Innate cravings and lactose digestion. (Letters From Our Readers).

Bravo on your latest issue. It's about time animal rights and environmental issues were debated. However, I disagree with Lester Brown. He says the fact that people start to eat meat as soon as they can afford to proves that "the taste for meat is probably an innate appetite." As soon as people can afford it, they build large houses and buy expensive cars. Is there an innate appetite for these?

There is "an innate appetite" for goods that suggest status, and meat more often than not suggests status. There may have been a reason in the hunter-gatherer (or gatherer-hunter) stage of human evolution to eat meat, but we know very little about this stage and the diets of that time period. We do know, however, that they were nomads who burned their meat. Today, meat burns us. Our "innate appetite for meat" is now as anachronistic as our "innate appetite for violence." We can't afford either.

Roberta Kalechofsky
Marblehead, MA

While I commend you for the excellent coverage on the implications of meat, egg and dairy consumption, I found your discussion of the rates of lactose intolerance misleading. In "Body Of Evidence," Sally Deneen writes, "Three out of 10 adults are lactose intolerant." While this is true if the focus is only North America, we need to look at the bigger picture. In fact, the majority of the world's people, approximately seven out of 10, are unable to digest the sugar in cow's milk.

It is inappropriate to discuss lactose intolerance based on a western, predominantly Caucasian standard because it imposes on Asians, Africans and Aboriginals a diet that contributes to disease that these groups have been protected from for most of their existence. When they immigrate to North America and adopt our lifestyle, they begin to suffer from the rates of heart disease, cancer and stroke that have become our norm. We would benefit from omitting dairy products even though most North Americans can consume them.

Michael Manchester
Aylmer, ON, Canada