Is anyone familiar with her argument? The book was just released. I ordered it just now to review. Anyone else want to review it with me?
-Breeze
Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith
Book Description (from: http://www.lastgasp.com/d/34466/) : We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant- based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray — not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance. The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil — the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them. Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.
From what I understand, her analysis comes from a very anti-civ/primitivist perspective à la Derrick Jensen/John Zerzan. It makes me hesitant to pick it up, but I am curious. I’ll have to wait until I can find it at the library.
I do! I was just reading about the book elsewhere. I don’t want to buy it though… I don’t want to support the project. I’ll see if I can get it from my library.
I look forward to your review, as I am not familiar with the text and do not currently have access to it.
However, the summary here clearly comes in two parts: ‘Agriculture is damaging the planet’, and ‘Veg*nism cannot help to feed the hungry, honor the animals and save the planet’, without presenting the reasoning which logically connects them.
A quick glance at The Vegetarian Myth on Google Books seems to confirm that Lierre Keith’s analysis is based on an anti-civilization perspective — that is, civilization, and not exploitation/oppression per se, is the root of all evil. I, personally, find the cynicism of anti-civilization books like this one counterproductive. I also think a focus on anti-civilization, as opposed to anti-exploitation/anti-oppression, misses the point.
For instance, the exploitation of other animals is not seen as exploitative and is instead called a “reciprocal relationship.” It’s sad that Keith, who comes from an anti-sexual violence background, would make such a repulsive claim. It’s repulsive, because by reframing the exploitation of other animals as a “reciprocal relationship” in defending animal husbandry Keith depoliticizes that exploitation. It shares a twisted logic with patriarchy and the belief that a woman or child cannot be exploited by a husband, father, or other “male head of a household.”
Since Keith believes that civilization and vegetarianism are “substantially the same,” the book is fanatically anti-vegetarian. For instance, Keith makes an overzealous and misguided attempt to use the Haber-Bosch process to somehow link vegetarianism to the Holocaust. Should we think this is absurd, Keith tell us that is because we are believing the myth of the vegetarians. From page 106:
“This overlap between war and agriculture will only surprise you if you believe the myth of civilization or the myth of the political vegetarians, which ends up substantially the same since their genesis is the same: agriculture and its annual monocrops. The myth is that civilization is progress, for human rights, human health, and human culture. The myth continues: agriculture’s foods are the foods of peace and justice.”
It’s ironic that Keith claims a plant-based system of food production is inherently linked with war, while she proudly promotes an intensive pastoral system of food production when there is an overwhelming amount of anthropological evidence showing an overlap of herding- and war-based cultures.
Furthermore, the vegan movement was founded in opposition to both synthetic fertilizers and war. In fact, Geoffrey L. Rudd coined the term “veganic” (combination of “vegan” and “organic”) almost immediately after Donald Watson coined the term “vegan.” Nor are annual monocrops an inherent, or even a necessary, component of plant-based culture. See the Movement for Compassionate Living, the writings of Graham Burnett, and the work of Plants For A Future for just a few examples.
I knew Keith. She was a vegan for a long time before her spinal degeneration started. She started blaming it on her diet after she started taking Qi Gong lessons and her instructor told her that her pain was due to not eating meat. Chinese folk medicine thinks meat is very healthy and therapeutic.
As if no meat eaters have spine problems. Spinal degeneration is a problem common to eaters of all types, and is probably more endemic to a “sitting” culture than anything else. That she blames her degeneration on her vegan diet is simply ridiculous.
lets just forget about how she got sick, and concentrate on what she says.
This is a bit off-topic, but I just have to say that I find Lierre Keith ties to anti-trans politics troubling in the extreme. Keith is a founding and present member of the Radical-Feminist Lesbian Festival, which is “unalterably opposed” to the existence of trans people. In addition to promoting the anti-trans works of Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, RadLesFes is explicitly opposed to allowing trans people access to trans-related health care.
I also think it’s odd that Lierre Keith, a militant anti-porn activist, seems to be “unalterably opposed” to any lesbians ever taking part in any consensual acts related to BDSM or pornography, yet she believes that enslaving and slaughtering other animals is congruent with a “reciprocal relationship.”
I don’t think this is off-topic at all; I think it’s incredibly relevant. Thanks for bringing this to light.
Agreed. Thank you, I had no idea she felt this way.
I haven’t read the book yet
But humans have been eating meat since there have been humans. It’s only been in recent years that vegan and vegetarian diets have come to the be popularized, and still only a small percentage of humans are vegetarian.
Agriculture isn’t just ruining the planet for our civilization but it’s displaced many other species as well. So when you talk about killing animals you have to consider what agriculture of land does to them.
Idealistically eating meat should mean wild meat, but unfortunately our food system is distorted into a money making business that treats animals in dispicable ways.
I think it’s more logical to argue against the way animals are treated in these mass farms, than it is to say eating meat is bad altogether. Considering it’s the way that humans have eaten for hundreds of thousands of years.
Not to mention the human physiology depends on the fat and cholesterol to keep the brain etc functioning at peak that comes from meat.
Melissa, the things that you have written are simply not true, and are based on misinformation spewed around by reactionaries like Lierre Keith.
In places like India and countries with a lot of Buddhists there have been millions of vegetarians and vegans for many thousands of years.
Hominids began eating animal protein and fat when they were early scavenger/gatherers millions of years ago, when in their gathering they learned to go to predator kill sites after the predators had left and eat the leavings (largely by cracking open the prey’s bones with tools in order to get at the fatty marrow inside those bones).
However, this scavenging activity made up a very small part of the hominid diet which was almost exclusively vegetarian.
Humans adopted hunting much more recently in climates/habitats which did not support a sufficient vegetarian gathering (tens of thousands of years ago).
There was a brief period in history when hunting became pretty dominant in human behavior, but that large scale hunting was quickly replaced by organized agriculture between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago. Very importantly, big part of the reason that humans transitioned to agriculture was that during the brief predominance of hunting, humans became so good at it that they wiped out almost all of their megafauna prey species, on every single continent, including Australia.
So at that point, human over hunting, combined with some other factors like climate changes, forced humans to turn to agriculture to survive because it allowed the production of much more food on a much smaller area of land.
Then, as soon as humans got to be really good at agriculture, that massively increased food supply caused a huge human population boom all over the planet. And then in the industrial revolution which enabled humans to basically turn massive amounts of oil and other fossil fuels (which had been stored for millions of years underground) directly into food, and that factor turned agriculture into such a powerful and unsustainable tool that human population exploded into the billions that we see now.
All throughout that entire history there have been millions of vegetarians, and especially recently, this has been a damned good thing because animal based agriculture (even grass based pastorage) is -far- more land and resource intensive, and produces far worse negative environmental impacts than agriculture for a vegetarian diet. (This can be seen graphically by looking at what happened to the ecosystems of Australia once pastoral animals were introduced by Europeans.)
So what has happened to humans in the 21st century is that we have gotten into what is called a ‘progress trap’ by Ronald Wright in his excellent book ‘A Short History of Progress’ see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Progress
The progress trap of modern (mostly grain mono-crop) agriculture is what has enable 7 billion people to arise on the planet. But it is a -trap- specifically because to turn back from it would make matters even -worse-. If all of humans suddenly turned to Keith’s fantasy of pastoral/hunter-gatherer meat based lifestyle it would wipe out the planet in a decade or less because it tales so much more land/habitat to support that diet.
It takes 200 acres of habitat to support a hunter-gatherer diet (as opposed to only one acre for a vegetarian-agriculture diet). And it takes from 10 to 20 times more land/habitat to support a pastoral agriculture meat based diet over a vegetarian agriculture based diet. And note that even -vegetarian- gathering in wild habitats would very rapidly destroy the entire planetary ecosystem.
So it will -not- get us out of our current progress trap to abandon agriculture, because that would require either 1) over a hundred planet earths of landmass to support 7 billion people or 2) the mass death of almost all of those 7 billion people so that the rest of them could sustainably live as hunter-gatherers. This is clearly not possible.
There is only way out of our trap, and that is to use biodynamic permaculture techniques to make a mostly vegetarian diet sustainable. And frankly, even if we do this well, -even- that permaculture vegetarian diet will probably not support 7 billion people. And that means that while we are perfecting our vegetable based agriculture and making it sustainable, we also need a huge global program to educate and empower women, and equalize wealth disparities to end poverty, so that the global human population starts rapidly and immediately reducing.
Employing these strategies might, -might- save civilization and the planetary ecosystem from total collapse, if we do it all really well and really quickly.
Turning back to pastorage and hunting/gathering will only make matters -much- worse much faster.
So the short version of what I just wrote, is that Lierre Keith’s thesis is a -very- naive and spiteful diatribe based on her own subjective bad experience with vegetarianism and has almost no basis in reality whatsoever; -unless- what she is proposing is that we turn over the world to a fascist dictator who will engage in the mass murder of 6 and half billion people so that the remaining humans can be happy hunters in some fantasy meat eaters’ Eden.
This is of course why Derrick Jensen endorsed her ridiculous book, because that mass human die-off is exactly the sort of grisly future Jensen would like to see happen…
And since neither Keith nor Jensen are going to get their wish, and most humans will not turn to mass murder and hunting while skipping and jumping through the countryside, it is safe to say that Keith’s book is a useless waste of paper made from the very trees which Keith claims she cares so much about.
It is interesting that her -book- doesn’t also say that we need to stop making unsustainable factory forest/agriculture paper based books for reading, and instead start using sustainable hunter/gatherer smoke signals again for long distance communication…
BTW, Mary Martin at Animal Person has a post about this:
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2009/05/the-book-that-saved-derrick-jensens-life.html
I would be tempted to review it but not if I had to actually support the book by buying it. And I only say tempted because I really wouldn’t want to give this book any more publicity than it already has.
Oh and Dani, great and insightful comments! Thanx!!!
Beautifully put, Dani!
It is exactly for the reasons you bring up that I find the whole “civilization” vs “wildness” discourse so dangerous and counterproductive. Rather than examining the diverse and particular actual day-to-day oppression of certain people, animals, and ecological systems, the ecological and social crises of our day are reduce to a master narrative in which all the world’s problems exist b/c we live in cities and use technology–as if oppression and ecological degradation is (or will be) nonexistent when humans live a more “natural” way of life.
Keith’s work seems counterproductive because it not only wrongly equates civilization, agriculture, and vegetarianism, but also is focused attack on vegetarianism (as if it is even a monolithic diet) rather a manifesto opposed to all oppressive food systems. On top of that her arguments against the “morality” of vegetarianism don’t engage with actual moral theory and the decades of literature devoted to the debate; her nutritional argument is essentialist, classifying a vegan diet as unsuitable for every- and anybody; and she even makes the audacious claim that vegetarians have “infantile” worldviews!
It seems like Keith has nothing but a grudge with vegetarianism due to her illness, and it’s real bullshit that Derrick Jensen would put such staunch support behind such a poorly researched (i.e. she says oil is made from dinosaurs and is thus an animal product; it’s actually made from algae and plankton!), pretentious, book full of oversimplified, reductive arguments.
Soil Isn’t Just Dirt: A Review of The Vegetarian Myth
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/vegetarianmyth05032009/
i’m not familiar with this person’s work, but already she exhaust me. it’s funny how many anti civilization people find themselves unable to leave civilization.
@Alicia, post #8.
Inter Library Loan. If a library in the country has a copy, they will get it to you.
Thanks Anonymous, still not interested though.
@Dani, comment # 6
Founders of organizations don’t always agree with the policies those organizations come to have.
Can you site anything written by Keith where she expresses views about Trans people?
Do you have any citations of Keith stating that she is opposed to lesbians taking part in consentual BDSM or pornography?
If any of this is true it would quite ironic. Keith was banned from an extended stay meditation retreat in the 1990s because she is a Lesbian.
Since this is regarding Keith’s anti-trans views, and not her anti-vegetarian views, I’ve posted a reply on The Vegan Ideal.
@Dani, comment #13;
I read your reply to my questions on The Vegan Ideal. Thank you for taking the time to type all of that up. I would have thanked you there, but I couldn’t find any links to post a comment.
If I bother to borrow a copy of the book I will consider the “case closed” if it does not have citations to clinical studies, and a number of them.
If the book does the next step will be for me to see who paid for the studies.
If things still hold up after I have friends educated in research who can help me evaluate those studies.
In 14 years of being a vegan I haven’t seen any anti-vegan statements like this book hold up to all of these things.
Hello Breeze: I am glad you brought this controversial book into discussion on VOC , and I agree with you and the critique laid out by Dani here. Now my two cents are: It’s a highly problematic book in my point of view, the ethical weight of veganism can’t really be reduced to a profanity by a list of selfserving counter arguments against veganism. Since veganism is factually the only opportunity to gain a holistic or all encompassing world peace. Peace has to include the balance of everything in the world. That’s it.
wow. As per usual I was excited by the description here and ready to rush out looking for it & then read all the comments and saw multiple new worlds of info opening up. I really love this blog & the intelligence and insight of all of the comment-makers here!!!
How tightly does one have to shut their eyes to the animals’ suffering in slaughterhouses and factory farms in order to say, with a straight face, that their relationship with humans is “reciprocal?”
This is actually not was she says at all. Throughout the book, she reveals herself to be strongly against factory farming and the mass-production of meat as a commodity.
It’s clear to me that the majority of people critiquing this book have either not read it, or have drawn conclusions that simply aren’t there, or may, in the very least, not understand anti-civilization ideology.
I am amazed by the responses to this book. Have *any* of you read it?
Lierre ties civlization, agriculture, and vegetarianism into a singular “grand narrative” because they are completely intertwined: the first two are totally dependent upon each other, and the third almost certainly never existed without the first two.
