They are often the source for lots of Asian ingredients in mainland Europe, while I was in the UK we sourced lots of things like umeboshi and miso from Holland; to my surprise being from CA with lots of access to Japanese/Chinese/Korean ingredients I found lots of the Dutch stuff to be really good.
I'm not sure if that has to do their with relationship (and desire for it's food) with Japan during the isolation period, but there were lots of Japanese products in a biodyanmic farm/shop I worked at in Germany too.
Sadly, it was rather limited in scope because they are the main exporters of conventional food in the EU for a reason.
After a few years living in the NL I was travelling home via London. I'd come to love vegan food while living here and expected London would be beyond my wildest dreams for choices, being so big and so diverse.
Imagine my dissappointment when I went to the shop and the closest thing to a vegan option I could find was a cheese and egg sandwich!
Ended op going to Boots where I found mint and sweetpeas.
It's only in modern times that we have the luxury of taking the animal's feeling into account at all. I'm sure you would want even more consideration for the animals, but it's much better today than it was.
The concept of how an animal was feeling simply didn't occur to them. An animal was a tool, and you took good care of the tool, but not because of the tool, but because then it was more useful.
It was the 18th century when animal rights started becoming a thing, which exactly corresponds with the industrial age when things became less scarce and people could worry about animals, and not just themselves.
There are hundreds of Roman monuments, inscriptions, and poems [celebrating dogs](https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2015/06/20/every-dog-has-his-d...) as companions and pets. There are medieval European graves that strongly suggest sentimentality towards the animals buried in them. There's this [lovely ninth-century Irish poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/...) about a cat. Someone with more knowledge in the area than I possess should comment on animal portraiture in ancient and early-modern China and Japan, but that was a thing as well.
I think the fairest thing to say is that people in every era - very much including today - instrumentalize some animals, and sentimentalize others.
Wow.
Meanwhile, I've travelled a lot for work - mostly to odd corners of the world, and I've yet to meet people that didn't have stories about animals and animal behaviours.
Famously, for example, Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are largely about animals, Tiddalick the Frog, Emu and the Jabiru, etc.
They encapsulate the place of animals in the environment, and as hunter gatherers attuned to where next years meal will come from, attention is paid to breeding and caring for the young so that there are full grown adults to breed again and to eat.
Rightly or wrongly the stories are about the imagined feelings of animals, the things that make them happy and plentiful, the bad things that cause numbers to dwindle.
Various people had various relationships with various animals, not as "pets" but as other beings in the world.
For example: Ngarritj - the Yolngu speaking bird
I don't find it difficult to imagine my great-great-great-great-(fill in the appropriate number of greats here to qualify for ancient ancestors) grandmother butchering a pig and not really giving it a second thought at all, having grown up on a farm myself. Hell, my current grandma is probably much gentler and gives the pork a much better time than my ancient ancestors did
- Mahavira, 6th century BC
(Translated, of course.)
It's sad this type of trolling is becoming tolerated on HN.
on the evolutionary scale, this is provably false. all the great apes are vegetarian. we have flat, grinding teeth like cows, and long intestinal tracts like cows too -- not the quick, short intestinal tracts of predators or their sharp, pointy teeth.
strictly speaking, not even cows are vegan. not absolutely, perfectly, and totally. one of the weird side effects of ubiquitous cameras today is people have caught cows eating birds that were trapped in fences. it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.
but overall, with a reasonable margin of approximation, then yes, our ancestors were definitely vegan, at least our evolutionary ones.
" their sharp, pointy teeth." Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.
Australopithecus did eat animals. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus#Diet"
Its a common misconception among vegetarians that humen were originally vegetarians. Quiet the opposite is true.
we have evidence for hunter gathering societies since 1.8 million years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Archaeological...
Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.
sure. is that evolution or technology?
idk if that's really worth the effort, but I admit it, you made a point.
edit: to everybody else, I apologize for the passive-aggressive vibe, I just don't see where else this (requested!) reply can really go.
Except vegans, of course.