evidence: It's a platitude that we've all heard dozens of times, whether to justify our treatment of other species or simply to celebrate a carnivorous lifestyle: humans are the top of the food chain. [...] On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the score of a primary producer (a plant) and 5 being a pure apex predator (a animal that only eats meat and has few or no predators of its own, like a tiger, crocodile or boa constrictor), they found that based on diet, humans score a 2.21—roughly equal to an anchovy or pig. Their findings confirm common sense: We're omnivores, eating a mix of plants and animals, rather than top-level predators that only consume meat. To be clear, this doesn't imply that we're middle-level in that we routinely get eaten by higher-level predators—in modern society, at least, that isn't a common concern—but that to be truly at the "top of the food chain," in scientific terms, you have to strictly consume the meat of animals that are predators themselves. Obviously, as frequent consumers of rice, salad, bread, broccoli and cranberry sauce, among other plant products, we don't fit that description.