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• Monday, October 22, 2007 11:28 AM

  Reply to LaurieNY

  Hello, Laurie. No, I do not seriously think soybeans and meat are the only foods on the planet that contain protein. (In fact, as an avid baker, I know that the more protein in flour, the more bread-like, or less cake-like, the structure of your baked goods.)

  However, I did use the phrase "complete protein", not protein. What I meant was, from page 70 of Nutrition for Dummies:

  "For example, eggs are 11 percent protein; dry beans, 22 percent. But the proteins in beans do not provide sufficient amounts of all the essential amino acids, so they are not as valuable to human beings."

  Or, from page 72:

  "Nutrition fact #1: Food from animals has complete proteins. Nutrition fact #2: Vegetables, fruits, and grains have incomplete proteins. Nutrition fact #3: Nobody told the soybean."

  There's also a quote from Matt Ridley's Genome that I cannot find right now that basically says humans started eating fish and other animal proteins to support their larger brain sizes.

  So perhaps in my first letter I come off as saying it's impossible to be a healthy vegetarian, (and if you're a vegetarian, perhaps you're somewhat pre-disposed to read my letter that way) but that was unintentional on my part.

  On the other hand, if I came off sounding like I think it's perfectly normal for humans to crave meat as part of their diets, and that it is unrealistic to ask the average person to become a vegetarian, you'd be spot-on.

  When I read articles in Scientific American that discover wolf meat in pre-historic people's stomachs (apologies, again no reference), this comes as no surprise to me. The same way we have to sometimes substitute honey or artificial sweeteners for sugar, or good fats (olive oil) for bad (butter), any realistic dietary solution for the planet is going to have to grapple with the fact that most people like meat, and that from an evolutionary standpoint, this is completely normal.

  PETA telling me to be a vegan is like a bishop telling a teen to abstain from sex rather than using a condom, or like Nancy Regan telling me to "just say no". It's so much more complicated than that.

  Thanks for reading my letter.

  —manniwood Read manniwood's other letters
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