The Vegetarian Myth
Wow.
It isn’t often that I write book reviews (have I ever? – serious question), but it isn’t often that a truly important book like Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth pops up on my radar just begging for one.
You may remember it from a brief mention I gave back in September, or maybe from Dr. Eades’ endorsement of it. You may have even already read the book yourself. If you haven’t, read it. And if you have? Read it again or get one for a friend.
That goes double for vegans, vegetarians, or anyone on the cusp of adopting that lifestyle. If you fit the bill, especially if you’re considering veganism/vegetarianism for moral reasons, drop what you’re doing and run to the nearest bookstore to buy this book. It’s incredibly well-written, and the author has a real knack for engaging prose, but that’s not the main reason for my endorsement. The real draw is the dual (not dueling) narratives: the transformation of a physically broken moral vegetarian into a healthier moral meat eater; and the destructive force of industrial agriculture. The “Myth” in question is the widely-held notion that vegetarianism is the best thing for our health and for our planet. On the contrary, Keith asserts that a global shift toward vegetarianism would be the absolute worst move possible. It’s vitally important. It’s definitive. It’s somewhat depressing, and it’s brutally honest. It also might be the book that changes your life.
Lierre Keith is a former vegan/vegetarian who bowed out after twenty long years of poor health and paralyzing moral paradoxes. Her original goal was to explore the question, “Life or death?” as it pertained to food. She, like most vegetarians, assumed she had a choice between the two, that it was an either/or thing. Eating tofu and beans was life, while a burger represented death. Life didn’t have to involve death – that was the weak way out, and the honorable (and difficult, and therefore meaningful) way to live was by avoiding animal products of all kinds. No blood on your hands or on your plate meant a clean moral slate.
Or so she thought. See, Keith began as a moral vegetarian. She never espoused the idea that meat was inherently unhealthy or physically damaging; she was simply a young kid who “cried for Iron Eyes Cody, longed… for an unmolested continent of rivers and marshes, birds and fish.” We’ve all heard of kids who “turn vegetarian” when they find out their chicken nuggets once walked, clucked, and pecked. Well, Keith was that five year old who bemoaned the “asphalt inferno of suburban sprawl” as a harbinger of “the destruction of [her] planet.” Hers was a deep-seated commitment to the preservation of all living things, not just the cute and fuzzy ones.
That expansive scope meant she looked at the big picture, and suffered for it. She never got to enjoy that oh-so-common smug vegetarian elitism, because she was too aware. Seeds were living things, too. They may not have had faces or doting mothers, but they were alive, and that meant they could die. Killing slugs in her garden was impossible, and deciding whether to supplement the soil with actual bone meal was excruciating. Unlike most of her peers, she knew that avoiding direct animal products didn’t mean her hands were clean. They might not be dripping red, but living organisms died to make that head of lettuce possible. Fields were tilled and billions of microorganisms were destroyed, not to mention the mice, rabbits, and other wild animals whose environments are leveled to make way for industrial farming. And so whichever direction she went – home gardening, local produce, or grocery store goods – Keith was contributing directly and indirectly to death.
What’s a moral vegetarian to do?
She briefly entertains studying with a mystic breatharian, hoping to (tongue-in-cheekily) learn to subsist purely on oxygen. She spends hours picking slugs from her garden and goes to relocate them. Nothing works. She keeps coming back to death.
“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.” Keith realizes this vegetarian plea (which “borders on a prayer”) is impossible to fulfill. She can’t live and eat without something dying, and that’s the whole point of it all. Death is necessary and natural. Circle of life, you know? Without death of some sort, life would get a whole lot worse.
Keith ultimately sets her sights on one of our favorite human “advancements” at the Apple: agriculture! Readers of MDA already know how agriculture altered our trajectory forever, but maybe not in such vivid detail. We focus on the lowered life expectancy, reduced bone density, compromised dental health, and the stooped, shrunken skeletons of our Neolithic ancestors, but Keith shows how grain agriculture actually destroys the land it touches. The Fertile Crescent, ground zero for grain development, used to be, well, fertile. It was verdant, lush, and teeming with life – including nomadic hunter gatherers. Paradise, you might even say. Animals grazed on perennial grasses, pooped out nutrients, and gradually those nutrients would work themselves back into the soil. It was a beautiful, natural life cycle that worked great for millennia. But once grains were grown and the land was irrigated, everything changed. Perennial renewable grasses became annual grains. Animals no longer grazed and replenished the soil. The top soil was robbed of nutrients and faded away. Irrigation meant crucial annual floods were disrupted or even halted. A massive monkey wrench was thrown into the system, and rather than coexisting as a complementary aspect of nature, man thus commenced the conflict with the natural world that rages to this very day.
