Today I discovered where the bladder is located, in relation to the navel. If you want to know where it is, drink sixteen consecutive cups of tea - strong tea with milk, no sugar - and wait for the sharp pain that starts just the other side of the belly button. That is your bladder.

There is something both disconcerting and pleasing about this kind of discovery. However painful, it's reassuring to know that the human body does not need a consultant to report the cause and effect of too much caffeine, or excessive amounts of tannic acid. It got me thinking about the role of instinct in human behaviour, and wonder when the hell we stopped adapting that innate sense into our consciousness. Or when we reverted.

Over a massive steak dinner a few weeks back, a friend gave me his mind on the whole to-beef-or-not-to-beef issue. "You can't deny two million years of evolution," he said, jabbing at an eighteen-ounce filet mignon with his knife. "The whole reason humans developed cutting teeth was so that they could deal with the task of eating flesh."

Don't mistake my friend's thoughts as a screed in favour of the massive beef industry. We were, in fact, chowing on some damn good meat - the best I've had in ages. We're talking about Grade-A beef, perhaps Grade Triple-A from a free range somewhere in Bolivia, where the livestock lives a long and prosperous life before being sacrificed for our benefit in an ages-old, candle-lit ceremony. This steak was served how I like it - rare - and I sensed it was still pulsing with blood as I sunk my knife into for the first time. Golly.

Of course, the price of meat in New York has made an herbivore of me. But I do feel the urge to sink my incisors into a hunk of cow now and again, and that urge is rooted deeper than the average nic-fit or chocolate craving; this is predatory instinct, triggered by the sight of blood.

"Your body needs meat," my friend went on. "If we stop eating it altogether, we'll probably end up toothless and ugly."

"Toothless" is a pretty good description of the general reaction to the American government's recent smash-and-grab attack on civil rights (and "ugly" is a good word for the parallel I'm about to draw). It's not news that the people have increasing apathy toward the democratic process, but few Americans put pen to paper to advise their representatives in Congress and the Senate to draw the line. Our priorities lie elsewhere: we need to show the boss how valuable we are; the bills don't stop arriving just because the President has launched a debatable war and the economy has gone to pot. Duh.

That meat talk has aged in my mind like a filet mignon in cold storage, and I think it's achieved that something special. I reckon that if we didn't need meat - if we were offered a substitute that contained the same enzymes and proteins and other nutritional elements and still tasted and chewed like meat - then we could give it up. But however convincing and delicious those mock-meat creations are, they don't come close to the real thing.

So what does the body know that the mind has yet to learn? No matter how many different liquids, solids and chemicals we ingest, there are a few key things that the body simply needs, and somehow we know it. Away from the supper table, we have somewhat less choice. We can play a democratic role in society, or we can vote with our feet, our wallets and our remote controls. We can seek what's fair and right for all, or we can work hard to earn some serious cash and retire early.

I won't put a finger on it but, somewhere along the way, We Was Had. The abundance of choice has been mistaken for quality in our lives. We are free to choose, but few of us choose true freedom. We all crave a bit of fresh meat from time to time, but only some of us can afford it.