A hungry man is an angry man.

Proverb

Have you noticed, that vegans and vegetarians are always hungry? Have you also noticed, that they are always in a perpetual state of indignation and anger?

Our bodies are fantastic machines, and they produce instincts in reaction to stimuli - some of which we have learned to repress. Our craving for chocolates and/or something sweet is partly from our natural urge to diversify our diets to increase our intake of essential vitamins and minerals. In ancient times, after we killed our dinner, we would get our vitamins from fruits and berries. This craving stays with us today.

We also are driven to aggression by the lack of animal protein. You must have noticed that when you eat in a Chinese restaurant, you are hungry two hours or so later? This is due to the large amount of vegetables and small amount of meat. (This was more true in the old days of reasonable portions!)

Vegetarians are always hungry. Those of you who have vegetarian friends, can attest to this.

Just like the animals of the savannah, the lions can lie about relaxing between high protein kills, while the antelope and vegetarian animals must nervously eat and eat and eat the whole day long in order to get enough food. They too, are always hungry. They too are angry. In fact, the most dangerous animal in Africa is not the lion, but the vegetarian hippo.

As Jared Diamond said in his "The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee":

That transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is generally considered a decisive step in our progress, when we at last acquired the stable food supply and leisure time prerequisite to the great accomplishments of modern civilization. In fact, careful examination of that transition suggests another conclusion: for most people the transition brought infectious diseases, malnutrition, and a shorter lifespan. For human society in general it worsened the relative lot of women and introduced class-based inequality. More than any other milestone along the path from chimpanzeehood to humanity, agriculture inextricably combines causes of our rise and our fall...

...recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step towards a better life, was actually a milestone for the worse as well as for the better. With agriculture came not only greatly increased food production and food storage, but also the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse modern human existence.

Small and mean!

Many modern cases illustrate how improved childhood nutrition leads to taller adults: for instance, we stoop to pass through doorways of medieval castles built for a shorter, malnourished population. Paleopathologists studying ancient skeletons from Greece and Turkey found a striking parallel. The average height of hunter-gatherers in that region towards the end of the Ice Age was a generous 5 foot 10 inches for men, 5 foot 6 inches for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, reaching by 4000 BC a low value of only 5 foot 3 inches for men, 5 foot 1 inch for women. By classical times, heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the heights of their healthy hunter-gatherer ancestors. (Source: Jared Diamond - ibid)

It is no coincidence that the modern era of warfare began about the same time. Farmers were constantly in need of land - which had to be taken away from the hunter/gatherers.

Anthropologists know...

Anthropologists have long known that vegetarian tribes, while smaller in stature than omnivorous tribes, are far more dangerous and war like. They are also more territorial.

When our body needs food, it indicates this to us with the feeling of hunger. But there are also other signals if specific nutrients are deficient. Meat is the best source of several nutrients. When our bodies are deficient in these, we become irritable and aggressive. This is a perfectly natural signal built into our genetic make-up over our evolution: our bodies are telling us to go out and kill something to eat. This is why strict vegetarians tend to be so vociferous. It is a trait that was recognised long ago; it was, after all, the vegetarian Cain who killed the carnivorous Abel, not the other way round. The vegan Kikuyu tribe in Kenya were the perpetrators of the murderous Mau Mau in the 1950s, not their wholly carnivorous, but peaceful, neighbours, the Maasai.

Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities and the dawn of the age of large-scale warfare.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the Ice Age, bands had to 'choose', whether consciously or unconsciously, between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps towards agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands adopted the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because ten malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It is not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except ones that farmers did not want. Modern hunter-gatherers persisted only in scattered areas useless for agriculture, such as the Arctic, deserts, and some rainforests.