And that’s the crux of her argument – that modern industrial agriculture is wanton destruction. Grain-based, vegetarian agriculture is even worse, because it attempts to eliminate a crucial player in the normal life cycle of the planet. Animals, which provide manure, calcium, and other nutrients for the soil, have to be part of the equation. Whenever a culture turns to a grain-based agricultural system, these same problems arise. Annual grain crops killed the American prairie and, for the vegans out there, they kill the millions of animals, bugs, and birds that rely on specific ecosystems to survive. The vegan’s soy burger has nary an animal part, but the machines that worked the soybean fields were greased with the blood of a thousand organisms. The vegetarian’s wheat crops feed millions, but robs the land of nutrients and destroys the top soil necessary for life.
Primal readers won’t be surprised by what they read. They may be horrified at the extent of the environmental damage caused by industrial agriculture, but they won’t be surprised (given agriculture’s poor track record with our health). Keith lays out an effective case against grains (and for a Primal-ish, low-carb, high-fat diet, believe it or not) on nutritive, moral, and economical grounds that’s tough to refute. The nutritional information will come as second nature, but the sources are sound and the references are powerful.
There’s more, far more, but I’d rather not spoil the entire thing. Just read it and rest assured that it’s worth your time. The book is a must-read, and a great ally for anyone interested in promoting a healthy, sustainable, omnivorous future. Read this book and distribute it to your vegan friends.
Primal approved!
Check out excerpts on Google Books, read the first chapter here, or purchase the book here or here.
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
I normally wouldn’t comment on a place like this, as my diet doesn’t bear much resemblance to the primal diet, but I just had to comment on this…
I, like many ethical vegetarian/vegans, used to be a vegan. I thought one cow not killed equals one animal saved. Nobody ever proposed a bigger picture image to me, and I never thought of it myself. To be honest, it was reading the reviews of this page that really made me think about “am I really doing the right thing?” Anyways, after thinking about it for a week or two I decided the arguments were right, and that I really wasn’t saving the planet by being vegan, so I introduced eggs, a little goat cheese, and eventually some meatloaf (Yes mark, I’m aware enough of your views on the oats and would actually be appreciative if someone could give me feedback on how to avoid constipation without the soluble fiber, as I had this problem when I tried to eliminate beans/grains from my diet). I felt amazingly better, I felt much stronger, more awake, my digestive issues resolved, life was good. However, I don’t think this is a realization many vegetarians are able to make yet. When I try pose some of the arguments in this book to vegetarians I know, all they see is “you now kill animals, I dont kill animals, you traitor bad person.” Perhaps it’s because it would make them somehow equal to other people, which terrifies them. I guess I was just curious if anyone else has has experiences with such people who just seem so closed to the idea that vegetarianism isn’t morally superior? Would be cool to hear others experiences, thanks.
I suggest that anyone thinking of reading this book fist check out it’s top review on Amazon.com
Apparently this book is only 8% backed up by reality.
Industrially grown corn is not even edible, it is used to feed the factory grown cattle (which they aren’t even designed to digest), and to produce high fructose corn syrup. So it has nothing to do with vegetarians. And if everyone was vegetarian, we would need much much less crops to feed everyone, which could be grown sustainably and organically. I have nothing against sustainably grown animals for food if someone wants to eat meat. Just industrial farming and agriculture – how it’s done and for what purposes (profits) – is the root cause of problems.
I would suggest, as has been stated before, to read the review posted on Amazon by an apparent Phd student on the apparent wild inaccuracies included in this book. The comment was far too large to completely paste in here but here are some excerpts:
”
1) pg. 140: The author states that “Carbon-13 is a stable isotope present in two places: grasses and the bodies of animals that eat grasses”. She goes on to suggest that since there is no evidence of grass “scratch marks” on the human teeth found, that they must have been eating animals. There are many flaws in this thought process. First, I cant even begin to explain the preservation and degradation issues present in examining three million year old teeth for ‘scratch marks’. Second, carbon-13 is an isotope found in ALL terrestrial and marine plants, not just grass. Finding high levels of C3 or C4 (which are what carbon-13 breaks down into) in human teeth only means that that human was eating large amounts of SOME plant, seed, nut, etc. (not JUST grass) or the animal that ate those. It is not as simple as GRASS OR COW.
