A nutrition “rich in red meat, dairy products, processed and artificially sweetened foods, and salt, with minimal intake of fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes, and whole grains” is the definition of Western Pattern Diet. Although you could already feel sick by reading this definition, I get often told that what humans should eat and would be adapted to eat is this type of nutrition. I searched for a name for this type of diet and found that the Wikipedia gives Western Pattern Diet as the official name of this kind of nutrition. Most people don’t know the name of this diet, but simply want to say something opposing when they hear that I’m a vegetarian. Advocating for a diet known for causing many diseases isn’t convincing, so such people add two arguments. One is that predators would feed on animals too, so this must be the natural diet for all those, who don’t want to be prey. The other is that humans would since millennia consume these same products.

I’m somehow sure that I already published an article on this blog explaining why the reply to these two sentences must be longer than two sentences. But I can’t find this article anymore. The reason is known as Brandolini’s law. Perhaps I come back to the arguments, but in this article I only want to tell an anecdote.

I once watched a documentary about a guy, who works as an interpreter or translator at a South African court. I watched that because I’m aware that different languages don’t consist of different words, but of different concepts! So I was interested in whether a court is able to understand that. The interpreter knew very well that jurisdiction is part of a culture. He also knew that the people, who speak different languages in South Africa belong to different cultures. South Africa acknowledges seventeen official languages! The translator had not only to translate, but often to interpret legal terms for the people, who had to appear in the court. The interpreter sometimes had also to inform the judge that a certain concept is impossible to understand for the people because it isn’t part of their culture. So South Africa has some difficulties with the implementation of its legal system. But something completely different caught my attention and is of interest here.

The interpreter spoke with the journalists while he had a lunch break together with his colleagues. They ate bowels. The interpreter knew the cultures outside of Africa too. So he immediately began to explain to the journalists that South Africans eat bowels and don’t waste parts of animals. Only North Americans and Europeans take only a few parts from their slaughtered livestock and export the remains to China and Africa. So the nutrition of meat-eaters in the First World is completely different from the nutrition of meat-eaters in all other parts of the world!