How can you say an “anti-civ” perspective is cynical? Perhaps you meant it in relation to Cynicism, the greek school of philosophy? Is it counterproductive merely because it opposes the form of production which you find preferable (the industrial variety, I imagine)? What if civilization is by necessity exploitation (of humans, non-humans, ecosystems, the planet itself)? You seem to be rejecting it merely upon the basis that it is unpleasant for you to contemplate. How would you react to the argument that someone distraught by the current profusion of environmental destruction or non-human animal enslavement is just being cynical, is “not seeing the whole picture”?
Perhaps the RadLesFes is opposed to trans-related health care because it is not healthy (unnatural manipulation of hormones?). I sincerely doubt they are opposed to the eradication of gender dichotomy.
The reason “anti-civilization” people can’t leave civilization is because it is fucking completely pervasive and inescapable. Did you not realize that the planet is dying, that there is more at stake than your sense of dietary purity?
Locavore, I’ve only read two chapters (and I plan to read more), but from I can tell, Keith’s analysis is very reactionary and reductive. Critical analyses that solely deploy grand narratives are very problematic in that they trap thought and marginalize other pov (i.e. anti-oppression), as Dani mentioned.
[Actually, your suggestion that RadLesFest excludes trans healthcare because it is "not healthy" is a great example of how "civilization" discourse has obscured your understanding of transphobia (i.e. Hormones are "artificial/synthetic", placed "out of balance", the "manipulation" of "natural" cycles, etc.--radical feminists can't be transphobic because they are opposed to the gender dichotomy!)]
“Civilization” is itself a vague cultural construct and “anti-civilization” rhetoric really avoids addressing what is particular/exceptional about “civilization” that makes it so bad. It also relies on the notion of an abject or noble savage and wilderness which reek of colonial discourse. “Wilderness,” for instance, does not actually exist, but was a contruct in romantic times as a reaction against industrialism and during the “Age of Exploration” (aka colonialism). Aboriginal and pre-historical humans destroyed many of the large mammals and birds through hunting, and much of the “pristine/virgin” forests of today were actually “man-made” from burnings and horticulture. So if you want to address the *degree* of ecological degradation today, perhaps you should critique the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, and Western philosophy. Otherwise you fall prey to, rather than escape, the racist and “civilized” discourse of the 18th and 19th century thinkers.
“Locavore, I’ve only read two chapters (and I plan to read more), but from I can tell, Keith’s analysis is very reactionary and reductive. Critical analyses that solely deploy grand narratives are very problematic in that they trap thought and marginalize other pov (i.e. anti-oppression), as Dani mentioned.”
It does not rely “solely” on the deployment of grand narratives. Lierre goes into many details regarding the destructive qualities of all the institutions or procedures mentioned. Also, as I said before, such a grand narrative only marginalizes other POV insofar as it reveals all forms of oppression (patriarchy/sexism, genocide/racism/eugenics, environmental destruction/species extinction(/agriculture), social hierachy, etc.) as a single interlocking system. I believe that the leftist technique of critiquing separated aspects of the overall “violation imperative” is counterproductive because it fails to see how they are dependent upon each other as well as an identical mentality. That said, I also think the environmental crisis is a more urgent problem than humanist concerns. When the permafrost melts, people will not have the option of hormone replacement therapy.
“[Actually, your suggestion that RadLesFest excludes trans healthcare because it is "not healthy" is a great example of how "civilization" discourse has obscured your understanding of transphobia (i.e. Hormones are "artificial/synthetic", placed "out of balance", the "manipulation" of "natural" cycles, etc.--radical feminists can't be transphobic because they are opposed to the gender dichotomy!)]”
I am opposed to all impetuous manipulation of embodies states of equilibrium, whether they be human bodies or ecosystems. I am opposed to the systems that both create such a sense of gender depersonalization and purport to fix it with their scientism.
““Civilization” is itself a vague cultural construct and “anti-civilization” rhetoric really avoids addressing what is particular/exceptional about “civilization” that makes it so bad.”
Civlization is a life characterized by cities. Cities require the importation of “resources,” because they have destroyed the land upon which they are based. As they are founded upon the notion of exponential growth, they will denude an ever larger area until they collapse. This has happened to all civilizations and it will soon happen to this one. You can’t have cities without importation (because they consume at a rate faster than the land is willing to give), you can’t have importation without war (because there are generally people living on the land where you want to get those resources) or collapse (because eventually you will have consumed it all). You also can’t have cities without slavery and oppression (because someone had to work in the mines).
“It also relies on the notion of an abject or noble savage and wilderness which reek of colonial discourse. “Wilderness,” for instance, does not actually exist, but was a contruct in romantic times as a reaction against industrialism and during the “Age of Exploration” (aka colonialism).”
“Abject”? What is wrong with the notion of a noble “savage” (as you call them; I would prefer the word “indigenous” or “native” or something without such “abject” connotations)? I agree that wilderness is a social construction. But that does not mean that civilized humans can’t destroy their habitat.
“Aboriginal and pre-historical humans destroyed many of the large mammals and birds through hunting, and much of the “pristine/virgin” forests of today were actually “man-made” from burnings and horticulture. So if you want to address the *degree* of ecological degradation today, perhaps you should critique the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, and Western philosophy. Otherwise you fall prey to, rather than escape, the racist and “civilized” discourse of the 18th and 19th century thinkers.”
Hmm. Not really sure what you’re trying to say here. Yes, I am aware of the forest “management” practices of the indigenous (although I am very skeptical of the “Pleistocene Overkill” hypothesis which you mention). These people have no conception of “wilderness” as a distinct entity because they live amongst it constantly. Such a distinction is naturally dependent upon cities. When cities come to an end, humans can begin to restore their previously-held and healthy relationship with the land upon which they are dependent for their survival.
I find Western philosophy quite reprehensible, as it is generally a justification for patriarchy, capitalism, racism, environmental destruction. Not sure why you’re trying to get me with that one: seems like kind of a non sequitor after your mentioning of indigenous practices. Do you mean to suggest that hunter-gatherers unleashed just as much destruction upon their landbase as the civilized?
The question if civilization needs sacrifices, is exactly that which civilization tries to solve, I believe. Veganism is of course not just a dietary purity, but a grand step in civilization, which will need a lot of innovation still, too.
The catch is that this “purity” is a mere illusion when you look at the ecological costs required for such a diet to exist on a large scale. There is no purity if the vegan diet is inherently destructive. Lierre explains the agricultural destructiveness required in the foods that a typical vegan strives off of.
Thankfully, I think this blog thread will be a significant portion of the attention this anti-vegan, axe grinding book gets before it slides further down into obscurity.
The population of the Earth is over 6 billion people with some experts predicting it going to 12 billion within 40 years if the environment doesn’t become incapable of supporting all of those people.
Rescuing the Earth ( or even all of those people coexisting ) isn’t going to happen without the type of organized, sustained, action that is likely only possible with governments, laws and enforced laws. In other words, civilization.
Seems like the idea of anti-civilization is unrealistic at best and likely a waste of time unless you enjoy putting energy into thinking about things that will not yield any value beyond enjoyable discourse.
I cannot respond to any of these replies yet, as I have not read her book and prefer to read it before engaging in the discussion…Just in case folk were wondering why I posted the topic but did not participate in the critique of the book.
It is not unrealistic. It’s the realization that the problem IS civilization. Rescuing the earth would be unnecessary had civilization not been created. Civilization simply tries to band-aid the problems that it itself produced. It is the MOST counterproductive in terms of fixing anything.
You need vitamin B12, which puts a damper on any vegan talk.
But it’s true: Monoculture was responsible for the Dust Bowl and the desert in the Middle East.
Jon — B12 comes from bacteria, not animals. Industrial agriculture has wiped out this bacteria in many food-growing places. But that’s an effect of industrial agriculture — it doesn’t “put a damper on any vegan talk.”
We vegans are familiar with nutritional yeast, a couple of tablespoons of which provide more than the daily recommended amount of B12! Check it out!
I am yet another one who has not actually read the book in question (yet?), but I just listened to an interview with Lierre Keith, on “Healing the Earth”, a podcast on rabble.ca and had to google her name as I was curious to read some reactions to her thoughts.
My impression, based on the interview, is that she would distinguish between the dominant forms of agriculture today (industrial scale, pesticide- and fossil fuel-dependent monocultures), which destroy the soil and and require inputs of non-renewable resources, and something like permaculture (organic, using perennial crops and companion planting), which can build soils, promote greater biodiversity and which does not require use of non-renewable resources.
Based on this view, which I share, I would tend to agree that veganism in itself is an insufficient solution to the big sustainability issues threatening the long-term survival of humanity (and much of the rest of the biosphere we’re part of) – as long as we don’t address the way our food is produced. Is she attacking veganism itself? Or is it the idea some might have that being vegan automatically makes their lifestyle ’sustainable’ she’s criticizing?
Purely from the point of view of designing a food production system that can last for millenia, it is more important to design an agricultural system that nurtures soil health and biodiversity than to simply abstain from consuming animal based products. Meat production using free range animals can be sustainable (from an ecological perspective).
The ethics of killing animals for meat is obviously a separate issue, though, and an important one at that. Just based on what I heard in the interview, though, I’m guessing Ms. Keith is NOT in favor of industrialized meat production, but her reasons for this may differ from those of some commenters here.
In response to anonymous in comment #21 – it’s that “if” in your first paragraph that’s the issue, isn’t it? Ms. Keith argues (as I understand it) that civilization as we know it is not sustainable, meaning whether we like it or not, it will not be possible to keep it going in the long run. While you might be right that national or international scale responses to these challenges might be more effective at this point, I’m not sure they’re more realistic (in the sense, more likely to happen) in the long run (decades out). The triple challenges of climate change, economic contraction and resource scarcity may put a permanent damper on such massive scale management, basically.
the thing is FOR ME: the world is not only for humans, but also for those beings we call “farm animals”. If the focus stays on the human interest, you miss out on the interests of nonhuman animals. Ethically humans need to face the question of ’sharing a world with fellow sentient beings’. The focus on the human interest is really too narrow to be ethically really waterproof.
Exactly, which is a view Lierre Keith clearly states she believes, except her perspective is even LESS discriminating in the sense that she hold plant life as equal to animal life (including human animals).
Animals aren’t the only one’s that must be looked at and treated equally, and no matter what, something must die in order for something else to live. That is the beauty of the “circle of life”. Death exists, and to avoid killing in order to live, is a denial of death and pain and suffering. That does NOT mean that factory farming is okay, or that oppression is okay. It’s about coming full circle, and doing what you have to, to do it with respect and to give back what you take, and I believe Keith makes that clear in her book.
“she hold plant life as equal to animal life” ??
Bull***t, and we all know it.
“circle of life” ??
Bull***t! Who slaughters you, keith and all other humans?
Instead of slaughtering INNOCENTS cows, Keith should slaughter not-innocent humans – the greatest virus on earth.
Humans’ flesh is the less-harmful meat there is.
But her discriminating views tells her she can slit the throat of other innocent beings. Is she for real?
She might have been vegan for 20 years, but she never was animal-rightist for 20 years.
“Saving the earth” so humans can master other species (and plants, if you so insist) is not a solution. Period.
You don’t have to kill in order to live, and live does not flourish and thrive and even exist because something has to be killed or was killed. It depends on your cultural perspective, you might have learned to see animal- and plant life as “natural objects”. A.) Nonhuman animals can not simply be interchanged, because they are in fact what they are: nonhuman animals. B.) The same goes for plants, they are: plants. I assume everybody is aware of the differences they encounter with plants and with nonhuman animals. To assume you need to destroy plants or kill animals in order to live is a view that bases on a cultural/religious/philosophical or otherwise background. Its not a “truth” per se, and it should definitely not be tried to be sold as such.
[...] Vegans of Color: Vegetarian Myth- Lierre Keith [...]
Sadly, Lierre has been snared, thoroughly conditioned by, and with this book has sold out to the vehemently pro-meat/dairy, anti-veg/vegan weston price foundation (wpf). This is a DC-based lobbying group whose members consist of “farmers”, which of course means they breed, confine and kill animals in order to sell their parts and fluids for profit (not to mention their own culinary enjoyment on top of that). The wpf and it’s disciples are completely responsible for all the soy/vegan-bashing of the past decade, with the reason being that their main agenda is to scare/persuade caring, compassionate people, who have either chosen or are thinking of choosing veg, into either continuing or resuming their consumption of animal parts and fluids. They bash, demean and fearmonger against the compassionate veg/vegan lifestyle to the point where their followers become hostile to it, which is their goal. They claim to be anti-industrial agriculture, eco-concerned, etc, but then instead of focusing their energies on eliminating animal agriculture (which is responsible for 80% or more of all industrial agriculture in existence due to the fact that the vast majority of all crops (including soy) grown, are funneled through animals for meat/dairy production), they instead attack the vegetarian lifestyle. It is a very selfish, sad agenda, and is yet another strike against the planet.
You really should inform yourself of the things which you choose to critique. The Weston A. Price Foundation is an indictment of industrial agriculture.
Anonymous above is posting this same comment above me all over the internet. Word for word. I would really be interested to hear from people that ACTUALLY READ the book. Perhaps I’m old fashioned.
Instead he/she is trying to “poison the well” with empty allegations that the author is a “WPF” front person. Give me a break! Read the book.
Anonymous may be posting this all over the Internet, but are they really “empty allegations.”
What Anonymous wrote was that The Vegetarian Myth promotes the views of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a DC-based anti-vegetarian lobbying group. And if we actually read the book we find this is true.
