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[Neonivek]

"Blue"? Ohh I thought it was called "Blue Rare" but I guess I am mistaken.

[JoshuaFH]

Oh hey:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak#Degree_of_cooking

You're right. I never eat the stuff though, Medium well done all the way!

[Osmosis Jones]

I can't eat steak past medium these days, and usually go for medium rare. Incidentally, if you guys ever order kangaroo steak, you have to eat it rare/medium-rare. Roo goes very tough, very fast, and the only way to take it further is to slow roast it.

[Neonivek]

What about Tenderising the Roo steak?

[Osmosis Jones]

Marinating helps a bit (you can push it up to about a medium), but I can't say I've tried tenderising roo steak (I don't have one of those awesome little hammers ).

[Neonivek]

The Hammers make it easier but I think you could use just about anything to do it.

Also I love Marinated steak. I don't know why this one person thinks it means your being cheap... I love marinated steak.

[Zironic]

I am are vegetarior!

I don't think it's cruel or anything, I just hate it.  I hate the meaty taste of meat, I hate the stringy texture of muscle, I hate the spicy taste of chicken, and above all I hate the aftertaste of pork that I can taste for hours.  Hate.

This is every reason why I like meat. It took me a while before after getting used to meat to get used to fish. It's a much different type of meat. Almost a non-meat.

[Cthulhu]

I can eat fish, but it's not my favorite.

[Luke_Prowler]

Holy mother of god, do I love meat. Pork, beef, chicken, fish, I eat that shit like it's no one business. Sausage, burger, stakes, roasts, bacon, OM NOM NOM. And it's not just the meat, but I love fruit and vegetables too. even without the melted cheese (although it does help sometime).

I guess I'm just an extreme omnivore

And my opinion on vegetarians: I have nothing bad against them, but humans were not evolved to only eat plants.

[Reasonableman]

Here is what you do:

You take tenderloin.
You wrap uncooked bacon around it and pin it with toothpicks.
Torch that sucker on the grill. Like, completely. 'Till it's difficult to distinguish from a charcoal briquette.
Remove toothpicks to prevent a horrible, terrible, accidental tracheotomy.
Shove meat (well carbon probably by this point) in face.

Sweet, bacon-and-beef flavored carbon.

Actually if you do this properly and at a high enough temperature I think you can get the inside to stay relatively juicy while the outside is made into bacon-flavored beef.

[G-Flex]

And my opinion on vegetarians: I have nothing bad against them, but humans were not evolved to only eat plants.

Says who? If humans start eating only plants and it works out for us, then by definition we were.


The "what's natural is natural" argument doesn't exactly work with people, considering that you have to draw the line at some ridiculously arbitrary point, and wherever you draw it probably doesn't take into account things like dietary supplements or processed food or medicine or a zillion other things.

If you want to know what humans have evolved to do, it's using their ingenuity to find whatever they can around them to produce whatever food they need. If you want to use prehistoric man as your model, great. Different people living in different places used wildly different sources of food. You had some dudes fishing, some dudes harvesting plants, some dudes hunting down large game, some dudes hunting down weirdass mushrooms in the forest, etc.

Humans aren't like lions or something, we haven't developed some extremely specific, strict, limited natural diet; we've developed to handle a ridiculous variety of food, and that's what makes figuring out a healthy human diet so difficult.

So really, the question is what's actually, demonstrably good for people. That's the only question that's actually worth asking here. It doesn't matter what people did in prehistoric days, what matters is what's good for us now, as with any other human endeavor, otherwise we wouldn't have gotten anywhere to begin with. There would have been some guy tens of thousands of years ago talking about how we shouldn't be burning our food with fire before eating it because, hey, that's not what we're supposed to do.

[Neruz]

Says who? If humans start eating only plants and it works out for us, then by definition we were.

In a word; No.


The reason we exist as we are today is because we started eating meat. See these toofs? These are omnivore toofs. Anyone who thinks that Humans evolved to be vegitarian needs to look at the third tooth on either side of the upper jaw. See those teeth? They're kinda pointy aren't they, know what they are? Those are Canines, know what they are evolved for? Eating meat. That's what they do; they serve no purpose to a herbivore.


The human body is evolved to eat a mixed diet of flora and fauna, thankfully it's also evolved to eat just about anything and be incredibly resilient by normal standards. Human beings are the Terminators of the animal world; we can eat almost anything and we can keep going for days, and to add to this monsterous body of ours, we have a scary-as-shit brain; a brain which has in fact so far outpaced the body that we are now suffering serious physical problems such as mass obesity due to our body not being able to catch up to our mind.


