We've always eaten meat, isn't it natural and traditional?

The objection

“Eating meat is woven through human history. It sustained our ancestors, shaped cuisines and festivals, and is part of nearly every culture on Earth. It’s both traditional and natural, a practice this deep and this old can’t simply be wrong.”

The answer

There’s something real to honour here. Meat genuinely helped our ancestors survive, and food carries irreplaceable cultural memory. But the objection makes two distinct claims, that the practice is old and that it is natural, and neither does the work being asked of it.

Take tradition first. Age is not innocence. Some of the practices humanity sustained longest are the ones we are proudest to have ended. Slavery is ancient. The subjugation of women is ancient. “We have always done this” was the defence offered for each, and in each case it failed once we recognised that how long a harm has continued says nothing about whether it’s justified. A wrong does not mature into a right by repetition.

Now naturalness. Even if eating meat were perfectly natural, that settles nothing. Disease is natural. Infant mortality is natural. Much of civilisation consists of deliberately overriding what is natural in favour of what is good. The word “natural” describes the world. It doesn’t bless it.

And here the two defences fold into one, because the thing that justified meat for our ancestors was necessity, and necessity is exactly what we no longer have. They ate animals to survive. We can be fully nourished without them [1], and the meat being defended even carries documented health risks of its own [2]. Subtract survival and what remains is habit, not tradition or nature. Of all the ancient and natural things our ancestors did, we kept some and let others go the moment we saw they caused needless suffering. This one has earned no special exemption.