For instance, the foundation is prominently listed under “Resources” in the back of the book. In fact, Keith made the Weston A. Price Foundation the first resource listed, which she call, “Hands down, the best nutrition site on the web.” Nor is it denied that this is an anti-vegetarian, anti-soy pressure group. Keith writes that the Foundation “does political advocacy, like lobbying against the soy industry,” which is essentially Anonymous claimed.
In my opinion, Keith’s reliance on the Foundation as a, if not the, leading expert on nutrition deserving of utmost scrutinies. The Foundation’s “political advocacy” includes promoting heterosexism and making insidious attack that make connections between homosexuality and the “primacy of traditional animal-source foods to human health,”
From the Foundation so-called “best nutrition site on the web”:
“There is no doubt that the origins and ’causes’ of homosexuality are diverse, and that long before the invention of processed food, many cultures accepted same-sex relationships as normal. At the same time, there is also no doubt that a diet of imitation foods can disrupt the hormonal development of the growing child, as demonstrated by the studies of Pottenger and many others, resulting in same-sex orientation that would not otherwise have occurred. Chief culprits are margarine, MSG (which causes injury to the hypothalamus) and soy formula (which floods the infant’s bloodstream with estrogens). We believe that it is important to provide this information to prospective parents who also want to be grandparents.”
The above statement, which is the Foundation’s official position, relies on heteronormativity in assuming that being straight is healthy and desirable. While, in contrast, “same-sex orientations” is treated as a pathological and undesirable result of something we ate, if not some other “culprits,” “origins” or “injury.”
Additionally, the Foundation’s reliance on heteronormativity is also evident in how it ignores, marginalizes and erases the fact that people with a “same-sex orientation” can and do have children. The Foundation, which Keith describes working “to educate the public about … the primacy of traditional animal-source foods to human health,” is apparently also working to educate the public about the primacy of heteropatriachry to human health.
I would definitely categorize this clever playing to society’s homophobia — in essence telling parent that soy will turn your children into sick, childless homos — “fear mongering” of the worst kind.
It’s doubtful Keith would accept the claim that she might be a lesbian because she ate a plant-based diet. However, regardless of Keith own sexuality, her endorsement of an organization that promotes heterosexism as part of its “political advocacy” work “to education the public” is troubling, too say the least.
Great response!
If you think the passage you quoted from westonprice.org represents homophobia on the part of Lierre Kieth, you are sadly mistaken, or deliberately taking it out of context. In fact that passage was a response to a letter written by Lierre to the WAPF protesting the apparent homophobia of WAPF.
Her letter is here: http://www.westonaprice.org/letters/L2004sp.html
titled “sexual preference” about 2/3 down the page.
the last paragraph: “I am deeply disheartened and disturbed to find this attitude in Wise Traditions. I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, hence I am writing in the hope that you can either explain what your position is or change that position to something more respectful of human diversity.”
This was published back in 2004 so you’ve had 5 years to check this out and get it right. I hope you have the integrity to correct this mistake wherever you have made it.
linshelton,
Please re-read the comment. Of course Lierre Kieth knows the Weston A. Price Foundation is homophobic. That’s the entire point. Kieth asked that the Foundation explain it’s position, which it did in very homophobic terms. This position is exactly what was asked for — by Kieth no less — that is quoted above. So, yes, Kieth has known about this homophobic policy for five years, but instead of correcting the mistake of associating herself with the Foundation, Keith writes a book based largely on the Foundations work and calls the Foundation THE best source for nutrition information. Kieth’s letter is not vindication, but rather incrimination.
Incrimination? The statement that “There is no doubt that the origins and ’causes’ of homosexuality are diverse, and that long before the invention of processed food, many cultures accepted same-sex relationships as normal” is certainly not characteristic of a homophobic attitude because it recognizes that homosexuality IS normal in many cases.
The part about the parenting shows a level of insensitivity and ignorance that I’d say is typical of the general public. It’s a real leap to generalize that single statement into making the WAPF out to be institutionally “reliant on heteronormativity”. If so, there would be more statements of this nature. I had to dig to find this one (it was buried in the letters archives from 2004), and haven’t been able to find any others.
My guess is that Lierre Keith had to weigh the benefits of the WAPF’s pro-social justice, pro-environmental, anti-factory farming and nutrition education work against that single statement, and found they vastly outweighed it. I would also venture to guess that someone like Lierre would have far more impact from within the organization than the rants of people who are apparently opposed to the very existence of that organization.
First, advocating the position that soy will turn children into homosexuals is base on heterosexism and perpetuatic homophobia — this should be obvious and straightforward.
I’m sorry, linshelton, but it doesn’t make the Weston A. Price Foundation any less heteronormative to say in some cases homosexuality is considered normal. I do not believe it’s up to you, Lierre Kieth, the Weston A. Price Foundation or anyone else, including myself, to debate in which “cases” a same-sex relationship can be considered “normal.”
In her letter, Kieth says that she is giving the Foundation “the benefit of the doubt.” I believe all doubt was erased as soon as the Foundation made its heterosexist, homophobic position clear — as Kieth requested.
I do not agree that an organization’s work can be used to justify or rationalize its oppressive policies, positions or actions. If Kieth thinks this political advocacy work to educate the public “vastly outweighed” the Foundation’s homophobia, then I think that’s a credibility issue for Kieth. What other forms of oppression is Kieth willing to overlook, marginalize or ignore to promote her personal agenda?
If this was a vegetarian organization claiming that consuming products of other animals’ bodies was a source of homosexuality, then I believe most of the people who post and comment on this blog would be the first to condemn it. In fact, many have criticized heteronormativity as a tool for promoting vegetarianism — see Breeze Harper’s post Skinny Bitch, Pregnancy, and White Heteronormativityas an example. So I see no reason why anyone here should be sympathetic to the argument that Kieth is simply doing what she believes is politically expedient by continuing to promote and work with the Foundation.
“I’m sorry, linshelton, but it doesn’t make the Weston A. Price Foundation any less heteronormative to say in some cases homosexuality is considered normal.”
Of course it does. To say that homosexuality is considered normal in many cases is simply not consistent with a homophobic agenda.
“I do not believe it’s up to you, Lierre Kieth, the Weston A. Price Foundation or anyone else, including myself, to debate in which “cases” a same-sex relationship can be considered “normal.”
The WAPF person said nothing about relationships. The statement was about biological _orientation_ (again, the premise that sexual orientation can be biologically driven is not consistent with a homophobic agenda, which generally claims that homosexuality is a choice), and how pre-industrial cultures often considered homosexuality to be normal.
“I do not agree that an organization’s work can be used to justify or rationalize its oppressive policies, positions or actions. If Kieth thinks this political advocacy work to educate the public “vastly outweighed” the Foundation’s homophobia, then I think that’s a credibility issue for Kieth.”
If you think the WAPF is on a mission to oppress anyone because of one statement buried in the archives, well, good luck with that.
“What other forms of oppression is Kieth willing to overlook, marginalize or ignore to promote her personal agenda?”
How many forms of oppression are you currently ignoring while you get your panties in a bunch over something dug out of the archives from years ago?
“So I see no reason why anyone here should be sympathetic to the argument that Kieth is simply doing what she believes is politically expedient by continuing to promote and work with the Foundation.”
Are you so sure that Keith hasn’t already dealt effectively with this issue? I don’t see any other opinions of this nature on the WAPF site.
Ok, I wasn’t going to post a comment here until I read the book in it’s entirety. I went to my local library and they didn’t have it so I decided to read what was offered on Google books.
After reading the beginning of the book, I would like to point out the way in which Keith is framing her introduction (or perhaps her entire book – the intro is in fact titled, “Why This Book?”), and also some important factual errors within the first few pages, to not only show how desperately she’s reaching to make her point(s), but how her credibility should be seriously questioned. I’ll skip the issue of vegans greatly relying on monoculture crops (which is not necessarily true) and grains that are actually grown in excess to feed “livestock” (not necessarily vegans), because that’s already been addressed above.
To show how ignorant vegetarians/vegans are (one of the main points in the entire book?), Keith says that she read a post on a message board where vegans said that true carnivores didn’t really need to eat other animals, and that the idea that they did is meat industry propaganda.
Just to be clear, she is relying on a conversation between unidentified vegans (yes, they were ignorant if that conversation in fact took place) on a message board, where anyone can express their views, to show how ignorant vegetarians and vegans, as a whole monolithic group, are. She then proceeds to ridicule this alleged post on some vegan message board (and yes it was ridiculous) to show how we vegans (and even vegetarians) are ignorant to the “nature of life”, as if we all think like these unidentified (fictional?) vegan posters. It doesn’t really matter what the details of the alleged discussion on the message board were for me to post this. What matters is Keiths (twisted) logic, and, again, the way in which she is framing her introduction (titled “Why this book?”).
Ok, then, and this is classic speciesist language, she says that “we need to be eaten as much as we need to eat” and, in regard to consuming animals (WARNING – get something to vomit in), “these are not one way relationships, not arrangments of domination and subordination. We aren’t exploiting others by eating. We are only taking turns”. However I haven’t seen her suggest that we feed ourselves, or she feed herself, to carnivores… Self serving, twisted logic much? Anyone else see how ridiculous this is? As if any of the animals Keith eats were going to eat her had she not got them first. Then again, I haven’t read the book yet. Maybe she’s missing many body parts because she’s cut them off and given them to other animals so that her consuming animals would not be a “one way relationship” and therefore justified. It’s possible…
One of the most confusing claims she makes, especially to a longtime vegan, is that vegan nutrition is not sufficient for optimal health and will actually end up damaging us. She makes this claim, she says, because she “knows” from her own experience, which, of course, is tragic. However it’s obviously not indicative of all vegans, myself, and friends and family members, included. She goes on to talk about all her health problems and, without one single source, attributes all of them to her vegan diet, from her spinal problems to hypoglycemia to anxiety and depression (even after admitting that she comes from a “venerable line of depressive alcoholics”!). Again, anyone see how ridiculous, and misleading, this is? To show how ridiculous her assertions are, and this is very revealing to me, she says seratonin is made from the amino acid tryptophan (correct) and that “there are no good plant sources of tryptophan” (-BUZZZZZ!!!- FALSE!!!). Ok, what about chocolate, oats, bananas, durians, mangoes, dried dates, sesame, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, spirulina, and peanuts?! It’s in those foods too! http://www.vitamins-supplements.org/amino-acids/tryptophan.php
She then says that “all the tryptophan in the world won’t do you any good without saturated fat, which is necessary to make your neurotransmitters transmit.” Assuming that this is true, YOU CAN STILL GET SATURATED FAT FROM PLANT FOODS! Coconut anyone? Did she do any research? Or even a simple google search?
I could go on and on about this but, since this is only a review of the first ten pages, and because this post is already getting lengthy, I’ll stop for now, until I can read the entire book. The way this is going, an entire review would be hundreds of pages long : (). Perhaps she’ll even convince me that I’m ignorant and I start consuming animals again. Hahaha!
So long for now.
Hi there everyone commenting and reading this site,
I have read Lierre’s The Vegetarian Myth, and I have interviewed her on my radio show, Healing the Earth Radio, a couple times. You can listen to those interviews at http://www.resistanceisfertile.ca.
On my experience of her book: I was a vegan for almost 6 years, and being a vegan was a big part of who i was, as was having prominent in my analysis a critique of captivity, domestication, industrial agriculture, etc etc etc. This is all still very important to me.
At the time I was reading an advance copy of Lierre’s book, I lived in a cabin in the forest on the edge of my hometown. Surrounded by a wild ecosystem, getting to know the river, deer, coyote, forests, meadows, walking trails, etc., was an amazing experience. At the same time as I was surrounded by the wild, I was fueling my body on imported monocrop rice, quinoa, beans, etc., that was all destroying and perpetually displacing wild creatures and wild ecosystems elsewhere. The conflict began to strike me as absurd and irresponsible.
Reading Lierre’s book and thinking deeply about the ecological impact of most agriculture changed my way of thinking about my diet, and led me on a path to taking the life of wild animals I eat. The consequent change in my physical and spiritual health is profound and I do not expect you to agree with me or understand unless you have had similar experiences. I am not alone in this transition, and I and many of my friends and family are nowadays much less reliant on imported food, clearcuts maintained as farm fields, and industrial infrastructure in general.
Lierre talks in detail of her transition from being a vegan for 20 years. She struggled with the same questions I struggled with: when I bought vegetables from a local farm through a Community Shared Agriculture program, the only way the land was replenished after growing those vegetables was through applications of animal shit, blood and bones. Those animals (cows, in fact) are captive cows who are raised essentially as slaves, for their flesh, their milk, and yes, their shit. A truly closed-loop vegan agriculture is very hard to attain if we are talking about feeding large numbers of people over a long time, so I would invite anyone else who is vegan to also think about how much captivity is required to grow the vegetables you eat.
Thinking about all this has led me to see that not much food is truly vegan. For example, the rice I used to eat a lot of (and maybe you eat rice, or other grains, too) – those fields need to be irrigated, and that irrigation often requires dams, and those dams kill fish and other species, and in the long run has led, and continues to lead to, extirpations and extinctions. Same thing with most farm fields – who do you think organized the bounty killings that led to the extirpation or extinction of the wild creatures around your home? It was mainly the farmers and agriculture institutions. And that same power dynamic continues, of human farmers threatening wild animals with death if they mess with their crops. So it comes down to which kind of violence do you prefer? Killing an animal yourself and getting elbow-deep in blood, or letting the animals be continually killed by cars, barbed wire fences, lack of habitat, and so on.
My recommendation, from someone who was a very very staunch vegan, is to find a copy of Lierre’s book, let your guard down, relax your defensiveness, and read it with an open mind. And take time to ponder her perspective and information.
