BLEHH x3 rule
also apparently the deer population are going to rapidly fall due to chronic wasting disease because it’s 100% fatal and really spreadable or something
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· in reply to @arrow74@lemmy.zip
There are simply too many people on earth for us all to continue eating the amount of meat we do, this will become more and more apparent as our reliance on crude oil wanes. I also don’t think there is neccesarilly a connection between abundance of food and population size when it comes to societies like they had. I have heard that in some parts their diet was over 90% meat, which was possible because of the way they managed prairie and woodland ecosystems. Its obvious to me that we are going to have to give up factory farming in the next 100 years, and whatever the human population is by then will have to be sustained by practices not rooted in refining crude oil. That means we wont be able to grow corn or soybean monocultures for livestock feed. There is also the physics angle behind all of this which is what makes me believe we could really be eating a decent amount of dear. The ratio of sunlight that gets converted into meat is a lot higher when you have a proper native ecosystem harvesting it and channeling it up the food chain than you achieve when you just grow corn to feed to cows.
Unfortunately the archaeology disagrees with that. You also seem to be making these really broad statements encompassing a variety of cultures over 30,000 years.
The fact is Native American populations exploded and grew in “complexity” with the arrival of domesticated crops such as corn, beans, and squash. That’s when we saw permanent settlements develop across various cultures. Simply put they were able to feed more people and move less because they had more food. You see this pattern repeat over and over as these crops spread across cultures.
There’s a lot to breakdown here. Let’s start with “their” diet. Diets varied wildly culture to culture, region to region, and across time. The diets of the Mississippian culture of the Southeast looked radically different than the diets of the contemporary peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Even looking at contemporary groups in the southeast you see that people on the coast got most of their calories from marine sources, but you go inland and you see a huge increase in the reliance of corn.
The only groups I can think of hitting that 90% number would be the various cultures of the Plains, the Innuit, and mostly every group during the Paleo period (it was the ice age after all pre-domestic crops).
Our food future is local, what meat there will be to eat will have to come from nearby and every neighborhood is gonna have to start growing its own vegetables. I almost definitely underestimate the average appetite for meat. In any case, right now is a great time to shoot a deer or two if you want cheaper meat over the next year.