From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Mon May 13 2002 - 09:14:59 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> > Brian D Williams wrote:
> >>>
> >>This was largely guarenteed by the conditions of the show,
> >>specifically the no hunting clause. Vegans wouldn't have lasted
> >>long.
> >>
> >
>
> Uh, how do you explain that the large and relatively primitive
> populuations have been and are largely vegetarian? I don't
> understand why people feel the need to take occassional pokes at
> folks who don't eat meat. You can live just fine off of nothing
> but a good vegetable garden and a bit of flax-seed oil now and
> then for B-12. Not exactly hard to do out in the woods.
This is absolute rubbish. Name one 'relatively primitive' population
that is vegetarian exclusively. While it may be easier to do so in a
warmer climate, it is absolutly impossible to do in any climate with an
appreciable winter, and the further to the poles you go, the more
carnivorous cultures seem to be. An exclusively vegan diet does not give
a person the energy they require to perform the exhausting labor that
primitive cultures require to build and maintain shelter, food gathering
and processing, and sanitary conditions.
In the Frontier House show, the most glaring omission by all of the
families was their lack of woodcutting they had prepared. It was
estimated that they were on average 90% short of the firewood they'd
need to get through the winter. What this means is that the families
were all guarranteed to freeze to death in the middle of winter, no
matter how much food and hay they had stored up. A primitive, poorly
insulated shelter like the cabins in the show would require between 4-10
cord of wood a winter to heat, at a minimum, assuming they had a cast
iron stove technology. An open fire or fireplace technology would
require three to seven times more wood to maintain through the same
period.
To cut this amount of wood requires not just immense stores of energy
food (carbohydrates or fats) but also proteins to maintain the muscle
needed to do the work.
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