If we were meant to be vegetarians we would have barrel-like guts in similar style to the gorilla; and our present susceptibility to diabetes would not be the same.

Tony McMichael puts the issues of human diet into perspective in Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease.(Cambridge University Press 2001).

For a lot of our generations yet to come we will be stuck with an evolutionary heritage based on about a third each of vegetables, meat, fruit: vegetables pesticide-free, fresh (tubers, leaves, grain); meat au naturelle, sans hormone additive, wild-range grass-fed and lean; fruit fresh in season. An absence of continuous availability - occasional gross-feasting (stranded whale, trapped mammoth?), occasional fasting. Nutritional absorption greatly assisted by adequate exercise, and something which was denied our primate cousins – cooking.

Great oceans of canola, wheat, rice, corn --- in landscapes denuded of natural biodiversity will never overcome the problem of overnumerous humanity. They do no more than defer that problem to the next generation when it will be even more awesome.

Geoff, I'm not disputing the 45 % factory farmed figure, for there
is much intensive production of pigs and chickens going on. I'm
certainly saying that the 8% figure is distorting and wrong. It
has partly to do with they way that they have classified the data.

Dont' forget, nonsense into a computer also means nonsense out the
other end.

If you spend a bit of time tallying up the number of grazing
livestock on the planet, it is enormous. Even just the figures for
Africa. But the data for meat production from these animals is not
recorded anywhere, despite the fact that people slaughter them and
eat them every day. Most of Australia's livestock would not be
included in that 8% figure, nor most of America's cattle, despite the
fact that tens of millions of animals spend most of their time
grazing and are not in intensive systems.

Was bushmeat allowed for? I remind you of the tragedy in Africa,
where shooters follow logging trucks into forests and shoot anything
that moves. If you are interested, do a google search on bushmeat
and you will be shocked. These are unsustainable forms of production,
for species like bonobos, gorillas and chimps are being shot, driving
them to the verge of extinction.

Yes, since the 70s land in Australia has been cleared mainly for
cattle, but most of Australia was cleared a long time before then.
The land that I am on was cleared well over a hundred years ago
with an axe!

Yes, there are are up to a million cattle in feedlots in Australia
at times, where kgs are added and to produce the kind of meat that
customers want, ie grain finished, tender, muscles full of glycogen.

Grassfed beef is also available in stores, its darker, leaner and
cheaper, rated 2nd grade. It is really up to consumers to choose.

I produce lambs and they are often grain fed in small paddocks for
the last couple of weeks, so they eat a mix of pasture and natural
grains. But the system is still a free range, pasture-based-system.

yabby [have you heard of sprouted seeds as feed for stock?]
its vagly mentioned here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fodder

cant find the origonal article [a dude from toowoomba sells the sprouted grain for around 15 cents a kilo ,compared to arround 50 cent for just the grain

thing is there are divergent husbandry teqniques that vegetariona [vegans] have no intrest in dis-cussing

as your post pointed out we get our protein via many divergent production teqniques ,

anyhow i added the link
[sorry a link]

cheers

came acxross a link
[re the stock food]
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=f4jKHzsa5kw

also come across this one
http://www.prisonplanet.com/austrian-government-study-confirms-genetically-modified-gm-crops-threaten-human-fertility-and-health-safety.html

not sure gm corn would 'hatch'
but its worth vegans noting this gm infertility link

lest we forget that aids came from live monkey virus serun via VACINATION's to prevent polio pumped into africans [as well as the lesser known northern release into gay black people]