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bookwyrm_kate's review against another edition
1.0
I'm reading this book because I am a seeker of knowledge and I appreciate Truth, even in painful forms. That having been said, this book was not logical at all, and contained twisted truths at best. The examples given are highly emotional, yet utterly ridiculous anecdotal evidence that the author was a non-educated vegan, and instead of eating healthy, whole foods, she admittedly ate bread for every meal (pg. 69), and had very poor health overall (she mentions alcoholism and mental illness in addition to reproductive and skin disorders, which she apparantly did not seek medical treatment for). She uses this as evidence that humans are meant to eat meat, when in truth, she had been a vegetarian who never ate vegetables. Admittedly, there are vegetarians and vegans out there who share her mistake, but the vast majority have made the decision to go vegetarian because they are highly educated about being conscious consumers and advocates of their own health. She attempts to make vegetarians looks like bumbling idiots, by making arguments like vegetarians think "Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey." (pg. 7) This is a ridiculous concept, and the vast majority of vegans would be highly offended at being villianized to the extreme of libel.
Instead of arguing the compelling arguments of Dr. Neal Barnard(Physicians Council of Responsible Medicine) or T. Colin Campbell (The China Study), she instead makes fun of a charicature of the idiot vegan. Her arguments include such concepts as [we exploit and kill trees by not eating and pooping out the seeds, as trees intended by making fruit, so we are really raping and killing plant life, therefore, what is the difference if it is a tree or a cow? You can not kill and rape a tree and say that I may not use a cow. ] She says that deforestation to produce grain is killing our planet and the topsoil, which is the truth, but she doesn't address the fact that 90% of the grain produced goes to feed livestock. She says that if we all ate vegetables, we would have to clear the planet to farm, but the fact is, we already produce more food than could feed twice the number of people on our planet, we just use it to feed our meat, and the rest sits in the supermarket until it spoils and must be thrown out. Surely you've heard the statistic that it takes 15 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef. She does not address that at all. She mentions it in her introduction, but does not address it.
Anyway, I could write an entire book refuting her uneducated arguments, but the fact is, hundreds of those books are already published. If you are curious, read her viewpoint, but I beg of you, don't abandon logic because you want her to be right. Her arguments just don't stand up. At times they even made me laugh out loud.
Instead of arguing the compelling arguments of Dr. Neal Barnard(Physicians Council of Responsible Medicine) or T. Colin Campbell (The China Study), she instead makes fun of a charicature of the idiot vegan. Her arguments include such concepts as [we exploit and kill trees by not eating and pooping out the seeds, as trees intended by making fruit, so we are really raping and killing plant life, therefore, what is the difference if it is a tree or a cow? You can not kill and rape a tree and say that I may not use a cow. ] She says that deforestation to produce grain is killing our planet and the topsoil, which is the truth, but she doesn't address the fact that 90% of the grain produced goes to feed livestock. She says that if we all ate vegetables, we would have to clear the planet to farm, but the fact is, we already produce more food than could feed twice the number of people on our planet, we just use it to feed our meat, and the rest sits in the supermarket until it spoils and must be thrown out. Surely you've heard the statistic that it takes 15 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef. She does not address that at all. She mentions it in her introduction, but does not address it.
Anyway, I could write an entire book refuting her uneducated arguments, but the fact is, hundreds of those books are already published. If you are curious, read her viewpoint, but I beg of you, don't abandon logic because you want her to be right. Her arguments just don't stand up. At times they even made me laugh out loud.
daniellesalwaysreading's review against another edition
4.0
The author was very passionate and she told her story in a very compelling way but I wish there was more concrete information on the environment, health, and population. Overall, it is a good place to start.
ksbookjunky's review against another edition
5.0
Don't let the title fool you! A great addition to Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser's work.
plcbaker's review against another edition
2.0
I had to switch to skimming this because it is just too jumbled to read. I don't agree with all her points but do agree on the main one: for us to live, something else must die. I also wish she'd acknowledged that people need and respond physically to different things, we are not all the same.
randijean's review against another edition
1.0
i got to page 200 and had to skim the rest because of how hard this book was to read. argument goes in circles, and i hate how defensive her stance is on this subject. also didn’t like the writing style. cringe
caseydmc's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
tense
fast-paced
3.0
Well researched,definitely hasssome good insights, but a bit browbeating, redundant in moments, with a Malthusian conclusion.
myrto229's review against another edition
3.0
I decided to read The Vegetarian Myth (Lierre Keith, 2009) after running across it in several blogs that I read. I was kind of reluctant to read it, though, since I normally dislike manifesto-like writings. I finally ILL'ed it last week, and read it during the last couple days of my bout with the flu/cold that put me out of work for a few days.
