Jay Bost
New york

It’s no secret that I am a vigorous and unapologetic carnivore. After visiting a farm and saw its operation, I’ve decided to weigh in on a subject I’ve been thinking about for years: why it is OK for me to eat another sentient creature.
This I believe: to eat humanely raised and slaughtered animals is not only ethical, it’s important to our humanity.
I don’t argue against vegetarianism, and do believe that our diets should be composed mainly of plants, as someone rightly simplifies it. I don’t believe anyone has the right to tell anyone else what they’re allowed to eat. I believe veganism as practiced by most is sanctimonious at best, and at worst harmful arrogance.
What I can say for veganism is that it’s a superlative weight-loss strategy.
As the Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues in his bookCatching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, the cooking of food may well have been the mechanism that tripped our ancient genes into our current human ones. He suggests convincingly that consuming calorie-dense food (attainable only by cooking it) grew our brains, gave our ancestors the health needed to spread their genes, and socialised us (cooking food required cooperation, which led to small societies that could organise and protect themselves). Meat was a main source.

n Jay Bost is a self-professed meat lover.
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