2) pg. 142: The author states that there are no bacteria in the human stomach. This is simply untrue. In 2005 Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a stomach bacteria that causes gastritis and ulcer disease. There are currently over 130 known stomach bacteria.
3) pg. 146: The author states a “rumor” authored by RB Lee about hunter-gatherers getting 65% of their calories from plants and 35% from meat. She states that this “simply isnt true”. First, this rumor-spreader is one of the most well-respected anthropological/archaeological researchers in hunter-gatherer studies who edited what is considered THE tome on hunter-gatherer theory, ‘Man the Hunter’. He isnt some random hack. Second, saying those numbers ‘simply arent true’ is simply not true. Hunter-gatherers did and do inhabit a huge range of environments and likewise their diets cover a wide range. Some do follow the 65/35% number. Some eat much more meat. Some eat much less.
These are only three examples from a span of six pages. This pattern continues throughout the entire book. Fact is the authors ‘facts’ just arent believable (which, again, is a shame because a factual book on this topic could be powerful). She writes as if the anthropological and archaeological evidence she quotes is written in stone, when in fact many of these topics are constantly under revision or not well understood yet. Most importantly, I just believe that writing a book and promoting it as a factual, scientific account of a subject when it is not is doing a great disservice to your (mostly) unknowing readers. If you are not willing to put in the real research effort, write a book that is touted as a personal account and nothing more. Selling flubbed facts to people who are truly searching for answers, inspiration or (insert what you are looking for here) is just bad journalism.”
The entire comment is here with subsequent comments made and I’d recommend anyone to seriously consider reading this before buying the book.
I have my own views on the topic but for now, I’d rather leave it to the archaeologist/anthropologist who is qualified in the field.
I should preface this by saying, I am a vegan. I think killing/mistreating nonhuman animals is, all other things being equal, just as ethically problematic as is killing/mistreating human animals. I do not, however, find anything intrisically wrong about utilizing cruelty-free animal bi-products. I choose to be vegan because there is no for certain way to determine that your eggs or milk were in fact derived by cruelty-free means.
OK…
Personally, I roundly reject the idea that “doing what you ought to do” means the same thing as “doing what is ‘natural’”. First of all, while “Nature” may be an easy thing to grasp when talking about, say, the nature of a rock,talking about “human nature” is nearly impossible, since we are capable of deliberating about what decisions we will make, etc. Sure, we have biological functions, and psychological processes. But when it comes to determnining a basis for human behavior, the concept of “nature” is akin to the idea of “normalcy”. Simply put, the bases for these ideas are typically spurious. Moreover, even if one believed they had a clear grasp of what “the” difinitive nature of humankind is, it still would not follow that one “ought” to do what is in one’s nature. I’m not sure where this trope comes from, but it’s perevasive in our cultural mythos. Nevertheless, no matter how many people believe you can soundly base an ethic in a notion of human nature, it remains a flagrant violation of the “is/ought” gap.
I also, personally, reject the idea that “killing” or “death” – where these terms are understood in opposition to “biological life processes” – are, in themselves, morally problematic. I see no reason to maintain that “killing” a plant is any more morally problematic than sanitizing one’s hands (i.e., killing bacteria), or even tearing a piece of paper. The reason for this is that plants, like paper, and bacteria, don’t possess sentience – a capacity to feel pain, or pleasure. Since they don’t have any “inner states” or “subjectivity”, plants can’t possibly have, much less express, a preference about what is done to them.
Animals on the other hand (by which I mean all vertebrates, and some invertebrates like octopi) DO have such inner states. They are, like humans, capable of experiencing pain, suffering, fear, and anxiety. They do possess, and in most cases express, thier preference to not suffer, and of life over death.
Moreover, the fact that some can say with a straight face that “100% cruelty-free living is not possible, therefore I should not try to live as cruelty-free as possible” is baffling to me. So, the Platonic ideal of “the Good” isn’t attainable. Is this a reasonable justification for having no moral scruples whatsoever? for being lax with your struggles to be ethically just? It seems like just so much lazy thinking, and living.