This book's basic premise is to refute the notion that becoming a vegetarian/vegan is a valid way for humans to save the planet. The author, who lived most of her life as a radical, feminist, vegan lesbian, managed to ruin her own health through her diet. Subsequently, she has been living now as a radical, feminist, non-vegan lesbian, and is healing herself slowly. She wrote this book to outline the major lifestyle shift in her decision to start eating meat again.
The book is divided into three big chapters, each of which refutes the arguments of a particular brand of vegan: the nutritional vegetarian (who believes that being a vegetarian is more natural for human bodies), the political vegetarian (who believes that vegetarianism will save the planet), and the moral vegetarian (who believes that "meat is murder"). While this organizational strategy is effective in marshaling her arguments, the length of the chapters and the total lack of any subheadings left me floundering at times in the structure.
Keith's answer to all of the vegetarians listed above is more or less the same. She says that all of the different kinds of vegetarian persuasions are based on data that originates in feedlot-style meat, mono-crop, grain-based farming, and Big Ag (a la Monsanto). According to her data, if humans were to engage in foodshed eating and eliminate the enormous, government-subsidized mono-cropping, we'd be both healthier and in a better position to save the world.
Now. This is a delicate subject, a fact to which Keith is not immune. Having spent 20 years of her life in which being a vegan was a major part of her identity (not just a diet, she's quick to point out, but her true sense of her self), she is sympathetic to the idea that her book may come across as offensive. In fact, this is one thing I enjoyed about this book: I was expecting the fervor of a convert, which I found, but it was tempered by her deep understanding of what makes vegetarians tick, so it was missing a certain degree of stridency that I was expecting.
[Not that this sympathy has got her far. Apparently she's lost friends and even received death threats, the irony of which is almost too much to process...death threats from the "meat is murder" crowd?!]
It seems to me that this book's most violent critics miss Keith's crucial point, which I'd like to restate because it's a strong one. In reacting defensively to a perceived attack on their dietary choice, the critics don't see this: no amount of planting corn and soybeans and wheat is going to feed the world. All it will do is continue to destroy grasslands and wetlands. Corn and wheat and soybeans don't constitute a balanced diet, either, so the starving people will continue to starve.
Keith's two-pronged approach to saving the planet is this: eating locally and sustainably, and severe population control. (The second prong is the one that doesn't get much press, but is obviously necessary too.) Whether you agree with her dietary choices or not, you can't ignore her main point.
This book's basic premise is to refute the notion that becoming a vegetarian/vegan is a valid way for humans to save the planet. The author, who lived most of her life as a radical, feminist, vegan lesbian, managed to ruin her own health through her diet. Subsequently, she has been living now as a radical, feminist, non-vegan lesbian, and is healing herself slowly. She wrote this book to outline the major lifestyle shift in her decision to start eating meat again.
The book is divided into three big chapters, each of which refutes the arguments of a particular brand of vegan: the nutritional vegetarian (who believes that being a vegetarian is more natural for human bodies), the political vegetarian (who believes that vegetarianism will save the planet), and the moral vegetarian (who believes that "meat is murder"). While this organizational strategy is effective in marshaling her arguments, the length of the chapters and the total lack of any subheadings left me floundering at times in the structure.
Keith's answer to all of the vegetarians listed above is more or less the same. She says that all of the different kinds of vegetarian persuasions are based on data that originates in feedlot-style meat, mono-crop, grain-based farming, and Big Ag (a la Monsanto). According to her data, if humans were to engage in foodshed eating and eliminate the enormous, government-subsidized mono-cropping, we'd be both healthier and in a better position to save the world.
Now. This is a delicate subject, a fact to which Keith is not immune. Having spent 20 years of her life in which being a vegan was a major part of her identity (not just a diet, she's quick to point out, but her true sense of her self), she is sympathetic to the idea that her book may come across as offensive. In fact, this is one thing I enjoyed about this book: I was expecting the fervor of a convert, which I found, but it was tempered by her deep understanding of what makes vegetarians tick, so it was missing a certain degree of stridency that I was expecting.
[Not that this sympathy has got her far. Apparently she's lost friends and even received death threats, the irony of which is almost too much to process...death threats from the "meat is murder" crowd?!]