You said you were a “very very staunch vegan”.
Well, there is a great difference between being a vegan and being an AR person.
A classic example for this is the moment you revealed your specie is superior to other species (“A truly closed-loop vegan agriculture is very hard to attain if we are talking about feeding large numbers of people over a long time…”).
Matt, there is a -key- fact that you are totally failing to recognise in your personal analysis.
If every vegetarian on Earth did what you are doing, it would destroy the planet -much- more rapidly.
It takes 200 times more land mass to feed a hunter/gatherer diet than a vegetarian diet. This is because the animals and plants hunted and gathered are -much- more spread out than they are in organized agriculture.
With 7 billion of us on Earth, that factor of 200 would mean an almost immediate collapse of every wild ecosystem on the planet if everyone lived as you are living.
The reason that we must find a vegetarian biodynamic/percultural agriculture solution to our current diet/planet crisis is that there are far too many of us to switch back to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
If we did, we would destroy the Earth with orders of magnitude more rapidity!
“With 7 billion of us on Earth, that factor of 200 would mean an almost immediate collapse of every wild ecosystem on the planet if everyone lived as you are living.”
Eric, this is why Keith’s utopian vision is dependent on population control. Her ideal world would never work for our current, growing population. Therefore her position is straight up elitist.
I actually have read the book but it would take some time to write a review, as there are so many problems with many of the points she tries to make, as well as the sources she sites.
Perhaps I type one up and pass it along soon.
I would like to say quickly that her chapter on Nutritional Vegetarians rivals the absurdity of the highly sensationalistic 1930’s film “Reefer Madness”. Keith sloppily blames basically all her health problems on her vegan diet when there is very little evidence to support her claim, and much evidence to the contrary, similar to the way the film erroneously places all the blame for many societal ills on marijuana consumption (which was, in turn, strikingly similar to the racist propaganda of William Randolph Hearst’s publications), when there is little, or no, evidence to support it’s claims. Basically, as Keith asserts, if all the missing vitamins and nutrients in a diet free of animal products doesn’t kill or debilitate you, you will just become so depressed that you’ll off yourself!
Read for yourself and have a hearty laugh, just as my partner and I did.
Matt,
Why could you not put up a raised garden bed and only rely on your monoculture crops until you could supplement your diet with food you’ve grown? Did you consider that?
The system of food production was not set up by vegans. Vegans are obviously concerned about causing minimal damage to animals, humans included, and the planet. That’s why, as Dani pointed out, vegans are, and have been, working on vegan organic, veganic, agriculture to minimize environmental impact. It can be done. Small scale, local, organic vegan agriculture is the answer, not dominating and exploiting other animals so you can feel like your living naturally to the utmost… with a computer… and internet…
The truth is, for Keith’s, and your vision to become a reality, many people will have to die. Will you fall on your sword for that vision? Will Keith? The vegan vision is, and has been since the movement started, to repair the damage done by non-vegans by being more conscious about the environment, humans, and animals, and to create a sustainable way of living for all. It’s totally possible. We just need more compassion. It will certainly not come from killing “wild animals” for food, so you can live out your utopian vision.
And no, you don’t need manure from other animals to grow crops. Checck the links Dani provided, let down your guard and relax. No animals have to die for you to be a such naturalist.
And, Matt, did you ever consider foraging for vegetable food to ease your reliance on monoculture crops, since you were such a “very very staunch vegan”? Or did you just take the cruel way out?
This person’s a vegan -
http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/
And he doesn’t live in a forest like you. He actually forages around NYC.
Relax, let your guard down and look over his site. You probably won’t find as many factual errors as I had in Keith’s introduction. (HINT HINT)
If somebody practices a total ethical dismissal of the interests of nonhumans animals, what do you want to do? A person can say over and over again what he or she believes to be better for “us humans”, but still Animal Rights can’t be simply wiped off the table of our today’s ethical debate.
I mean we shouldn’t just have to be the ones who look that an anti-vegan perspective, an “anti-vegan” person should also look at the aspects of ethical veganism. Veganism bases on the notion of an ethical attitude towards the animal question (…).
I suggest Matt and co as a good read for example: Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status by David DeGrazia, where you excellently can learn something about some basic moral argumentations pro and con animal rights, here is a review http://www.hedweb.com/animals/degrazia.htm and here the book partly http://tinyurl.com/r3pq6h .
My apologies if this point has already been mentioned.
In addition to my point in comment #21 I don’t think agriculture isn’t going anywhere and for a good reason.
The Earth has over 6 billion people on it with some experts predicting it going to 12 billion within 40 years. There isn’t enough land and other resources to give everyone parts of animals raised in a more “natural” way for food.
In fact, livestock production of all kinds uses more land to produce food than using land to produce food crops.
Agricultural methods need to become more sustainable, but if someone wants to make a choice to reduce the impact of agriculture the most direct way to do that is to eat plant based diet.
Soil Isn’t Just Dirt: A Review of The Vegetarian Myth
By Mark Hand
Review of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith (PM Press, 2009).
On the cover of Lierre Keith’s new book, The Vegetarian Myth, there’s a blurb by environmental activist and author Derrick Jensen that says, “This book saved my life.”
I don’t think I’m prepared at this time to make such a bold pronouncement. However, I may change my mind if my health radically deteriorates and I decide to follow the advice on diet and nutrition dispensed by Keith.
After reading the book, though, I am prepared to write this about it: The Vegetarian Myth tackles a set of related topics—the food we eat, how it’s produced, and how it affects us—with a substance and style that I’ve never read anywhere else.
My summary assessment isn’t as dramatic as Jensen’s “This book saved my life” blurb. Such an opinion would be hard to match, given the consequences at stake in Jensen’s life. Another test of a book’s redeeming value is to determine whether it effectively challenges one’s long-held beliefs on a particular topic. For me, as a vegetarian, The Vegetarian Myth passes this test because it effectively challenged my strongly held belief in the merits of vegetarian and vegan diets.
And The Vegetarian Myth has many other merits, including explaining the awesome destructiveness of agriculture—and the role played by the corporate giants in this sector—in a manner that I, as a layperson on the topic, had never read anywhere else.
The heart of The Vegetarian Myth is composed of three chapters—“Moral Vegetarians,” “Political Vegetarians” and “Nutritional Vegetarians.” Keith defines moral vegetarians as people who believe life is possible without killing other animals. Political vegetarians believe a plant-based diet is more just and sustainable. Nutritional vegetarians believe that animal products are “the root of all dietary evil.”
On a rudimentary level, someone could come away from reading The Vegetarian Myth, particularly the “Nutritional Vegetarians” chapter, thinking the U.S. meat, poultry and dairy industries will love the book—except those pesky parts where she states factory farming of animals is cruel, wasteful and destructive.
In one such pesky part, Keith writes: “Factory farming is a nightmare, from every angle: ethically, ecologically, nutritionally. There’s not word besides torture to describe the experience of laying hens in battery cages, so crowded they can’t lie down or open their wings, driven insane by the bright glare of lights that stay on forever. Torture also describes what happens to pigs, animals that are smarter than dogs, so smart in fact that if they had digits instead of hooves they could probably learn some rudimentary sign language. … This tortuous life ends at the slaughterhouse, where, if not properly stunned and killed, they may be boiled alive in a rendering vat. No moral person can face these facts without a sickening of the spirit.”
In the minds of the executives at these companies and their marketing gurus, would drawing attention to Keith’s fierce opposition to any type of factory farming—the exact type of farming in which each of these industries engages—outweigh the benefits of publicizing her impassioned case against vegetarianism and veganism?
Would it benefit these industries to leverage Keith’s life story—from a meat eater in her youth to 20 years of veganism and back to a meat eater—to promote the supposed nutritional value of consuming their food products?
Will these industries ever know The Vegetarian Myth exists?
Released by PM Press and Jensen’s Flashpoint Press, the book likely will get very little exposure due to the publishers’ limited marketing budgets. But let’s say an executive with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association does get her hands on the book. What will she discover? She will learn that Keith believes humans need to embrace the consumption of animal products, including beef, or else face severe and chronic health problems.
A vegetarian diet, most especially a vegan one, “will damage you. I know,” Keith writes. “Two years into by veganhood, my health failed, and it failed catastrophically. I developed a degenerative joint disease that I will have for the rest of my life. It started that spring as a strange, dull ache deep in a place I didn’t know could have sensation. By the end of the summer, it felt like shrapnel in my spine.”
Keith says her spine now “looks like a sky-diving accident.”
Six weeks into her veganism, Keith says she had her first experience with hypoglycemia. Three months into it, she stopped menstruating. She felt exhausted all the time and had an ever-present cold. Her skin became flaky and itchy. At the age of 24, she developed gastroparesis. She suffered from depression and anxiety.
Keith, now in her mid-40s, says she wasn’t the only one in her circle of friends who developed severe health problems from going vegan. “All the friends of my youth were radical, righteous, intense. Vegetarianism was the obvious path, with veganism the high road alongside it. And those of us who did it long term ended up damaged,” she writes.
Now that Keith has gone back to eating meat and dairy, how has it changed her life? She says her spine “isn’t coming back” but that eating a diet of grass-fed [my emphasis] animal production “has repaired the damage a bit and made a moderate dent in my pain level.” Her insulin receptors “are also down for the count, but protein and fat keep my blood sugar stable and happy,” she says.
She hasn’t missed her period in five years and her stomach is “okay” as long as she takes betaine hydrochloride with every meal. She is now depression-free, but her cold and exhaustion are permanent due to her veganism, she says. And some days her breathing takes more energy than she can spare, all because she lived as a vegan for 20 years, she says.
Keith would be a perfect spokesperson for a national campaign against vegetarianism and veganism, as long as the sponsors of the campaign understood and, even better, shared her distaste for what “civilization” has done to the planet.
Second Thoughts
Keith’s transformation from vegan to campaigner for the human consumption of animal products reads similar to some notable figures who renounced their staunchly held beliefs or past associations in order to bring attention to their current causes. Some recent examples include David Horowitz, who spent most of the 1980s renouncing his “communist” and Marxist upbringing and early adulthood and is now a right-wing political activist; Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace who now serves as a shill for nuclear power; and Bjorn Lomborg, who also was a member of Greenpeace (although Greenpeace says it has no record of him being actively involved in the organization) prior to writing The Skeptical Environmentalist in which he argued that the world’s environmental problems aren’t as serious as many scientists’ claims and that environmental conditions “are going better and they are likely to continue to do so into the future.”
One might argue that Keith’s conversion can be easily differentiated from these three examples because her goals—one of which is putting an end to global biocide as quickly as possible—are much more radical. But one could also argue Horowitz’s support of a more powerful U.S. police state is radical and far out of the American mainstream. And Moore’s support for a nuclear power renaissance certainly runs counter to the beliefs of Wall Street banks, which have been reluctant to invest in new nuclear power plants over the past 25 years, viewing the energy source as too costly and risky. Perhaps Lomborg is the least radical of the group, given his support of the global economic status quo.
And yet, I agree with those who would argue that Keith’s fundamental critique of industrial culture is not represented anywhere in mainstream political discourse or media, unlike the beliefs of Horowitz (FOX News), Moore (Barack Obama/Stephen Harper) and Lomborg (BusinessWeek, Time, The Guardian).
Some might argue that Keith has simply become an advocate of “happy meat”—local, grass-fed, sustainably produced, and humanely raised meat. But that would be unfair. If there were ever a movement devoted to the principles set out in The Vegetarian Myth and if it proved successful, such a movement would easily result in a spectacular reduction in the suffering and torture of animals, compared to what they experience today in factory farms and due to ecosystem devastation.
The leading perpetrator of crimes against animals and the planet, according to Keith, is agriculture. “Liberal remedies will never serve a radical analysis,” she writes. “There is an inherent contradiction in understanding that systems of power must be dismantled while only embracing personal solutions. To put that more bluntly: if agriculture is a war, why aren’t we fighting back?”
In The Vegetarian Myth, Keith uses her 20 years as a vegan to lend credibility to her campaign against agriculture. Along the way, however, she may alienate a large segment of the vegetarian and vegan populations, the groups of people who she hopes to convert to her cause. Describing these segments of the population as a “subculture” with “cult-like elements” will certainly raise eyebrows. It also could prove counterproductive.
Throughout the book, Keith mocks vegetarians and vegans. She portrays them as adolescents. “In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood,” Keith writes. “It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else had to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose a different way, a better way.”
In Defense of Animal Fat
According to Keith, not only misguided and naive individuals like her, but entire nations have benefited from moving toward a diet based on large amounts of animal fat. The Japanese have been living healthier and longer lives since they started eating a more “Western” diet, higher in total fat and animal fat, she writes. The studies she cites run counter to conventional wisdom, which has told us that the health of residents in Japan and other Asian countries has grown worse since they increased their intake of animal fat.
The Japanese have “increased their consumption both of total fat and animal fat over 250 percent since 1961—and they are now the longest living people in the world,” Keith writes.
And in the United States, the past 15 years have seen a reduction in fat consumption of almost 25%, but our health has only gotten worse, according to Keith. Americans have done what the experts have told them—“ate less fat, more carbohydrates – and have gotten sicker,” she writes.
Clinical studies, according to Keith, have found that low-fat diets increase anger, depression and anxiety. Low cholesterol levels occur more often among criminals, individuals diagnosed with violent or aggressive conduct disorders, and homicidal offenders with histories of violence and suicide attempts related to alcohol.
Currently, 40% of Americans are killed by coronary heart disease. The rate of coronary heart disease has increased at the same time that the proportion of animal fats consumed by people in the United States dropped from 83% to 62% and the consumption of vegetable oils has increased by 400%.
