“Ancestral” Ways and Plant Based Diets

Originally written on November 21st, 2025.

Edited on May 12th, 2026.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about meat based diets. Naturally of course, for I am a dietitian. We’re supposed to only ever think about diets. That’s our cross to bear. Kidding, of course.

But, I have spent a lot of time thinking about diet composition and also a lot of time on Instagram doing my best to bother the liver king before I made a grand exodus from social media, and before he was scandalized by the revelation of his nearly $30,000 monthly steroid budget. 

Anyway, that's not the point, is it? It can't be.

It kind of is. He preached, as do so many other gym-bro, manosphere influencers, that meat based diets are critical for health and well being and that we would all be better served by “returning to our ancestral ways of living.” This usually reads like a montage of not showering, eating raw meat, lifting weights, and pretending to hunt things, yet for some reason doing so with modern military grade weaponry. Really cool guys. This doesn’t feel like confused cosplay at all. 

But, what if we just blindly accept their premise, made more coherent by yours truly, that it would simply be better to eat and live as we evolved to do rather than  to eat and live as capitalism and modernism have made inevitable. That is the grander point that they’re trying to get at. Oftentimes they’re also obsessed with capitalism. Their ideology is incoherent. It’s frustrating. But that’s what happens when your world view is born from cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, if we blindly accept the premise, then let's accept the logical realities implied by that statement.

And let’s go point by point. Let’s keep this simple. 

In a world before capitalism, as our ancestors would have known, we would not have access to unlimited meat, eggs, milk, etc.

We were first hunter-gatherers. Across locations and cultures, successful hunts would have been celebrated.

Hunting was hard, demanding, and not guaranteed to be successful. People hunted in packs, not alone.

A kill was shared by a people. Meat was not simply immediately consumed. It served roles in cultural traditions. All parts of an animal were used for a purpose. Bladders made great containers for liquid. Tendons were the closest thing to wire you could find. Hunter-gathers didn’t simply butcher an animal and grill 32 oz t-bones steaks for the men.

Tools were rudimentary. You would have had to be close to kill an animal. You would have had to fight and coordinate with other people.

Which means, meat would have been a celebrated yet small portion of overall dietary intake.

People would have roamed. Later, they would have been less nomadic, but still would have primarily consumed, gathered and foraged their foods: fruits, roots, fungi, tubers, flowers, etc.

We then became agrarian: farmers.

We learned to domesticate the land and opportunistic animals.

This means that, again, meat would have been a celebrated yet small portion of dietary intake.

We would not have had the space, money, or technology to quickly, on a large scale, breed muscle dense cattle for early slaughter. This is the result of capitalism. This is industrialization. This is mass production as a model and a theory.

A family and/or a farm would have had a small number of animals, a grain crop, and likely some hearty vegetable crop. Corn, beans, squash in the Americas, as example. 

Nearly all peoples cultivated a grain crop and relied on cooked forms of that crop. Everyone invented bread. Loaves, na’an, tortillas, you name it. Everyone came up with bread. 

Nearly all peoples relied on that grain crop, a legume, squash and gourds, root vegetables, [easily stored long term], and animal products [milk, cheese, eggs, etc.]

Their animals would need to last them years and be capable of providing off-spring. 

Meat would have only been consumed at the natural end of the life of an animal. Making it, again, a celebrated part of cuisine, but not a staple, and not a regular experience.

Wealth chooses the hard behavior or identity to attain. That is its signal of status.

Wealth would have meant you could afford so much livestock that you could kill one daily, weekly, monthly, etc. You could kill one without having extracted its whole value. Eating meat daily was a sign of wealth, of power, of ownership, status.

Same with our body ideals. The hard ones to attain became the ones that the rich pursued. Only money, time, and resources afforded them. That's a fun parallel tangent, huh?

Anyway, those staples (beans, grains, root vegetables, legumes) became associated with poverty.

Capitalism opened an always growing divide between people who have and those who have not.

And we have chosen our behaviors solely based on our (capitalist, consumerist) desire to get close to the ones who have, so we signal through our behavior that we belong in this class. And we signal through our behavior that we do not belong with those below us. 

That is the Western Way. Through consumerism, you climb the ladder. Through outward displays, you climb the ladder. 

Same goes for toys, clothes, furniture, everything. 

In the past, our ancestors would have built it to last, fixed it when it broke, handed it down, cherished it, loved it, admired it, shared it.

No more.

Do we really want to get back to our ancestral ways? I think, in a way, yes. With modern safety and comfort. But we need to be realistic about what our “ancestral ways” actually were.

Eating nothing but meat, uncooked, for 3-5 meals per day is simply not what anyone's ancestors at any cultural moment would have been doing. 

Because of what I just laid out, because of how I think about this reality, I have grown and evolved in my own dietary choices.

I am a vegetarian. I am uncomfortable with the idea of something being killed so that I can enjoy a taste sensation, when I am at no risk of starvation or underconsumption of food, and I can enjoy equivalent sensations through foods that require no blood to be shed.

In the same line, I am not horrified or appalled by the consumption of animal products, of milk, of cheese, of eggs. I am, however, still horrified by the treatment of the animals that produce these products in an industrialized, factory farm setting. 

So, forever I will remain a vegetarian. 

And forever I will feel an honest sense of sorrow for people who place their entire identity into the idea of eating meat constantly. And I will do anything in my power to never have to share a toilet with them.

Anyway, that's what I’m thinking about.

Leave a comment. Let's have a conversation.