !Kung today. ...
Thomas Hobbes said Stone Age humans lived lives that were "short, nasty and brutish." He could not have been more wrong. Sahlins refers to this era as the "original affluent society." ...
OUT ON THE STEPPES: THE HORSE, THE COMPOSITE BOW
... By 5000 B.C., North Africa, southern Europe, the Near East, and much of Asia was becoming much drier. At the same time herding had spread from east to west, north to south, causing or assisting in the desertification process. The Sahara Forest became the Sahara Desert, a process probably hastened by animal herding. ... Cattlemen needing new grazing land initiated a state of generalized war, which has continued to the present. ...
OLD EUROPE, BEFORE 4300 B.C., A PARADIGM OF PARTNERSHIP
... Pythagoras (569-470 B.C.) as quoted by Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.) (Metamorphoses, XV, line 96 ff.) said the people of the Golden Age ate a diet free of flesh food. ...
INVASIONS OF THE COWBOYS, A PARADIGM OF DOMINATION
One summer evening around 4300 B.C., in a town in Old Europe, in what is now Romania or Bulgaria, people were working in a jewelry shop, worshiping in a temple, and sitting at a sidewalk cafe having dinner. The sky was clear, but there was an odd, low rumble, like thunder in the distance. It grew louder and louder still, like a stampede of wild cattle. Into town suddenly rode hundreds of cowboys on horseback. They were Kurgans from southern Russia. Some were armed with bows and arrows, some with sabers. There was fear in every heart. There was no communicating with these men. Their language was completely different.
The Kurgans entered the jewelry workshop, the temple, the market, and the sidewalk cafe, and slew all the men, all the women, all the old people, all the boys. ... The Kurgans spared only the virgin girls: They ... could be made into breeding slaves. The Kurgans became the grandfathers of Europe; the surviving virgins its grandmothers. ...
The scene was repeated all across Old Europe by endless waves of invading tribes ... as far west as Ireland. ...
The world of Old Europe was turned upside down. Where there had been culture, education, literacy, medicine, equality, and the rule of law, there was now rule by the most skilled rider, archer, and swordsman. Artistic traditions were disrupted. ... Legends were changed to celebrate the sun god and the bull storm god. ...
We are gradually recovering the balance of Old Europe, however, this positive change takes place alongside population explosion, environmental devastation, a form of capitalism that seems to know no limits ....
It remains to be seen which tendency will win out: ... Will we will civilize the world before we destroy it?
A LOOK BACK AT KURGAN CULTURE
Who were our Kurgan ancestors, and what motivated them to be so destructive? ... Probably they moved west and south because droughts dried up their grazing lands. Probably their own overgrazing of the steppes contributed to the desertification. ...
INDIA: BRAHMANS, JAINS, HINDUS, AND BUDDHISTS
After 2000 B.C., powerful Aryan tribes of semi-nomadic cattle herder-farmers, descendants of the Kurgans, invaded first Persia and later India. ...
There were two broad group of Indians, first, the dark-skinned Shramana, the indigenous Dravidians, and second, the Aryan, Vedic Brahmans, who had invaded India and subjugated the Shramana. From the Shramana tradition developed the Jain religion and later Buddhism.
The Jains claim they and their Shramana predecessors have always been strict vegetarians. Their central teaching was ahimsa, non-injury to all living creatures. ...
GENESIS AND JUDAISM
The stories of Genesis are highly symbolic, but for one who is not afraid to interpret them in a less than literal way, there is much history to be found there. Scholars such as J.J. Bachofen and A.M. Hocart wrote of the "historicity of myth." (J.J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right; p. 75.) Greek historians such as Herodotus and Strabo freely examined myths and drew history out of them. ...
There is a legend referred to in the Talmud and the Bible that from the time of Adam to the Deluge, the predecessors of the Jews did not eat meat. According to Sanhedrin 59b: "Adam was not permitted meat for purposes of eating."
According to the legends of Genesis:
And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. ... (Genesis 1:29 f.) ...
The Jewish literature on vegetarianism is enormous, fascinating, and a door to many other aspects of Judaism and ancient history in general. ...
The word "Adam" in Hebrew may derive from the word "adamah," a feminine noun which means "earth." I hypothesize that there had been a matristic version of this legend, before the patriarchal invasions, in which the hero of the story was Adamah, a woman. I hypothesize that the patriarchal editors put Adamah through a historical "sex change operation." ... According to Theodore Reik, the predecessors of the Hebrews worshiped a female goddess. (Pagan Rites in Judaism, p. 100.)
I suggest that the old teachings from the matristic, partnership era survived by being grafted into legends from the father side. The religion of priests and priestesses was replaced by a religion of priests only. The gender of god was changed from female to male, from a goddess of ethics, law, and medicine into a god of war, conquest, and ethnic cleansing. ...
I suggest, however, that the goddess side of the pre-Hebrew religion survived and gradually reasserted itself in Judaism, which by the time of the Prophets had become a progressive, philosophical religion that stressed high ethical standards. ...The goddess side was strong in early Judeo-Christianity and Gnostic Christianity.