“You tell me what to blame: the saturated fats we’ve always eaten—for four million years—or the industrially manufactured oils that until recently were used in paint,” she writes.
Unlike the general meat-eating population, a large percentage of the target audience of Keith’s book—the “subculture” of vegans and vegetarians—have studied the impact of factory meat production on the environment. This subculture has concluded that it is not only more humane, but better for the entire planet and more efficient to refrain from eating animal products. They’ve probably read that it takes approximately 16 pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat in a factory farm. Much of this grain is grown in developing countries, where a large percentage of their land is used for cattle-raising for export to the United States, instead of being used to grow staple crops, which could feed local people directly. In a world where a child starves to death every 2 seconds, it seems impossible to justify such waste.
Oops! Grains and staple crops are products of agriculture, Keith reminds us. “The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us,” she writes. “The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems.”
Unlike the general meat-eating population, a large percentage of vegetarians and vegans will not get lost or utterly confused when Keith states, “What’s looming in the shadows of our ignorance and denial is a critique of civilization itself.”
“Critique of civilization”? The average American, who might have been nodding in agreement while reading the “Nutritional Vegetarians” chapter, in which she slams vegetarians and vegans, will grow suspicious when Keith speaks of bringing down civilization in order to save the planet and ourselves.
“The words ‘animal rights,’ ‘vegetarian,’ and ‘vegan’ are some of the most mocked and emotionally loaded terms in our language, even in very liberal circles. One has to wonder if a multibillion dollar meat industry hasn’t had a part in making these words and the ideals behind them seem so laughable to so many people,” Sunaura Taylor and Alexander Taylor write in a recent essay.
Looking beyond her case against vegetarianism and veganism, Keith’s book is essentially a well-researched indictment of the U.S. food industry—and, yes, civilization itself.
The food industry has developed more than 100,000 new processed foods since 1990, she writes. She spends several pages discussing soy and how big agriculture has heralded soy as a panacea for everything from hot flashes to world hunger. “Soy contains so many anti-nutrients that it isn’t edible for humans without a lot of processing, substantially more than other seeds,” she writes.
In discussing Asian cultures’ relationship with soy, Keith writes, “The Chinese ate soy as a protein source only when they were starving—when they also ate their children.”
The Vegetarian Myth is at its strongest when Keith avoids using attention-grabbing “ate their children” polemical ploys. In the “Moral Vegetarians” chapter, she goes into wonderful detail about soil and how one tablespoon of it “contains more than one million living organisms, and, yes, every one of them is eating.”
“Soil isn’t just dirt,” she writes. “A square meter of topsoil can contain a thousand different species of animals.”
Grasping the Concept of Domestication
Keith explains the reciprocal relationship between animals and plants and how she didn’t fully understand this relationship when she was a vegan. She writes about the concept of domestication and how it’s not well understood by people who claim to be against it.
“I saw domestication as bringing animals and plants under human control and it was appalling to me, a short trajectory that ended in hens tormented in battery cages and primates brutalized in head injury experiments,” she writes. “Of course, my entire diet was composed of domesticates, with the exception of a serving or two of fiddlehead ferns every spring, but they were plants, so I simply didn’t think about it. It was the animals I wanted to save from human exploitation, and in the vegan outlook, exploitation begins with domestication.”
In the “Political Vegetarians” chapter, Keith explains that where she parts company with them is when they conflate factory farming with any and all meat.
She describes how a 10-acre non-factory farm “of perennial polyculture in a mid-Atlantic climate” could produce 3,000 eggs, 1,000 broilers, 80,000 stewing hens, 2,000 pounds of beef, 2,500 pounds of pork, 100 turkeys and 50 rabbits.
“This is the amount of food that Joel Salatin—one of the high priests of the local, sustainable movement—produces on ten acres of his Polyface Farm in Virginia. The chickens get some supplemental grain; everything else eats grass,” she writes.
If people ate nothing but the above, it would be enough food to support at least nine people for a full year and support them in full health by providing essential protein and fat, Keith writes.
Political vegetarians, on the other hand, are planning a planetary diet in complete ignorance of where food comes from, she writes. “Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all,” Keith writes. “Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and typography problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians like everyone else in urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. They seem shocked when I ask them what will feed their food.”
With regard to the top environmental issue of the day in mainstream circles, global warming, Keith argues it all began with agriculture. “Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization, an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer,” she writes.
Our Only Hope Is in the Soil
To save the world, we must first stop destroying it, according to Keith. “Cast your eyes down when you pray, not in fear of some god above, but in recognition: our only hope is in the soil, and in the trees, grasses and wetlands that are its children and its protectors both.”
Toward the end of the book, as she tries to rally the troops and unite the factions, Keith calls for a new populism and a serious political movement combining environmentalists, farm activists, animal rights activists, feminists, indigenous people, anti-globalization and relocalization efforts that fights for a new, and living, world.
I assume Neal Barnard and my other former colleagues at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, where I briefly worked almost 20 years ago, will be able to respond to Keith’s “Nutritional Vegetarians” chapter with studies and evidence of their own showing that people live longer, healthier, and happier lives on a vegan diet.
I’m not a dietician, so I can only use my personal experience and those of others I know to say that I have not witnessed vegetarianism and veganism produce the endemic harmful health effects that Keith chronicles in The Vegetarian Myth. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 15 years and I’ve never been healthier. I’ve always been physically active. But since becoming a vegetarian, my strength and stamina have improved to the point that I’m a faster marathoner, half-marathoner, 10-miler and 10-kilometer racer today, in my early 40s, than I’ve ever been, including when I was a meat-eating, dairy-loving captain of my cross-country team in high school.
However, I’m not going to rule out the possibility that I would run even faster if I started eating meat again. It’s certainly possible, but I don’t plan on giving it a test anytime soon.
With regard to Keith urging vegetarians and vegans to eat meat and dairy or else face chronic health problems and an early demise, I assume such a move would only hasten the oft-predicted ecological collapse. There are not enough farms like Polyface Farm to support all of the vegetarians and vegans in the United States if they were to begin eating locally grown, grass fed animals. This means that these vegetarians and vegans would need to eat factory-produced meat in order to get proper amounts of protein, Vitamin D and Vitamin B12. These are the same factory farms that rely on agriculture, and all of its devastating qualities, to provide the grains to feed their animals.
My advice would be for vegetarians and vegans to monitor your health very carefully (as I’m sure you already do), and to adjust the types of food you eat if you begin feeling the same symptoms and enduring the same debilitating conditions experienced by Keith. And if you do go back to eating meat and dairy, try to avoid, if at all possible, factory-farmed food products.
If you, as vegetarians and vegans, are able to read with an open mind the sections of Keith’s book where she slams the vegetarian and vegan lifestyles as naïve, unhealthful and destructive, I think you’ll appreciate the rest of The Vegetarian Myth because it gets to the root of the problems that are driving our culture toward ecological collapse.
Our industrial culture, including factory farming, is destroying our planet. The Vegetarian Myth is a tremendously helpful resource that can help guide us away from the abyss and toward sustainability.
Mark Hand can be reached at mark@pressaction.com .
I just got the book the other day and will read it. Mark Hand’s review is pretty long and explicit. Thanks for posting it. I need to read this book on my own, as I am curious about exploring Keith’s health issues and how she strongly feels it is related to her personal vegan diet.
To be as radical as Lierre-Keith will never be, the problem is not agriculture but rather humans.
If Keith thinks it is ok to slaughter others, than her solution should have been eating other humans (the most destructive creatures on earth), not innocent creatures.
Ludicrous idea? Well, to expect the human specie to adopt Keith utopia is not less ludicrous. For Derrick Jensen sake, we are talking about humans, creatures like Keith, who encourage others to butcher innocent creatures out of caring and compassion. Thus, any solution that crowns human-KIND as the master specie of this earth has a dreadful future.
mark’s review lays out my problems with the book, and also what I like about it.
she explicitly and truthfully lays out the idea of liberal individualism vs. actual radical mass organizing, which I loved, but then delves into the same ‘individualist’ solutions herself…such as ‘don’t have kids’. or ‘live on a farm’…which plays into the lie that ‘all’ americans create 20% global warming gases…which we don’t.
the working USA class creates no where near what the rich do, and the USA military is the biggest sole source.I’ve been vegetarian for 25 years, and daily lift nearly 3,000 pounds at work.
and I smoke! know no vegetarians that are unhealthy in their 40’s compared to mostly meat eating 40 somethings, who are getting diabetes, and etc. Still this could mostly be a whole grain diet mixed with dairy and exercise. People that ‘eat more vegetables etc’ also tend to exercise more , not smoke, and are more involved in human interaction, more active is so many ways….Not sure.That a vege diet makes you so much healthier…somewhat for sure. Olive oil and avocados and really red and green food, make me not want to pick up a gun. That’s a good thing. heh. My spanish and italian friends on the med ‘diet’ of high meat and dairy fat, but in small portions, mixed with fruits and vegies constantly, are very healthy, and as you know if you have visited, look extremely well from their 40’s to 70’s. Compare that to what people over 40 look like in the midwest (where I came from).
the book is a good read. Really. No matter how angry it makes you. I am quoting a big bit in my left newspaper.
also interesting that ramsey of AK press, a vegan, put this out. on his imprint PM. shows what a true anarchist he is.
I personally feel that she went from being a 20 fanatic on one subject, to being a fanatic on another now. Even though there are very grounded historically correct ideas in the book. it still takes leaps…like so many ‘american radicals’ do. That is tiring to me. We need to be bottom up organizing against all the systems that destroy us and the planet, as she says, not pontificating and arguing about ‘what could be’. My god we have no time left. And to postulate that ‘all grain growing on a mass scale must be stopped’….while our military has just killed one million human beings in the past ten years..while we head to a depression with already 20% african american unemployed to give one example…..does NOT get me into the ‘fold’.
this is not anarchism, or left socialism, or radical organizing to me….if we take one topic…and go with it for the next five years…just typing…and just typing.
Why should this weighed out morally (!) so unequally: nonhuman animals, nature and humans? For me my ethical concerns can’t stop at the species border.
Wait a minute, talking about a “vegetarian myth” such as the title of this book does. What about if we take a look into the history of vegetarianism?
Pythagoras ran a school in which vegetarianism was practiced. Can we assume that his example was detrimental for a course agriculture could have taken?
What about the vegetarian history in parts of India’s cultural history? Did it lead to Monsanto? Well take a look at the point blank side of vegetarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism in history .
Vegetarianism can just as well be combined with alternative farming and growing practices. A site of interest is for example http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/veganperm/ .
I am fascinated at how in ancient history people knew how to grow crops, just look at how the ancient Egyptians irrigated the fields https://www.geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~gel115/115CH17oldirrigation.html .
I don’t think humans can ever exist without farming crops and vegetables and fruit. I can’t afford my own garden, and how can everybody on earth life like “hunters and gatherers” (when there is not even 5 trees in my street). More realistically is the vision of an increasing ethical awareness for our environment, and this will also automatically bring forth new and different economical practices. I’d rather read a book about the future of vegetarianism, I mean Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi did make some points for world peace …
A Quick Review from a vegan who has actually read the whole book on Google:
I first learned about Keith’s book from Mark Hand’s review (see comment 34. I was quite interested in reading the book afterwards, just for the sake of challenging my beliefs and values–hoping that they had not become dogmas. But after I read the introduction and first chapter, I was appalled by the sloppiness of Keith’s categorization of “vegetarians,” “agriculture,” and “civilization.”
However, after reading past page 50, I have found the book to be a lot better researched and nuanced than I had originally thought (due to the title, introduction, and defensive pro-”anti-civ” comments to this post).
Despite my earlier comments, I highly recommend reading this book.
Why, you may wonder? Because Keith raises food worthy of thought. I sincerely believe most VOC readers will appreciate *most* of what she has written but disagree with her simplistic conclusions. Her book is really a rebuttal against reductive, generalized claims made by veg*ns, not necessarily veg*nism itself (although, Keith may believe so). The dogmatic reactionary responses of some commenters of this post only justify Keith’s compulsion to write this book.
To label “Vegetarian myth” as an anti-civilization book is a misnomer. Keith, herself, seems sceptical of the whole wilderness/civilization dichotomy, but nevertheless deploys the discourse to establish the enemy that is globalization and urbanism. Keith, however, comes close to falling into the grips of xenophobic ecofascism by adopting conservative positions on world population and trade.
But just as not *all* animal agriculture can be regarded as ecologically destructive and flesh-eating destructive of one’s health, neither can *all* plant-based agriculture and forms of vegetarianism be condemned as belonging to a naive, childish idealism of a death-bearing material world.
Keith generalizes all vegetarians/isms into a single category (i.e. neoliberal humanists who eat a lot of grains and commodity crops). Of course, the majority of grains and legumes on the planet are fed to livestock (as is fish meal); so it’s frustrating that Keith spends few pages attacking feedlots and so much sending vegans backlash. It should be obvious to a 20-year-long vegan like Keith that not all vegetarians follow the same diet. Many eschew grains and legumes all togetehr and will only eat perennial crops, such as raw foodists. And many vegans do grow their own food or buy into CSAs. The there are veganic agricultural methods which replenish soils and perhaps those who have worm bins (vermiculture) to produce nutrients from food scraps. And even if Polyface and other permacultural systems are sustainable, this does not mean that the non-human animals must or ought to be slaughtered and eaten.
