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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t too long ago that Europeans were mostly peasants working the fields, including my ancestors. They rarely ate meat and if they did it would be on a holiday or very special occasion. Killing a chicken means you can’t get eggs and it’s the same for milk producing animals like goats, sheep, or cattle. Not to mention you couldn’t hunt on the lords land. I’d say it’s been less than 200 years since Europeans could afford to eat meat.

The article is comparing Indian food to food that was only eaten by the European elite. I don’t think it’s an apples to apples comparison. It does give us a history of western food as we eat it today. Lots of good food history comes from the haute cuisine of the 1700s to early 1900s.

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You're thinking in hundreds of years, while I'm talking in the tens of thousands of years.

We know that neanderthals ate a diet that consisted of 80% or more meat, while humans had a much more varied diet. We also know that neanderthals did contribute to European human DNA. A genetic affinity toward the taste of meat it certainly a reasonable thesis.

Tens of thousands of years? Give us proof that even 200 years ago Europeans ate more meat than Asians as you claim.

I'm not going to wade into this petty European vs Asian pissing contest but I'll offer that there was plenty of meat in the Viking diet (roughly 700-1100).

The difference is that Asia has had intense centralized agricultural economies for something like 6,000+ years while (north/west) Europe was primarily pastoral until around the Roman empire.

Agriculture spread throughout Europe during the Neolithic, like the rest of the Mediterranean basin (and possibly towards India), and brought along massive deforestation and demographic growth. Those were deeply agriculture-centric societies far before the Indo-Europeans came around, not even mentioning Romans.

And in what parallel universe agriculture was centralized in Asia in 4000 BC ?

The big advantage of Asia was double or even triple crops.

It took a long time for agriculture to spread. Crops that work in a Mediterranean climate do not work in Northern Europe. You have to breed new varieties. That can take hundreds to thousands of years. Heck, it’s still hard to grow certain kinds of fruit up here in the rainy parts of Oregon and we know how genetics and inheritance work.

and it wasn't too long before that when we hunted the megafauna out of existence... probably took us a while, too. Orders of magnitude more time than the duration of agriculture.

When they talk about rich meaty Indian curries, that was the food of the elite as well.

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