SOS: Save Our Souvlaki — And The Western World Together With It

I am blessed to come from a gastronomical paradise called Naxos, a garden of Eden in the centre of the Aegean where fresh local produce is king. There are so many places like this all around Greece. This is not just food. It is culture. A happiness blueprint and reminder that life, however simple or tough, can be good and enjoyable. A taste of hard work, community and continuity.

Therefore, it is not only as a reasonable person, but also as a Greek, that I look at the rising fashion for veganism and “dairy-free” living in Europe and America with bewilderment.

Come on. These are not neutral, nor natural lifestyle preferences. They are an assault on the biological, historical and cultural foundations of Western civilization itself, while at the same time they attack the practical livelihoods of the people who still produce the food that built it.

Let us get something straight. Meat and dairy are not optional extras. They are core Western values. We abandon them at our peril. Humans did not become the dominant species on this planet by grazing.

Our ancestors — hunter-gatherers across the Eurasian landscapes that later built Greece, Rome, and the rest of Europe — hunted. They cracked marrow bones, ate organs, fat and flesh. The dense calories, complete proteins, iron, B12 and long-chain fatty acids from animal foods helped fuel the brain development that made complex language, tool-making and eventually civilization possible.

Plant foods mattered, of course. But the idea that we are “natural herbivores” is a modern fantasy contradicted by the archaeological and isotopic record. The Western lineage sprouts from an omnivorous biology shaped by the hunt.

That inheritance continued into the agricultural age with the domestication of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. Homeric heroes feast on roasted meat after every sacrifice. The great festivals of the classical polis centered on the slaughter and shared consumption of animals. Pastoralism was not a sideshow in the Greek countryside. It was the basis of everything. Milk, cheese, yogurt and meat from sheep and goats provided the staple food in a rugged landscape.

The Romans, who absorbed and transmitted so much of Greek culture westward, treated livestock as central to economic productivity and urban markets. Later European societies — from medieval monasteries to the commercial cattle and dairy economies of the early modern period — were built on the same foundation. Animal traction, manure, meat and milk fed Western expansion.

Today, that continuity is under ideological attack. Vegan and strict dairy-free theory treats the entire history as a moral error. It presents the rejection of meat and milk as progress, and the defense of them as backwardness.