Not saying it’s a good idea, but how come we’re so much more prone to getting a disease?
In: Biology
Well, we can eat off the ground if we want to, and most of the time we’d be fine, the food would just have dirt and grit on it. Of course if you have your food sitting on a part of the ground where lots of animals poop, that would be a problem, but the ground itself isn’t inherently dangerous or contaminated. The ground is just some combination of decomposed organic matter, sand, clay particles, etc. Or if we’re talking about indoors, floors aren’t usually made of dirt, and aren’t particularly dangerous either, but we can certainly track in contaminants on our feet.
The main difference between us and other animals is that we have hands and know how to make things like plates. Other animals don’t, so they have no choice to eat off the ground. And since they have no choice, their bodies have ways of handling many common types of bacteria and other nasties. However, animals absolutely can get sick, and sometimes die, from contaminated food that’s picked up gross things from the ground (or food that’s rotten).
We also know how to cook food, unlike other animals, and so we have an ideal way to kill a lot of the little nasty things that would normally make us sick. And since we’ve been using fire for at least a million years or so, that’s enough time for our bodies to get used to eating food that’s cooked, and so we’ve gotten used to not having to deal with bacteria and parasites in our food as much as other animals do (though of course the cleanliness and safety of food does depend a lot on where you are in the world, cooking practices, etc)
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