Worst yet, her “moral” case against vegetarianism, ironically, takes an all-or-nothing approach to taking the lives of (non-human life) and thus maintains the very humanism she is opposed to–unless, that is, she thinks killing and consuming human flesh is equally acceptable (perhaps she agrees with Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal”. Further, because she does not engage with the decades of scholarship into environmental philosophy and ethics, she completely glosses over non-liberal humanist approaches to animal ethics and the entire tradition of ecological feminist animal theory. And in her most despicable pages, Keith has the audacity to talk her vegetarian readers through the process of becoming a born-again-omnivore, so that they are eating “real” food, and reach a moral, spiritual, and intellectual maturity that is impossible as an herbivore. She tells her readers that their vegan friends are replaceable, but not their bodies, and insists that they will be calling their parents to tell them that they were right all along: vegetarianism was a foolish phase in their life.
In the end, it is regretful that Keith had to frame her project of refuting reductive vegans “myths” because a lot of the objections she raises are very good. Keith’s own grudge against her past diet thus results not in allegiances between different movements (a multiculturalism/moral pluralism), but rather a re-establishment of dualistic thinking–a metanarrative in which one group is completely right and the other completely naive/evil. Vegetarianism isn’t just one of many sustainable diets, but a tactical dead end to “saving the planet.” Keith’s need to justify her change in diet (cognitive dissonance, anyone) and blame her past vegetarianism thus takes precedents over a more sophisticated and less antagonistic approach to productive food politics.
Nevertheless, the reason I recommend reading the book is because, by reading through the book, we will only test our commitment to veganism and be required to come up with better, more sophisticated arguments and make us stronger. If we refuse to respond to valid criticisms Keith raises about “mainstream” vegan eating habits and false universalized claims about the ecological and organismal healthiness of *all* flesh-diets and animal-based food systems, we risk becoming just as dogmatic as those who uncritically defend their privilege and tradition of flesh-eating.
I forgot to also mention that Keith blames vegetarianism for many cases of anorexia and depression. (p230)
Yes, that’s right. Why? One word: soy. (This , of course, ignores that many veg*ns are allergic to or otherwise don’t eat any soy). She also seems to think vegetarian parents feed their babies soy formula and implies putting children on a vegetarian diet or eating as a vegetarian during pregnancy is practically child abuse. Non-fermented soy products certainly aren’t the best foods to eat, but they also aren’t the worst–and it’s likely that flesh-eaters and plant-eaters consume similar amounts of soy in our nation of processed foods (i.e. families that use formula are more likely to be poor than vegetarian; many vegetarians eat whole food diets rather than processed/packaged ones that include a lot of soy isoflavons).
Keith’s fourth chapter, “Nutritional Vegetarianism” is hands-down the most egregious and obnoxious section of the book (and actually isn’t worth your time to read–unless you feel like laughing). Several dozen of her citations come from 5-6 previous books [Protein Power, The Untold Story of Milk, Good Calories Bad Calories, Against the Grain, etc (p290-95)], not primary sources. Worst of all, to prove her beliefs, she uses anecdotes (i.e. soy is bad for memory; Keith has a conversation with a vegetarian about soy, and the vegetarian forgets what they were talking about!). While Keith may be correct that animal-based diets are not always fatal/unhealthy, she is profoundly wrong that *any* vegetarian diet is deficient in nutrients and relies predominately on soy and grain.
(oh, and sorry about the poor grammar and spelling above)
adam Says:
May 20, 2009 at 11:24 pm, post #37
A Quick Review from a vegan who has actually read the whole book on Google:
Adam, how did you manage to get the whole book on google books?
Keith’s book is listed there as only having a limited preview available:
http://books.google.com/books?q=lierre+keith&btnG=Search+Books
Anon,
I didn’t read every page since some are not included, but I did read about 90% of the pages (all of the pages it displayed). Many google books will only allow you to access between 10-30% of a book/24-hour period, so almost an entire book can be read over 3-7 days.
again I would rather spend money, time and effort on constructive publications
i just wish that vegans would extend their circle of compassion to include not just farm animals, but wild animals as well, and whole ecosystems. because from an ecological perspective, it is far better to eat free-roaming bison from an intact, healthy native prairie, for example, than to eat crops grown where that prairie used to be. which way of eating supports more biodiversity? likewise, i know a lot of people who eat salmon, who are fighting like hell to remove dams on salmon rivers and restore habitat for the salmon and all the other creatures who live in the river. i also know people who want the dams to stay in place because they allow water to be diverted from the river to grow crops. so again, who kills more – the omnivore who eats salmon now and again, but devotes her life to maintaining and restoring the health of the river, or the vegan who eats irrigated vegetables and doesn’t even think about the river? water diversions for irrigation kill millions of salmon and other species every year – but those are invisible deaths that i can pretend don’t exist when i piously eat my vegan dinner! i mean, sure, you can also be vegan and work to save the salmon, and that’s great – but please understand that being vegan *by itself* is *not* going to save them.
also, what would you say to an indigenous person whose health has been restored upon returning to a traditional diet, which may or may not include meat? would you tell someone whose people have lived sustainably on this land since the beginning of time that her traditional way of eating is wrong? i am not challenging your right to be vegan if you want to be – i just don’t understand why you have to try to enforce it on those of us who have made a conscious, ecocentric decision to be omnivorous. please remember that including animal protein in one’s diet does not necessitate factory farming, and it does not necessitate the torture and mistreatment of animals or the earth. i am completely against factory farming of any kind, including the mass production of vegetables and grains, but not just because of its impact on a few species of farmed animals. i am against factory farming because it destroys whole ecosystems. i make my decisions about what to eat and how to live based on how it affects mother earth as a whole. here’s one more example: asian carp are an invasive species in many midwest rivers, and they are decimating those rivers, destroying entire ecosystems. some people fish for the carp and eat them, and this is helping the river and all of its native biodiversity to recover. could you honestly condemn someone who does this?
as far as i can tell, all lierre is asking any of us to do is to question our assumptions when we eat, and to honestly assess who lives and who dies when we grow our food – to remember the wild animals, soil creatures, forests, prairies, birds, rivers, migratory fish – who may die so that we can eat our “cruelty-free” vegan meals, and to take an honest look at how we affect them as well, not just the animals in the barnyard. because if we don’t think about these things, we will not change the way we relate to the soil, the water, and all of the earth’s living creatures in time to reverse our destructive impacts on them.
RE: “would you tell someone whose people have lived sustainably on this land since the beginning of time that her traditional way of eating is wrong?”
Chinook, please be very careful when you write such things. “since the beginning of time” suggests that these diets are essential to the health of indigenous people and the land as well as reduces them to “man [sic] in nature.” Many of these cultures had only existed for several hundred years before colonization, others went under constant evolution. And people didn’t even live in NA more than 18kya, so these cultures have by no means existed “since the beginning of time” unless you are of the Creationist persuasion. To say such reduces them to a “primitive” culture, as if they never “progressed”/”evolved.”
For better or worse, *some* vegans may oppose traditional aboriginal diets on the basis of a universal morality. To condemn hunting/slaughtering animals on moral grounds from this pov would be no different than condeming a tradition of “sustainble” war/genocide.
There is one thing that the side of argumentation that you are taking keeps trying to blurr out, which is the fact that those nonhuman animals that you/we call “farm animals” are actually wild animals that our societies “keep” (…) in farms.
A classic on the issue of veganism and how vegan ethics connect to “domesticated animals” is: Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals And The Feminine Connection By Karen Davis, Ph.D. http://www.upc-online.org/thinking_like_a_chicken.html . In that text the position Animal Rights versus Deep Ecology is being discussed.
Chinook is right on with this. Thanks for posting such articulate comments.
There is one more point too that hasn’t been mentioned, which is the sentience of plants. Maybe others here already think about this; I didn’t think about it much for most of my veganism.
Sometimes there is a tendency to create a dichotomy that places animals above plants, like it’s not ok to domesticate and enslave animals for our purpose, or in some people’s eyes, it’s not ok to even kill a wild animal who lives a free life up until the moment of death… but it’s ok to domesticate and enslave plants for our purpose.
The amazing sentience, emotional health, and ability to feel pain that is inherent in all plants and trees is often overlooked by most of this society. Some raw foodist folks take it to an extreme of not eating root vegetables because it causes death. But I figure a more appropriate, responsible, and accessible way is to eliminate one’s reliance on domestication and slavery of both plants and animals.
And this doesn’t mean that billions of people have to die, even though, as Lierre and many many other scientists and ecologists are pointing out evermore strongly, the earth is heading towards collapse and the likelihood of billions of people being displaced, if not dying, is very high for the next century.
Some great reads on the sentience of plants are The Secret Lives of Plants, and especially Stephen Buhner’s phenomenal The Lost Language of Plants, and The Secret Teachings of Plants, Highly recommended!
Thanks Matt. I will check these out. While practicing veganism, I do think of these things (plant suffering) as well as how many insects are killed for my practice of veganism. I do feel that these topics are very complex and I am constantly trying to understand how to best approach a plant centered diet.
Excuse me, Matt, referring to you saying “Chinook is right on with this”: Where you you place humans? on top and nonhuman animals and plants are below?
Whatever anyone’s religious beliefs are the brain does seem to be strongly associated with consciousness and sentience. Plants don’t even have central nervous systems.
For the sake of argument, assuming plants are self ware just like people eating a vegan diet would result in far fewer plants being killed for our survival.
I think it takes between 10 – 16 lbs of edible grains to produce 1 pound of beef.
chinook
i just wish that vegans would extend their circle of compassion to include not just farm animals, but wild animals as well, and whole ecosystems. because from an ecological perspective, it is far better to eat free-roaming bison from an intact, healthy native prairie, for example, than to eat crops grown where that prairie used to be
Chinhook;
There are over 6 billion people alive on planet Earth right now, with experts predicting it could double in 40 years.
There isn’t enough land right now for everybody to eat free roaming animals from intact or non-intact ecosystems.
Please don’t assume that vegans are pro big agriculture or that we don’t care about the environment. The exact opposite is true for most.
Keith acknowledges this, and thus suggests there are 6 billion humans too many. However, I don’t know how saying/acknowledging this makes any difference. She does says the best choice we can make individually is not to have children (p266, 267), but thinks that such “personal solutions” aren’t sufficient to save the world.
Keith acknowledges this, and thus suggests there are 6 billion humans too many. However, I don’t know how saying/acknowledging this makes any difference. She does says the best choice we can make individually is not to have children (p266, 267), but thinks that such “personal solutions” aren’t sufficient to save the world.
Charming. It reminds me of a passage Dicken’s wrote in his “Christmas Carol”. The Ghost Of Christmas Present just showed the horrified scrooge two emaciated child ghosts, “want” and “ignorance” as being the result of his attitudes. The Ghost then told Scrooge he should then think before he makes statements about the “excess population” because in the eyes of heaven ( relax, I’m not a Judeo-Christian ) he might be considered the “excess population”.
[...] and vegan blogs and message boards. Here are a couple examples of comments recently posted on the Vegans of Color [...]
I have no intention of offense to anyone.
So far, reports from people who have read parts of the book and comments supporting the book have left me an impression on me.
I am impressed by how weak arguments the arguments have been and how ignorant Keith/her supporters have been of some basic facts.
Again, I’m not criticizing these people, I’m making a comment about their points.
The points seem to lack a knowledge of basic facts and in many places seem to miss even a minimal depth of thought.
Dear Anonymous,
Since you are contributing much to this vibrant dialogue, could you perhaps share with us your name?
Best,
Breeze (co-moderator)
I saw this quote today from Time magazine:
Which is responsible for more global warming: your BMW or your Big Mac? Believe it or not, it’s the burger. The international meat industry generates roughly 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions—even more than transportation—according to a report last year from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
and…
If you switch to vegetarianism, you can shrink your carbon footprint by up to 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to research by the University of Chicago. Trading a standard car for a hybrid cuts only about one ton—and isn’t as tasty.
This article comes almost two years after the New York Times reported on findings by the UN that meat is a major global warming contributor:
In late November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.
I don’t think anybody would make the claim that the United Nations, The New York Times or Time Magazine is in the pocket of vegans.
As a self published author without any science credentials Keith has her work cut out for her trying to convince the public that vegetarianism is hurting the planet despite what the United Nations, The New York Times and Time magazine has to say to the contrary.
anon,
could you please link to the time or ny times articles? can’t find the cited quotes on either websites…
I became vegan out of respect for /individual/ animals. I won’t throw even one under the train on behalf of “deep ecology”, “sustainability”, “permaculture”, or whatever cute logo the boot stomping on an animal’s face happens to wear today.
The surest way to take away the rights of a group is to conceive of them in the abstract, as an amorphous blob rather than a collection of individual persons. It is this way with racism, with sexism, with nationalism, and with speciesism. Rand and her ilk put a bad name on individualism; nevertheless, for justice’s sake, the interests and rights of the individual must come first, /not/ the collective. That applies to animals as well as humans.
Wow, walkabout. “The surest way to take away the rights of a group is to conceive of them in the abstract, as an amorphous blob rather than a collection of individual persons.”
This statement will stick with me.
By the way, I don’t know if it is appropriate to post this here, but speaking of books related to veganism that others might want to check out, I am wondering if others in the anti-oppression path of veganism have read the activist handbook by Bruce Friedrich and Matt Ball.
I haven’t read the book, but I am going to his talk here in D.C. on Monday. Written by heads of PETA and VO, I at first didn’t want to go despite the invitation… but I read an interesting review of his talk posted yesterday: http://www.examiner.com/x-6041-Denver-Vegan-Examiner~y2009m6d1-Bruce-Friedrich-talks-about-more-efficient-animalrights-activism
Thought it was nice that the author ended by opening it up to debate and critical analysis, if praising the ideas presented.
Louche.
I have high respect for both coauthors. Mat Ball/Vegan Outreach has a reputation for getting the facts straight and being down to Earth.
I’ve been impressed with seeing Friederich in person. He is polite, handles himself rationally and seems to know what he is talking about.