It should be clear that defending the killing of vertebrates (and some invertebrates) for the consumption of thier flesh cannot be defended by the fact that the production of vegetables inevitably leads to the killing of inumerable slugs and insects, not to mention bacteria and the plants themselves.
I completely agree. Killing animals for food is wrong and also unnecessary. The death of animals in agriculture for grains and such is unfortunate.
Many people on here (I’ve read all of the comments) say that we should make meat growing as sustainable as possible. Why not make growing plants as sustainable as possible too? If everyone ate right (fewer grains because many people have cited that these are the problems) and these plants were grown properly we could minimize ALL damage.
Someone previously asked how the soil could accumulate. Let animals(ungulates) coexist, but when it comes to harvesting herd them away. Leave part of the field growing at all time so the system never crashes.
I know that this will be impossible to coordinate because lots of people here want meat. But saying that vegetarianism won’t work to save the planet. Granted I haven’t read the book, but I feel as if it would be very challenging to feed 300+ million Americans on organic, free ranged meat at the same consumption rates we have now.
So in short, eating less meat AND improving the way meat is grown (organic) AND improving plant cultivation must ALL be included if we are concerned about the environment.
Oops.
I meant “But saying that vegetarianism won’t work to save the planet” doesn’t make sense to me.
I didn’t read through all the comments (seems like this stirred up some debate!) but wanted to note that I read this and enjoyed it.
Pros: passionate and poetic author, and most importantly, gets the gears turning on some really important issues regarding diet and sustainability. This book is what I call soapbox-vegan-DEET… I respect a good argument about anything but MAN vegans can get on their high-horse sometimes, and here you’ve got a bunch of valid arguments to present to get some intelligent conversation-a-brewin’.
CONS: the scientific data is poorly presented. The nutritional stuff in this book would have benefited by a co-author with a scientific background. Luckily I’ve already read the science stuff, so I could brush it off, but a newbie could question the whole shebang based on this author’s presentation of the data. Also, this author is kind of extremist, and extremist feminist for sure, which kind of gets in the way. Her feminist comments aren’t even valid to the content half the time. Also, she recommends not driving a car and not having children to save the world, and I’m a big believer that our lives ARE our experience. Choosing to forego travel or child-rearing to save the planet really goes against my personal philosophy, no matter how “good” it may be. Just saying, brace yourself for some preaching that you may or may not agree with.
Overall a good read, and I’d recommend it to any vegan or vegetarian, just to get them thinking about a different perspective.
http://www.eatright.org/about/content.aspx?id=8357It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athleteshttp://www.spiralseed.co.uk/veganperm/
after only reading the review, i just got to notice that most people are forgeting, that these animals need to be fed. so anyone who thinks the giant amount of meat we are even now consuming could probably be produced by wild living, grass eating cows is just a brainwashed naive moron. the industrial countries (US, canada, germany (general EU) etc) are AT THE MOMENT importing corn and soye from countries like argentine who destroy vast areas of rain forest to support this export. there are a lot of antibiotics getting into the water and lots of grain or soye “destroyed” by feeding it to animals. intensive lifestock farming NEEDS industrial agriculture to produce these amounts of meat.
I know this is an older post and I’m not sure of what type of response I’ll get (if any). However, I found this review on Amazon and thought it was pretty good. I have not read the book yet. After reading Mark’s review I was interested in picking it up(as an eight year vegetarian thinking of a switch). In the rest of this blog it is clear that Mark cares about facts and loves to share new studies. So I wanted to bring this counter review into the arena to see what the reaction was.
To clarify, the bottom portion of this comment is NOT my review, but one I copied on here from Amazon.
I’m interested to hear what everyone has to say about the apparent gap from Mark’s review to this one.
I want to be clear about a few things:
1) I am a female.
2) I give the idea of this book 5 stars, but its execution 1.
3) I have been a radical vegan, a rabid meat-eater and everything in between (currently in the in-between)
4) I am working on an archaeological PhD on hunter-gatherer diets, subsistence, hunting and transition to agriculture.
I picked this book up after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals”. I thought it would be interesting to read a different perspective on the vegetarian debate. I found Safran Foer’s book to be much more geared towards the inhumane practices of meat while Keith’s book is geared more towards diet/health.
