WTF Files: Sam Neill says "Red Meat- We were meant to eat it"

Kind of creeps me out actually, though I've been creeped out by him ever since my guy friends made me watch Event Horizon. Dudes, that movie is not a "so good its bad" movie like Planet 9 From Outer Space. It's just bad.

Anyway, while most people who have studied basic anthropology and don't live in veggie fantasy land already knew that meat was the fuel for the evolution of our rather powerful brains, an NPR story about this has been makng the rounds lately.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

That is until some apes figured out how to get more meaty energy, probably by cracking open large scavenged animal bones with large stones. Once we figured out how to hunt meat more efficiently and how to cook it, then the brain party really got started. That's probably why most hunter-gatherer cultures do cook- a preparation method that increases the number of usable calories in food is obviously going to become popular pretty quickly.

The writer has a steak, while Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist who wrote a book on the importance of cooking, settles for some mango and potatoes. An interesting choice— perhaps he is doing a meat-free paleoesque diet. It would be interesting to know why he chose such a diet, but either way I'd rather see veg*ns chose whole produce than whole grain wheatie sugar crap.