I hope his being professionally tied to the publicity stunt train wreck that is PETA will not discourage people from reading his advice.
I’ve read some articles he has written on how to be a better activist. The advice is so solid and down to Earth you would never know it came from the leadership of that org
Is this really “solid and down to Earth”? Or is it more characteristic of “that org” (PETA) which constantly turns off many non-white, non-upper-middle class folks?
From the press release for the “activist handbook” bs –
“Friedrich gives specific examples of what to say in “mixed” company when the topic of eating meat comes up. He suggests that meat-eaters should be fed faux meat rather than ethnic or other less familiar foods as their introduction to vegetarianism, and he argues against questioning waiters in restaurants about the ingredients in menu items.”
So, first of all, don’t be vegan anymore when in company of others that don’t want to be inconvenienced by your veganism. Great advice, Bruce! Being a committed vegan in public must be so annoying to other people…
Second, definitely don’t cause a fuss over your ethics by simply asking about ingredients; that’s a big turn off to non-vegans, you know? I don’t want veganism to look bad by actually being a committed vegan! But what if I had an allergy? Should I still not question waiters because others will think I’m an inconvenience? Also, while out at a restaurant, should I laugh at a racist (or sexist, ableist, etc.) joke because others are laughing too and will be uncomfortable if I don’t? Damn, I just want others to like me : (.
And last, don’t feed “ethnic” food to meat eaters because they’ll (meaning anyone who is not “ethnic”) obviously want expensive, highly processed “faux meat”, right?..
Sounds like the same accomodation, assimilation, and alienation tactics that are prominent in PETA’s ignorant campaigns. Same story, different book.
I apologize for continuing this off topic discussion.
3 new Amazon reviews :
http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Myth-Food-Justice-Sustainability/dp/1604860804
I saw Keith speak last week in Philadelphia at the Wooden Shoe. I am not a vegetarian, but most of the audience appeared to be.
Judging from the reaction, I would say Keith makes a compelling argument. Nobody seemed to challenge her central thesis, which is that “agriculture” is imposed by people and destroys the natural ecosystems that form the regenerative basis of life on the planet. Also, because agriculture produces higher yields in the short term, it promotes population increases in a way that then feeds back into the need for still greater yields. This ties into the development of cities and industrial capitalism, factory farms, and so on.
She favors hunting/gathering and limited pastoralism as ways for human beings to live in a complimentary way with natural life cycles. She argues that limiting oneself to consumer choices like vegetarianism not address the destructive impact that growing grain and other crops have on the environment. She would additionally argue that there is some scope for meat-eating within one’s natural “food shed”: for example, someone mentioned the environmental impact of eating packaged tofu from Whole Foods, versus eating locally raised chicken; the tofu and other non-animal products shipped from long distances would make less sense from this perspective.
re: She favors hunting/gathering and limited pastoralism as ways for human beings to live in a complimentary way with natural life cycles.
isn’t that nice? easy to say when you live in rural MA. not so easy for most people who live in big cities. and if we are to all eat animals we hunt, then how long until the earth is Easter Island writ large?
it’s comical nonsense at best, dangerous denial at worst
I read the book three times and reviewed it for the nonprofit foundation I work with (The Weston A. Price Foundation). I have not read all the comments (so many!) above so sorry if I repeat points.
Both from her book and the emails I have exchanged with her, Keith is absolutely opposed to the factory farming of animals and all the horror and suffering that involves. She is also opposed to industrial agriculture, because it involves horror and suffering as well. Entire ecosystems are destroyed to clear land for grain agriculture (including grain fed to factory farmed animals). Species are extinct or endangered because of industrial grain agriculture. Countries are no longer able to feed themselves because of industrial grain agriculture and 160 of them depend on US and Canada grain exports for survival. For something to live, something else must die…every plate of beans and grains and tofu means rivers dammed, species extinct, microbes and soil life killed, insects killed, rodents and field creatures killed in harvest or picked off by predators following the harvesters through the bared fields.
Keith argues that few people know how the natural world works. Plants need to eat, animals need to eat. They take turns eating each other. The herbivores are supposed to be eating the perennial polycultures and returning nutrients in the form of urine and manure, and their blood and bones. Carnivores are part of the cycle as well. Producers, consumers, degraders, predators, prey, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores all have their place. We’re omnivores and our bodies need animal fat and protein. Because she’s opposed to factory farming and industrial agriculture, she is in favor of eating from your landbase. Animals can be hunted and killed cleanly (perhaps more quickly and with less pain than when wolves or a big cat kills), or raised humanely and slaughtered as quickly and painlessly as possible (if we dismantle the current slaughterhouse system). I’ve been to Joel Salatin’s farm and others; I’ve seen the cows and pigs and chickens thriving.
Sure, this view is anti-civilization because civilization (concentrating wealth and population in cities by pillaging the countryside) can’t be sustained. We’re almost out of places to deforest, out of oceans to vacuum, out of wetlands to drain, out of topsoil.
In reviewing the book I went through the bibliography and references extensively. She cites mostly secondary sources, however, I am familiar with a large number of those sources, which themselves rely heavily on primary sources and studies. It is a “grand narrative” in that it is pulling from a number of solid sources to persuasively argue that vegetarianism will not save the planet but hasten its destruction.
Thanks Jill for your contribution to this dialogue. I have not read the book yet, but am very intrigued by the synopsis of the book and the varied opinions about the book.
Yes, some animals no matter what we do. Vegans know this. Veganism is about MINIMIZING harm.
The answer is not to eat meat, but to make every effort to reduce accidental animal deaths from agriculture. It might be theoretical, but Keith’s world is no less theoretical.
Her anecdotes about incompetent vegan settlements, vegans who did not understand the world, etc. do not count against veganism in general.
She also was apparently dishonest about her Serengeti fence story. Read the link below.
http://www.postpunkkitchen.com/forum
/viewtopic.php?id=90752&p=1
Closing, I believe we should try when possible to simulate the Garden of Eden (with no death).
She claims on pg. 4 of the thread that she got this from a board that longer exists and it was serious on that board. However, the story she tells matches the Post Punk Kitchen sarcasm thread closely enough that her explanation is a little improbable.
We should try to minimize animal death (her claims about “credible” plant sentience evidence simply do not change the fact that plants lack anything remotely resembling a nervous system), but have to accept that it is a necessary evil in the natural world. However, we should not artificially create environments where animals are killed just to feed a species that easily can thrive on a plant based diet.
“Yes, some animals no matter what we do. Vegans know this. Veganism is about MINIMIZING harm.”
A diet of grass-fed, humanely produced meat is also about minimizing harm. What is better at creating nutritionally optimal protein and fat while actually improving the soil and species diversity in the natural ecosystem? A well-managed native-habitat appropriate ruminant species, or a multi-national agricultural corporation with its machines, pesticides and fossil fuel (or CAFO) fertilizer?
“The answer is not to eat meat, but to make every effort to reduce accidental animal deaths from agriculture.”
How many animal lives must be taken for a pound of tofu? Probably hundreds, not counting insects, nematodes and microscopic animals, and not counting the generations of animals that will never come into being because their habitat was destroyed for that crop. How many for a pound of grass-fed beef? 1/500th. Do the math.
“It might be theoretical, but Keith’s world is no less theoretical.
Her anecdotes about incompetent vegan settlements, vegans who did not understand the world, etc. do not count against veganism in general.”
If you want to cherry pick the best possible application of veganism as representative of the whole, (seriously, how many vegans out there don’t use industrial monocrop products like soy, grains, beans and most vegetables… anyone? No? Oh well, it’s the thought that counts) then don’t hold factory animal farming against meat eating in general.
I never mentioned factory farming. Besides, the vast majority of meat eaten is produced by this system.
The argument about free-range meat causing less death than carefully grown plant food is not valid. Gaverick Matheny refuted Steve Davis’ argument.
The actual article can be found here.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v0726k81713341m1/
Read the website below to understand more.
http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2008/01/contrasting-harms-vegan-agriculture.html
Microscopic animals and even insects do not count as much. Few would argue it is the same to kill an insect (even if they try to avoid it) as to kill a dog or cat (even if that animal is not currently owned by anyone). It is simply senseless that she wants to discount any separation between indisputably sentient animals who have emotional lives and microscopic animals who probably have neither of these, or at least lack the latter. Plus, individual insects nearly live only a few days.
Species diversity also is not important enough either to justify a system in which we deliberately kill animals to eat. The individual counts regardless of whether his/her species.
Please remember that most of the grain and soy grown in the world is currently grown to feed animals. One cannot blame vegans for most of the damage.
Of course, if you want meat protein and fat (which is not necessary), in vivo meat is being developed.
Her solution cannot accommodate the world population (especially considering that she favors a mostly carnivorous diet). It is not realistic to decrease the population much. In vivo meat could possibly provide unlimited amounts.
If we all start eating free range meat, then that is the system that will exist and a more life-affirming system (either careful agriculture or in vivo meat or even plant foods) cannot soon develop.
“Plants need to eat, animals need to eat. They take turns eating each other. ”
How comfortable for you & other humans to decide that… nobody is going to murder you & them. So might makes right, great…
“We’re omnivores “.
That statement alone makes your entire review dubious.
Here is one article on this non debate:
http://www.theveganlife.com/articles/comparative-anatomy.html
“Nature” is not a moral place. And yes, industrial agriculture is immoral as well. This doesn’t mean it is justifiable to murder others or to behave like your specie is superior to other species.
Another review –
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/06/12/18601536.php
New reviews plus video –
http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Myth-Food-Justice-Sustainability/dp/1604860804
new “OMG, she sooo makes me feel better about not being a vegetarian” reviews. yay. and on that killer of the independent bookstore, amazon, even better. you’ll see in the video (if you care to watch) her mockingly describe her anti-vegan views which are not based in science but in personal anecdotes and then go on to what is scientific, which is her discussion of modern agriculture. perhaps she just thought the anti-vegan angle would create more buzz and sell more books so she decided to wrap her discussion on agriculture around that, or perhaps she truly just hates her former self that much, or both. at any rate, thanks ashley for the empty plug for positive reviews
hmmm. someone’s trying to sell some books. of course we all know that the key to environmental health is more and more books written by this liar and her group of self-satisfied, over-privileged ecological narcissists and their never-ending and self-serving book of the month club. how many trees will be sacrificed to print their trite pablum before the world is free of them?
ps. ashley, please don’t repost that same link here any more. twice is enough. we don’t need amazon or keith PR people smothering comments here with sales pitches
sorry to upset you so much by simply posting a link to a video. Oh the horror!!!! Please take your frustration for the author and her book on someone else. I was only trying to help.
I just found this audio from Wooden Shoe Books for anyone like me who is trying to learn more about this author. I hope dingledork will tolerate my right to post a link. ; )
Runtime: (82:18)
Thursday June 4 7:00PM
http://www.archive.org/details/VegetarianMyth
I haven’t read the book yet… someone just recommended it to me today, and I took a look in Google and found this thread… which has been very educational, even absent reading the book itself.
The book sounds like an interesting, but very flawed, work.
I can’t help but agree that veganism or vegetarianism, in and of itself, won’t save the planet, and I get the argument that ecologically conscious meat-eating is superior to a vegan diet sourced from industrial scale agriculture… but I don’t get how one couldn’t approach being a vegan in the same fashion, and still have a lower impact on the ecology.
I myself, have made the argument that “organic” alone won’t save the world or make people healthier, etc., by simply asking them: if everything you buy in Safeway today were replaced by an “organic” equivalent, and people continued to eat and consume in exactly the same fashion, would the result be profoundly different? Conceding the benefits to farm workers, etc., the answer is: “no”. If we all turned vegetarian / vegan overnight, would the result be profoundly different? I think the answer is yes… and no: it *still* wouldn’t be sustainable.
The problem is the *system* of corporate-commercial industrial agriculture (to mention just one facet). I think most vegans and vegetarians get this, and do their best to limit their participation in it. Is there a “solution” to the problem that involves being able to sustainably support 6 billion (or 12 billion) human beings? I don’t know.
What I do know is that, right now, our species consume some ridiculous portion of all of the energy reaching the earth / resources of the entire biosphere, and leave only a fraction of it for all other non-human beings on the planet. To this extent, it is true that even as a vegan or vegetarian, participating in the system, as most of us are forced to do, we harm animals, and the eco-sphere.
All I can say is that (a) I’ve read the book (unlike most) and (b) I’ve tried the diet (unlike virtually all.) I was vegan, vegetarian, or semi-vegetarian for most of my adult life based on my conviction that it was “healthy.” It got me grossly overweight and type 2 diabetic. All efforts at sustained weight loss within a vegetarian, high-carb framework failed.
Finally, I got fed up and decided to try a carnivorous approach. I’ve lost 42 lbs. in just a few months and all-but-cured my diabetes.
I’m not insensitive to concerns regarding factory farming–in fact, I buy virtually all my own meat at local, small farms, and am gearing up to start raising my own. But the bottom line is that it’s hard to argue with results, and the arguments Ms. Keith makes from comparison of digestive systems are hard to refute.
Don’t feed the troll…
A person who writes a serious post about their personal experience is not a troll. Just cause you (and most here) disagree doesn’t mean that person is just writing to cause a ruckus. Jesus, just read the book. If anything, it’ll make your convictions towards veganism even stronger.
Sounds like a troll to me.
And let us not forget, a holocaust is on the line.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/lipid-hypothesis/the-vegetarian-myth/
Interesting how many of you are against this book, basing your criticism on random quotes from the book that are totally out of context. I did, in fact, make the effort and read the book and I must say it did manage to shatter some of my beliefs in vegetarianism, or at least question the depth of my knowdledge in a ever deep way. are you afraid of that? is that why you don’t even read it? come on, people, vegetarians are suppodes to reflect MORE than the average person, right?