Our bodies are designed to eat primarily a mixture of red meat, fruits and roots, with some fats and carbohydrates on the side. Our minds are designed to do whatever the fuck they want to do.




It is important to note though that different 'races' of humans, indeed different localities, will have subtly different dietary requirements. Even different individuals will have different dietary requirements; it's one of the downsides to having such a wide diet.

[Eidalac]

I just spent most of the day boiling down bones for stock.


While the average primate eats mostly fruits and such, our ancestry has been omnivorous for a long, long time.  We just couldn't get meat on a regular basis in the past, but we ate what we could get whenever we could get it.

[Neruz]

We couldn't get meat on a regular basis until our African ancestors were forced to hunt to survive due to food shortages.

Ever since then, we've been dining on meats, and our brains have been growing because of it.



Fun fact; the reason Man domesticated Wolves into Dogs is because Wolves are one of the few creatures in the animal kingdom that can keep up with us. A Kalahari Bushman (which is about the closest you'll get to our ancient African ancestors) can (and do, or did, probably still do) walk a gazelle to death. When you're a Human, you don't need spears or sharp sticks, you just need to follow the gazelle, and follow it, keep following it for a few days, eventually it will drop from exhaustion and then you just walk up and slit it's throat; a gazelle is only built for short bursts of speed, 5 - 10 minutes tops (this is due to it being a herbivore interestingly enough), wheras a properly trained and fit man can keep going for days.

Interestingly; we're also one of the few critters in the world that are not breathing restricted when running. Most quadrupedal mammals for example are mechanically restricted by the setup of their bodies to about a 1:1 ratio (one step, one breath), Humans adopt a number of patterns, although the most favoured appears to be 2:1 (two steps, one breath). This flexibility in breathing while moving is another advantage as it turns out, as it grants greater endurance; as we tire we can simply increase our breath ratio, getting more oxygen and going longer. As a gazelle or horse tires, it can't do squat except stop running, we can keep going.



Also; our primate friends will eat meat if they can get it; Chimps will go to rather rediculous lengths to steal baby animals and eat them for example. We just got there first, probably thanks to environmental pressures. And then we killed off or outbred all the others (like the Neanderthals) who tried to follow us.

[G-Flex]

Says who? If humans start eating only plants and it works out for us, then by definition we were.

In a word; No.


The reason we exist as we are today is because we started eating meat. See these toofs? These are omnivore toofs. Anyone who thinks that Humans evolved to be vegitarian needs to look at the third tooth on either side of the upper jaw. See those teeth? They're kinda pointy aren't they, know what they are? Those are Canines, know what they are evolved for? Eating meat. That's what they do; they serve no purpose to a herbivore.

Yes, our ability to eat a variety of food, including meat, has been very important to our survival over the millenia. So of course our teeth are the sort that would be up to the task.

I'm not talking about what we did eat, or what was vital for our survival then. I'm talking about what is or isn't a nutritionally sound diet now, which is a different matter.

Certainly, someone three thousand years ago eating no sort of animal product whatsoever would likely have nutritional deficiencies, especially when it comes to the rare things you can't get except from animal sources, although B12 is the only thing that comes to mind. These days, we have ways around that.


So again, the issue isn't whether or not our bodies are designed to be able to eat meat. Obviously, they are, and it was extremely important for our survival as a species to be able to eat basically anything we came across. That's why humans have great livers, for instance; we have an extremely varied diet, historically.

The issue is whether or not a vegetarian diet is actually workable now, and I have never seen any factual information indicating that it is not. If we only want to speak vegetarian and not vegan, then it's easier to get certain types of protein, as well as B12, from things like dairy and eggs. Vegans have slightly more difficulty because of the B12 thing, but there are supplements for that which aren't animal-sourced. It's also fairly easy these days to make sure that you can get all the amino acids you need from vegetable sources, as well as whichever other nutrients. There's just nothing in particular I can think of that you cannot get from a vegetarian diet.


Again, I'm not doubting that it's a useful thing that humans can eat meat, or saying that we never were meant to in the first place. It's been invaluable to us. I'm just saying that, at least when people can afford to eat a healthy, modern vegetarian diet, it may not actually be necessary.

The argument I'm seeing here is "we need to eat meat because eating meat has been vital to our survival for a long time". This is dodging the question of why it was vital to our survival, which factors cause that, and whether or not those factors still exist and, when they do, whether or not there are other means of satisfying them.