**26. Metabolic rifts**

Local farming "100-Mile Diets" (as was normal until recently) and less deforestation or loss of mangrove swamps and less mono-cropping and better ground cover (absorbing CO2) and care of the soil reducing desertification and dustbowls with less artificial fertilisers and lower transportation needs will help. Humus and the soil are both chemical and biological systems (Darwin's worms (1881) and their microbiome) with complex interactions. Losing the "commons" pastureland caused issues from the original metabolic rift between humans, animals and nature, as proposed by Rousseau and Marx, such that manure or compost does not get returned to the soil through to modern views on the circular biomimicking economy [68, 238, 282, 283]. Even losing the right to produce your own natural greenhouse gas emissions is part of a multiple "Enclosure" movement making everything a commodity that is entrusted and traded for a profit in the market but not returning proceeds to the underpaid whose diet then loses out [284, 285]. A symptom of capitalism is that food chain workers on the land are in the frontline at food banks. Significant "*Schumacherian Small is Beautiful*" locavore counter-movements emanate from community peasant farmers, such as "La Via Campesina", "Seikatsu" (allotments and "Dig for Victory" in WW2 that included chickens and pigs), with experiments in countries such as Cuba and slow food movements although they rarely major on meat and milk [286, 287]. Gardeners and horticulturalists and not only industrial farmers, have much to learn about sustainability tailored to the local landscape desperately poor farmers will mine their land for survival (and pastoralists invented zero-grazing stall fed cattle), as often as capitalists in tendencies that date back to the bronze age as first noted by Xenophon in the fourth century BC [288].

A return to universal common arcadian pastureland is too big a Utopian ask but the idea of "Sitopias" with a "Humanomics" and restraints on the "invisible hand" with a "doughnut" economy allowing meat for all in a resilient panarchy - meat for the rich is subsidised - is on the cards and is not a zero-sum game reducing many of the current risks to ourselves and to the planet [289, 290].

#### **27. Mayday: wars and pandemics?**

*"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"* was the socially sustainable message from president J.F. Kennedy's inaugural back in 1961. The alternative of an increasingly unequal world and further geographies of poverty with new class structures and aggrandizers as global warning damages many agricultural systems would create a vicious cycle of biodiversity loss, even our "good-selves" [291–293]. Stressing of the meat supply risks emergent zoonoses - and war [294–296]. Dyer (2021) writing on wars from resource stress points out that primate and human rustling and outright wars, from the fierce Yanomamo on, were often over meat [297]. Livestock raiding may be a rite of passage for some but easily escalates to predatory raiding and has a lethal synergy with oil interests that can lead to geopolitical conflicts.

Revolutions and wars were often triggered by an excess of an elite class colluding with the hungry poor. Aggressors cottoned on to the value of starving their

*Meat and Vitamin B3: Getting a Grip on Engel's Curve DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100056*

opponents in the American Civil war and World Wars - whose original purpose (like all empires as noted by Sophocles) was to gain pastureland ("Lebenstraum"). (Napoleon's earlier serial mistakes had been sending grain to Britain thinking that the gold spent would be more destructive, then ignoring his own supply lines in Russia and again in the Haitian revolution of the enslaved [123]). Civil wars are vicious often starving opponents as is being seen now in South African insurrections that bring access to food to its knees with child support coming nowhere close to satisfying – and tragically not representing the ideals of Mandela [298]. Despite somewhat different histories this Anglo-Dutch colony (note the extraordinary cattle-killing episode of 1857) and the American issues south of the Mason-Dixon line, including the Caribbean and down to the Rio de la Plata, are the hard core of white supremacy and both being prone to pellagra are key to our argument – as is also supported by the Australian experience [299].

Worse could come with a dystopia of climate change with droughts or floods affecting global food production first in the southern tropics and subtropics (often affecting pastoralist first who have to move), and triggering forcible attempts to break down walls (the fall of the Berlin Wall was triggered by meat queues and "solidarity" revolts), constructed as enclosures of rich gated communities protecting their own food supplies, is not too hard to imagine [300]. The end of the Cold War changed the political worry to migration and "the Coming Anarchy" from movements from low meat zones (as has been the case for all major human migrations from "Out of Africa" on) with terrorists joining up for remuneration as much as religious fervour to feed their families [40]. Water shortages have led to migrations but cooperation between states have often mitigated friction so far but remains a danger - the same might happen if meat was equilibrated increasing resilience [301, 302]. Wars and even "wars" against pathogens, often blamed on foreigners fueling xenophobia, is not an answer [303]. Relying on vaccines does not address the underlying driver but a more ecological and veterinary "One Health" approach with an emancipated public health concentrating on natural resistance from a good diet and safer sources avoids "Red Queen" evolutionary dynamics - or microbes will indeed have the last say [304, 305].

#### **28. Conclusion**

What we have tried to demonstrate is that, despite the importance of meat in our evolution and sharing of meat during our long less hierarchal hunter-gatherer phase, since recorded history began getting a grip on Engel's curve has been rigged for any but the rich and this mismatch has caused much inequality, disease, poor demographics and friction. Border wars and pandemics [306] would be a tragic own goal for rich and poor alike, given the political and societal impacts, if we cannot develop a new concept of the world from "emancipatory catastrophes" and cafeterias for all, not banquets for the few [40, 307]. These natural experiments and lived experiences aggregate evidence and by appreciating our "Bayesian" priors and precarity of the poor (all precarious), we can plan better for the future. Covid gives a current example of the poor being put at risk of late onset ailments from commercial 'bliss points' that then become risk factors as well as the hunt for meat leading to unsafe farming practices allowing microbes to jump species (as also happened with the bovine and human prion disease epidemic). We have been mean, sometimes inadvertently, about recreating our ancestral meat commons and stunting others lives in order to be in charge then racialising conduct and cognition. Not thinking like a "species being", but as classes or nations, puts our own species under threat let alone endangering many other species with extinction [308]. As Lewis Carrol said (in Through the Looking Glass, 1872) *"the question is, said Humpty Dumpty, who* 

*is to be master- that's all"*. Being more generous is to be more masterful over the longer term and more "Nordic" [309] and as with ancient potlatches would avoid the dangers of surplus wealth in general, let alone the specific dangers of meat and nicotinamide overload, as money has to be spent somehow often propping up the "rentier" class or in dangerous arms races or housing or stock market bubbles bailed out by governments at the expense of the poor, as pointed out by Bataille (1949) [218, 310]. Only a proportion of capital is spent in useful reinvestment, research and development but is hoarded by the 1% [311] or as Galbraith said earlier *"beyond doubt wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding"* echoing long held biblical concerns about 'Mammon' and 'Paradise Lost'. A more anthropological vision of the world that questions the least questioned assumptions, as Paul Broca (a 19thC neurologist) suggested, would accept the lifetime importance of a good diet, with nicotinamide pathways as the "secret sauce" rather than carrying on with the disadvantaged "left behind" being subject to the most unlikely explanations for their plight and discrimination and snobbery from the elites - that wastes so much human talent and could cancel race matters that already are not an issue amongst well fed well educated elites [277, 312].
