Feeding Humans: Animals or Plants?

Now I want to start with the elephant in the room. Humans can obviously eat plants, sort of... and we'll touch on that later, but humans have included plants in their cuisine all over the world for quite some time and have lived to tell the tale. However, just because we can eat something, doesn't mean we should. Just because we CAN eat 10 twinkies in one sitting, certainly does not mean that we should, as an extreme example. Have you ever wondered why you need survival training if you were to get lost in a rainforest, or on a hike in the remote mountains? Or why you need to google if you can treat your dog to a few grapes, or if you can give your cat white lilies for valentine's day? The short answer is quite simple. That's because plants can outright kill us. Just how a few grapes can shut down a dog's kidneys, or a few petals of a lily flower can kill a cat, there are tens of thousands of plants that can kill humans, if ingested, even in small amounts. In fact, there are thousands of plants that can be fatal just by being unfortunate enough to experience the beauty of nature's covert weaponry in person.

There is currently an estimated 369,000 known plant species on the planet, and out of all of them, less than .02% have been historically cultivated for human consumption. And, today, only about 150-200 plant species are actively cultivated on a large scale for through agricultural food production.

Even worse, a mere 12 plant species provide about 75% of the world's plant-based food supply, with rice, wheat, and corn alone contributing to over 50% of global calorie intake. Now rice, bread, and tortillas might be keeping our global population up and running, but why only 12 plants? There are more than 12 breeds of chickens. Well that's because over 80% of those 369,000 plant species are toxic to humans. Between 70,000-100,000 of those plant species are harmful, even in small amounts, or just from prolonged exposure. However, animals on the other hand, by stark contrast, are quite literally the opposite. There are over 8 million animal species by all accounts, if you include every single organism on the planet, but only around 1.2 million that have been scientifically described, and only really around 200,000 of animal species (vertebrates, crustaceans, mollusks) you would actually include in the conversation regarding food. Out of those 1.2 million, around 150,000 are toxic to humans, around 12-15%. And of those that are toxic, less than 1,000 are deadly when consumed in small amounts. When it comes to the 200,000 standard animal species as a potential food source, humans consume over 15,000 species, globally. That is 75 times more than choice plant agriculture. Why, you ask? Well because animal species are much easier to eat, much more bioavailable, and much less toxic.

Over the past millennia, humans have undergone trial and error in their food, developing one of the most sophisticated and advanced microbiomes of any animal on planet earth. Humans have eaten everything that they could get their hands on, and have come to the conclusion that we'll eat around 200 plants, and over 15,000 animals. And if push came to shove, if starved, you have about a 20% chance of survival eating random plant species, and an 85% chance of survival eating random animal species. So although humans can eat plants, there is an enormous amount of data that suggests we probably shouldn't. Human history has certainly echoed this sentiment just in our own agricultural endeavors. But that isn't what we are normally taught, is it? This is the first step into the Carnivore Mode of mind. Why weren't we taught any of the above? Why is that information not readily available? Food for thought.