I have to book. I haven’t read it, but I have mentioned before that I want to read all types of views about anything and everything and see what I can learn from them, even if I may not agree with everything.
Eat What you want!!!! Sexuality, your choice, tran orstraight or gay or lesbian.
Her point in the book is that the TOPSOIL is DISAPPEARING and SO is OUR LIFESTYLE AS WE KNOW IT as well as ALL OTHER CREATURES that we made ExTinCt. It is OUR REsponsibility to repaIR the soil OR, PERISH like everything else we are helping to destroy as we live our fat happy comfortable lives.
My understanding is that Lierre’s saying the vegetarian myth is that by being vegetarian we think we’re saving the planet, but as long as our vegetables are coming from agrabusiness that’s destroying the soil we’re basically re-arranging the deck chairs on the titantic. That is, vegetarians may not be destroying the planet as quickly as their carnivore friends, but the direction is inevitable.
I find her to be weak on the “so what’s the solution?” question. I’d like to see her promote the concept of one child per family world wide. The Chinese did it. Why can’t the rest of us? Yes – there are plenty of obstacles but they’re all less significant than our current path’s ultimate destination.
I actually stopped being a vegetarian after reading her book last spring. I have read 20-odd ecological books since hers and she is right. The main damage to the planet that derives from food (obviously capitalist industry and the military are also destroying the planet) is agriculture itself. That is the main point you should be understanding from her book. You walk into a Whole Foods Market for instance and what do you see? Miles and miles of isles of stuff made from wheat, corn, soy, rice – this stuff could only grow to us, the city-dwellers who eat it, by destroying millions of square miles of forest and country to grow one annual grain – thereby rendering hundreds of thousands of species extinct from eating those vegetarian foods while we bemoan someone eating a chicken, which was the result of one chicken death, yes, but not the extinction of chickens as a species or the health of the planet. I just traveled for many weeks to visit farms around the country and find out how they grew their produce. Even the large organic farms are based on the destruction of wilderness, which means animals in their millions died for food that we consider “pure” and “vegetarian.” That is the main point. When the indigenous in their wisdom ate water fowl, fish and deer, they knew we needed fat, and they knew those animals had practically all the nutrition we need without us having to render extinct millions of species so we can have our grains and vegetarian foods. Obviously the main culprit today is capitalism – producing things to make a profit. To restore our planet to balance we will have to abolish capitalism and also return to a sustainable society. And agriculture is simply not sustainable as it puts humans before other animals rather than allowing us to live AS animals (and omnivorous ones at that) in the fabric of what nature provides us in each given locale where we live. Many of you can’t stomach the idea of a society beyond “civilization.” While you bemoan my eating a free-range chicken do you know your cell phone towers kill songbirds every time you make a phone call? Do you know how toxic those computers we all type on (mine too obviously) are to Third World women who assemble them? Civilization, meaning a concentration of humans in cities, the origins of all human empires and class systems, will have to go – to be replaced by small communities that live sustainably. The evidence is as compelling as evolution, but evolution has a hard time settling on American religious brains. Just as vegetarians have a hard time accepting evidence about agriculture and meat-eating, because of the personal identity vegetarianism provides its adherents, a social psychological phenomenon. I am sure as the world goes more and more down the drain, and humans try more and more to create sustainable ways of living, vegetarianism and veganism will vanish as well. Get educated!
You were a vegetarian who thinks humans are the upper race (so it is ok to exploit and torture other species in the egg and dairy industries) and now you are a flesh-eater who has the same racists views. Not much of a change.
Do you really think vegans don’t know that a civilized vegan world is still a disgrace? Get educated!
By the way, it is “amazing” how every few days, a new(?) person writes here about him stopping being veg*n. Coincidence?
Interesting Daniel,
And what is it that you eat now? What is your current diet’s relationship to agriculture?
Total fat consumption has not gone down. Percentage of fat in the diet has gone down due to increased consumption of processed carbs, but total fat consumption has actually gone up. To claim that Americans have been trying low fat diets over the last 20 years is simply wrong, and is one of the low-carbers more tired arguments. Why does this stuff persist…in a new book much less?
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/NutritionInsights/insight5.pdf
Eric, take another look at the pdf you linked to. As of the last year for which that report gives statistics (1995), total fat consumption HAD gone down since 1965; it’s just that, as of about 1990, the absolute amount of fat consumption had stopped declining, and then had started creeping up. BUT: for men, average total fat consumption had decreased from 139 grams of fat/day in 1965 to 101 in 1995 (after dipping as low as 89), and for women, from 83 grams of fat/day to 65 (after dipping as low as 62). That looks like an absolute reduction in fat consumption per day for men of 37 grams, or 27.3%, and for women of 18, or 21.7%.
Have not read the book, but am interested in the argument if only because it could shed light on how people who believe these things think. Regarding the notion that civilisation is the root of evil could be correct on one level, I suppose there could be some truth in that there is certain behavior and motives that most people across civilisations classify as evil. But I doubt this is what the author is looking at. Among the anti-civ luddites there seems to be an idealized view of the natural world. That is somehow exists in a magically produced harmony instead of individual creatures behaving according to their own instinct for survival and advantage. Much of animal behavior when practiced by our own species is categorized as evil.
Review of The Vegetarian Myth
After reading reviews of Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth I simply wanted to ignore it as none of her arguments against vegetarianism were convincing. Then, I got a free copy, and decided to write a review for our vegetarian readers who may be asked by the eager carnivores“What do you think of the Vegetarian Myth”?
First of all, I am offended by the title “the Vegetarian Myth” as it is an assaults against a compassionate life-style which does not need a defense. Most vegetarians in the United States are well educated, peace loving minority group that deserves support not mockery for their food choices due to “their ignorance”. Imagine if Ms. Keith’s next book would be titled as “The Homosexuality Myth”? How would it be received?
If you have not read such pioneer books as The silent sprig, The diet for a small planet, Eaters digest and Diet for New America critiquing modern agro-technology, you may be impressed by the topics Ms. Keith addresses in her book such as how the mono-crop agriculture has robbed the top soil and it effects all the species on earth. She attacks the grain-centered agriculture as culprit of the modern civilization and stresses that conscious eaters have to find a better solution within their local communities to solve the world hunger. However, the topic land erosion and how to feed the planet has been better explained by the well-researched Diet for a small planet, by the famous vegetarian, Frnces Moore Lappe , few decades ago. If Ms. Keith re-reads this book, she may better understand why eating the grain/factory farmed animals is not an answer for a sustainable world.
I will skip all three arguments: the Moral Vegetarian, the Political Vegetarian and the Nutritional Vegetarian which encompass most of her book, partly because some of these arguments (such as the one where she links vegetarianism to the Holocaust) are absurd and others (such as “human intestines are not made for cellulose”) have been countered by more sound arguments or simply debunked. All of these arguments are so single-sided and flawed that most readers will not be convinced enough to check her sources.
Thirdly, I wish to point out her motive for writing this book. Lierre Keith tells us that she wrote the book ti offer a solution for a more sustainable and just world. But some people believe that she wrote it to make an easy buck. Others even stretch that the Dairy or Meat Industry paid her to write it (unlikely, since it is not published by a mega buster). Whereas, I think real motive (which she may not admit) was to share her unsuccessful attempt at claiming a life-style which she was incapable of supporting. I know some converted vegetarians who went back to eating meat and are honest enough to admit that this life-style was not suitable for them. Some got sick because they did not know how to prepare interesting and nutritious vegetarian food. Others say that they missed the taste of meat. In this book, more than anything else Ms. Keith communicates her emotional need for meat, her comfort food which she was raised on.. Not to my surprise, other ex-vegetarians are using her book as a passport and resume their carnivore diet without having to feel guilty.
As for the solution, Ms. Keith states that answers need to come from local communities on personal scale and not from reformed agriculture. Sorry, Lierre, your going back to hunting and gathering is just not a practical answer for the modern folks. As a city dweller, I take a child-like pleasure in picking berries from urban gardens, but I would hate to see an inexperienced hunters taking shots at wrong objects as Dick Chenney did few years ago.
First off as a vegetarian for 12 years and vegan for part of that, I will come out and admit that Lierre Keith’s book did in fact convince me to end this lifestyle. This was my identity we are talking about. Being vegetarian was essential to who I was and essential to my concern with social justice issues. I am currently a director of a youth empowerment nonprofit and am involved within the activist and social justice community. I am these issues. I came into the book skeptical but bought it, having heard nothing about the book. I thought the book would be a good challenge and would help me reaffirm my beliefs and confirm my convictions. After the first two chapters I felt panicked a bit. I hated Lierre Keith for making me question who I was and what I stood for and what I ate. I put the book down for a whole month but was constantly thinking about it. It consumed me. I picked it up again and finished it. I no longer hate Keith but she has destroyed who I am. But I now realize I was living a lie. This work will me to rebuild again. This book did change my life. It is the most powerful book I have ever read. I encourage everyone to read this book. Most of her facts and supporting sources are easily looked up and almost all are 100% accurate. Some of her evidence is definitely debatable and open for discussion but much is not. Oh, and people who keep talking about the human predator and who eats us, well you obviously don’t know much and didn’t read the book. We get eaten by worms and plants. We die so plants and worms and soil (etc.) can live. That is her point. The cynicism on this site is incredible. If anyone wishes to debate the themes of this book I would be happy to do so. But read the book first before you take me up on the offer.
One more thing: those who criticize her conclusions are blinded with rage and ignorance. The post above me talks about how the hunter gatherer lifestyle isn’t the answer. I would disagree to an extent. I think it could be an answer for many. She is also advocating, in so many words, permaculture. Could this save everyone? Well yes and no. There are too many people on this planet. We all know this. If done correctly it could work, but would mean everyone sacrificing in the western world and commitments from many to not have kids. This is oversimplifying it I realize. But, the vegan solution which can only be summed up as “more of the same” (which means monocrops usually) is much much worse. There are some vegan permaculturalists. Because of this book, though, there are a lot less. Sustainable farming doesn’t help the planet, it keeps it status quo. It flatlines the way we are. The answers are tough but the progressive movement needs to agree on something before it leads to (or further escalates) the racist dominant practices against the “third world” countries which will also eventually land on us. Veganism cannot be an answer to the problem. It is quite simply part of the problem.
I criticize her conclusions and I am not blinded with rage at all. I am simply well informed by a lifetime of study of food and sustainability that began when I became a vegetarian/vegan.
That lifetime of knowledge tells me that Lierre Keith is completely full of it, because I know facts that completely contradict what she is arguing for.
Keith’s main problem (which is frankly also a problem with many permaculturists) is that she myopically looks at her own life and what she sees succeeding, and then makes the completely incongruous leap to believing that because it worked for -her- this is how we would best run the planet. It same same mistake that libertarian economists make when they apply Adam Smith’s ideas the the macro-economy.
It simply does not work. Moreover, such economics cause mass suffering and devastation. And so would Keith’s prescription for the planet… Powerful conceptual theory does not always translate to the real world.
I am happy to debate you point for point and show you the truth of this.
Pick one at a time, give it your best shot. I’ll read that section of the book and then respond.
(Sorry I am not going to read the entire thing, because it would be a profoundly foolish waste of my time and I also don’t want to promote the book by purchasing it.)
Lierre dispells many ‘myths’ about food/acreage/water, etc. – clearly those repeating the myths have not read her book. Sure some Indians, etc. have been vegetarians – and have suffered poor health in respect to non-vegetarian Indians.
Vegan, vegetarian, or breatharian – whatever, fact is saturated fat, cholesterol, et al or not indicators of disease or cancer…issues of lectins, leptin resistance & the development of insulin resistance are key – all issues related to carbohydrates.
I’m not sure why vegans have such a disrespect for nature – to not see it as sacred as it is. It’s the typical western approach of domination – you think the way the earth has been for millions of years is ‘wrong’ and you can fix it by not eating animal! Ricdiculous and to me troubling – why are you so disturbed that death exists? Seriously. Are you angry at lions? Or the Massai, or the other handful of native hunter/gatherer tribes who are having their traditions encroached upon by agriculture….do you really think they are morally wrong? Egads!
Reading a lot of these posts reinforces much of Lierre talks about with regard to the ‘cult’ like aspects of vegans & the prospective brain damage.
Anonymous, since I did not read the book, are you saying “Lierre talks about… ” AND she also talks about vegans with prospective brain damage? OR are *you* saying this? IF so, what are your studies on this….or is this anti-veg{an} rhetoric?
BTW, most vegans I know are not so disturbed that death exists.
They know, and live a path to reduce suffering on the planet for animals and humans
‘Anonymous’, the stuff you have just written has almost no basis in fact whatsoever.
I challenge you to cite Keith’s sources. Sources which I assume she has foot-noted in her book.
Please name the source material that she gives for these claims with web references so we can look them up.
As to respecting nature, I have been an environmental activist my entire life, grew up in the mountains, and deeply respect nature. I have a deep understanding and knowledge of ecology and ecological science.
And this is precisely why Keith’s book alarms me so greatly. It creates a totally false impression that a diet with less meat is not better for the planet.
But, in fact, it is -so- much better for the planet and for fighting the climate crisis, that it is absolutely -crucial- that we get as many people as possible to eat as little meat as possible, as quickly as we can.
And vegetarianism is perfectly healthy. I have been a vegetarian for 25 years and my health is better now than it was before I became a vegetarian, even tough I was very young when I ate meat and dairy.
The -real- data bears all of this out, and has been doing so for decades.
If you and Keith are going to challenge that, you need to direct us to actual legitimate sources that prove your point.