[qiskit]

> We don't need meat.

We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential.

Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat.

Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.

[merry_flame]

Pure Meiji anti-Buddhist propaganda. Read up.

[qiskit]

The idea was pushed by the buddhist leadership of a buddhist country - Japan. Can't claim it was anti-buddhist when buddhists were behind it. It wasn't anti-buddhist, it was anti suboptimal diet.

It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.

[merry_flame]

Meiji leadership Buddhist? You seriously need to remove your blinkers. The "Meiji Buddhist Reform" was sweeping and extremely violent and 40,000 Buddhist temples were lost to riots or repression over the period. The new syncretic state-sponsored religion of Shinto was made to replace Buddhist and cut Japan from its Chinese cultural ties and demonstrate to the West that Japan could belong to their club.

Eating mostly polished rice or wheat is not optimal from a health perspective, so quite logically people transitioned from eating miserly diets to eating enough they started becoming taller, etc. That has very little to do with the meat itself and much more with the fact that people would previously mostly eat enough carbs to get by and children would never receive the best share in nutritional terms. Solve that and you probably can explain almost all of that effect. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... gives some insight on how primitive prescriptive dietary approaches were around the Meiji period. You can see the same magical thinking around the power of rice and meat in contemporary Madagascar and it's not pretty.