it’s about the scale at which these items are consumed - eating meat every day was pretty much unheard of until the advent of capitalism
If I were to be fair then my answer would be neither as I don’t believe capitalism is forcing us to consume meat and there was methods to conserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration was a thing.
I guess meat can be healthy. What certainly isn’t healthy is highly processed meat like burgers, hot dogs and deep fried turkey
capitalism has led to never before seen economies of scale, allowing for dirt cheap food prices never before seen in history. if we were to look at capitalism through that metric and that metric only then it would be wildly popular…
Fresh or preserved (salted or dried) meat has existed as long as people have paid for them. Even ice was used for a while prior to refrigeration.
Both. Refrigeration is what allows us to store and (I would argue more importantly) transport large amounts of meat, and is as such essential to the industry. However, Capitalism is also key to the meat industry because its lobbyists constantly push for meat subsidies, which is the main reason meat is cheap enough to be something we have every meal instead of once every couple of days.
*until the advent of mechanized agriculture and fertilizers, which allowed feeding large amounts of livestock in capitalist and communist countries alike
communism requires capitalism to exist … at its invention, capitalism was the cutting edge that allowed massive economies to form. free market capitalism allowed the creation of extremely complex and vast logistical networks that did not exist prior.
this is not some sort of “capitalism vs communism” thing. this is saying that capitalism was miles more efficient and liberating than anything that came before it. inshallah whatever comes after it will continue the trend
In some circumstances you’re absolutely right. In many parts of the word, meat was either scarce or difficult to preserve. In other parts of the word, some peoples survived almost exclusively on animal products. The natives on Alaska are the first that come to mind.
Of course “meat” was a very important part of their diet, they relied heavily on organ meats for their essential vitamins and nutrients. They were significantly more humane and less wasteful than we are today.
But they were also out and about hunting that stuff for days. Unlike average Joe American who never moves more than from bed to garage and from the parking lot to his office chair in a day.
Nobody ate meat before very recently. And cheese was not your typical daily treat. Remembers it takes a long time to produce
But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.
And if you go back even more when humans were still “wild” meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.
Huh? Humans evolved in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Before the advent of farming, it was impossible to get sufficient calories for a tribe or village without hunting and bringing down big animals on a regular basis. Meat was quite literally the “meat” of human diet for most of history.
After the advent of farming, you could pack a lot of calories with things like breads, for when you didn’t have meat (or in early civilization) when the rich folks got the meat.
As for cheese, it really doesn’t take that long to produce unless you’re talking about aged cheese… But that’s a different topic (and both aged/fresh have different health benefits)
So if I come from a lineage of smokers it means smoking is healthy? I take your word for it, science man.