I admit that it took a very long time for me to get through this book, for several reasons. I purchased this book hoping to get something out of it. I am not an upset vegan who wants to hate it and I am not someone who bought it knowing Id love it. I was just neutral. There were two main reasons for my disappointment with the book. One minor, one major. First, I found the second agendas (specifically the radical feminism) distracting and unnecessary. I have nothing against the feminist agenda, but this wasnt the place to put it. Second, I found the book absolutely riddled with bad information, faulty facts and just plain lazy research (if you can call it ‘research’). As someone who intensively researches these issues on a daily basis, I found myself underlining items on nearly every page that I knew were just plain untrue or were ‘cherry-picked’ facts slanted to give a certain perception. This is such a disappointment as a really great case could be made for the author’s view if she had only put the real work into researching the book properly. Once you lose the reader’s trust that you are providing factual information what do you have? Ill provide examples:
1) pg. 140: The author states that “Carbon-13 is a stable isotope present in two places: grasses and the bodies of animals that eat grasses”. She goes on to suggest that since there is no evidence of grass “scratch marks” on the human teeth found, that they must have been eating animals. There are many flaws in this thought process. First, I cant even begin to explain the preservation and degradation issues present in examining three million year old teeth for ‘scratch marks’. Second, carbon-13 is an isotope found in ALL terrestrial and marine plants, not just grass. Finding high levels of C3 or C4 (which are what carbon-13 breaks down into) in human teeth only means that that human was eating large amounts of SOME plant, seed, nut, etc. (not JUST grass) or the animal that ate those. It is not as simple as GRASS OR COW.
2) pg. 142: The author states that there are no bacteria in the human stomach. This is simply untrue. In 2005 Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a stomach bacteria that causes gastritis and ulcer disease. There are currently over 130 known stomach bacteria.
3) pg. 146: The author states a “rumor” authored by RB Lee about hunter-gatherers getting 65% of their calories from plants and 35% from meat. She states that this “simply isnt true”. First, this rumor-spreader is one of the most well-respected anthropological/archaeological researchers in hunter-gatherer studies who edited what is considered THE tome on hunter-gatherer theory, ‘Man the Hunter’. He isnt some random hack. Second, saying those numbers ‘simply arent true’ is simply not true. Hunter-gatherers did and do inhabit a huge range of environments and likewise their diets cover a wide range. Some do follow the 65/35% number. Some eat much more meat. Some eat much less.
These are only three examples from a span of six pages. This pattern continues throughout the entire book. Fact is the authors ‘facts’ just arent believable (which, again, is a shame because a factual book on this topic could be powerful). She writes as if the anthropological and archaeological evidence she quotes is written in stone, when in fact many of these topics are constantly under revision or not well understood yet. Most importantly, I just believe that writing a book and promoting it as a factual, scientific account of a subject when it is not is doing a great disservice to your (mostly) unknowing readers. If you are not willing to put in the real research effort, write a book that is touted as a personal account and nothing more. Selling flubbed facts to people who are truly searching for answers, inspiration or (insert what you are looking for here) is just bad journalism.
Ill end this review with some facts and encourage any readers (whether you liked the book, hated the book or havent read the book) to always question whether what you are reading is true and to do some research of your own.
The author cites 207 references in this book.
62 of those references are websites (~30%)
18 are newspapers and magazines (~7%)
32 are journals (~15%)
95 are other books (~46%)
First of all, think about that. 30% of the references in this book come from website information. Five of those 62 website references were Wikipedia. Wikipedia! One was Google Answers. I wont let my freshmen students use Wikipedia as a reference in their papers, why would it be acceptable for a book? Like websites, newspaper and magazine information needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Of the 32 journals less than half come from well known, peer-reviewed sources. The remaining 46% are books, which can truly say anything the author cares to print (as this one does) and only show that the author is getting her information from another source (and another opinion) aside from the primary one. The point of this is to make clear that this is a book that is sold as (and which many positive reviews hype as) providing scientific, factual, intellectual knowledge on the vegetarian/diet/health debate. In reality less than 8% of the book is coming from peer-reviewed, fact-checked sources which can provide unbiased, neutral information.
If anything I hope this review encourages people to get away from the bias on either side, find factual scientific sources instead of second-third-fourth hand knowledge, check information for yourself instead of blindly believing an author, and to question published material and push for it to actually be factual if it presented as such.