It seems to me that this book's most violent critics miss Keith's crucial point, which I'd like to restate because it's a strong one. In reacting defensively to a perceived attack on their dietary choice, the critics don't see this: no amount of planting corn and soybeans and wheat is going to feed the world. All it will do is continue to destroy grasslands and wetlands. Corn and wheat and soybeans don't constitute a balanced diet, either, so the starving people will continue to starve.
Keith's two-pronged approach to saving the planet is this: eating locally and sustainably, and severe population control. (The second prong is the one that doesn't get much press, but is obviously necessary too.) Whether you agree with her dietary choices or not, you can't ignore her main point.
emiged's review against another edition
1.0
Well, that was...interesting...
Lierre Keith is a self-described radical, meaning that she basically wants to remake the world from (literally) the ground up. She lays out her idealized - well, not civilization because that's a bad word - but lifestyle for the world. While there are nuggets of value and interest in this book, they are mostly hidden in piles of sentimental, inflammatory, and repetitive filler.
The over-the-top sentimentality is eye-roll-inducing. Crying over slugs dying instead of eating your garden? Really? Plants "make meaning...are capable of agency and courage and self-awareness." Huh? Inflammatory language abounded, too. The book would have been stronger, in my opinion, (maybe even two stars) if she had just stuck to the facts on the topic at hand rather than waxing eloquent about the "love for all beings" and how her "prayer pulses in me like another heart" or ranting about how "the brilliance of patriarchy is that it sexualizes acts of oppression."
Structurally, it's not an easy book to read, either. There is no index, so when I wanted to go back and see what she said about celiac disease or irrigation I had to do a lot of flipping and skimming. The three loooooooong chapters really needed to be split into several smaller chapters or at least to have section subheadings on them.
The main thrust of Ms. Keith's book is about our food choices and their consequences. I actually agree with her up to a point; many of us don't fully consider the moral, political, or nutritional implications of what we put into our mouths. Especially in first world countries, we consume far more than our fair share of the world's resources and have completely lost touch with where our food comes from and how it gets to us. As a recovering vegan herself, Ms. Keith specifically targets the three main rationales for following a vegetarian or vegan diet.
In a nutshell, moral vegetarians believe that killing is wrong and, therefore, eating meat is akin to murder. They believe that animals shouldn't have to die to feed them. Ms. Keith points out that even a vegetarian diet results in deaths: rodents caught in farm machinery, insects killed by pesticides on crops, even microbes in the soil and plants themselves are alive. All life, she claims, not just animal life, is precious, but for one being to live, something else must always die. We must come to grips with the fact that we must kill in order to eat. But she doesn't stop there. According to her, agriculture itself is responsible for most if not all the evils in the world: imperialism, class distinctions, misogyny, and slavery to name a few. Not to mention the damming and draining of rivers and wholesale destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems. "Soil, species, rivers. That's the death in your food. Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole." So participating in modern agriculture by eating annual grains like wheat is condoning thousands of years of oppression and male domination as well as the death of the earth itself.
Then there are the political vegetarians who don't eat meat because they believe an animal-free diet is best for the environment and the only way to feed the number of people on the earth. Here Ms. Keith again lays the woes of the world at agriculture's feet. But she legitimately points out that modern farming takes a great deal of fossil fuel, a non-renewable resource, in the form of fertilizers, so being a vegetarian doesn't solve that problem. The farm subsidies that promote the production of huge surpluses of corn, for example, are problematic from a nutritional standpoint as well as for their effects on poor farmers in other countries. She starts to hint here about her ideal solution by praising Joel Salatin's ten-acre perennial polyculture in Virginia and bemoaning the fact that there are about six billion too many of us on the planet.
Finally she attacks vegetarianism from a nutritional angle, using her own twenty-year history of failing health on a vegan diet as the example. I actually thought this was her strongest argument as she makes good use of many scientific studies and demonstrates how vital nutrients are extremely difficult to include in a strictly vegan diet. For example, cholesterol, protein, saturated fat, vitamin D and vitamin B12 are all required by our bodies for growth and repair and come mostly from animal sources. Low tryptophan, also difficult to get on a vegan diet, can lead to severe depression. On the flip side, I know several vegetarians who are very healthy. One is even a triathlete (Hi, Nicole!). While I have my doubts about a strict vegan diet, I'm not convinced a well-balanced vegetarian diet is not nutritionally sound.
Ms. Keith frequently refers to becoming an adult, using our "adult knowledge", completing our "adult task" of saving the planet. But to be "adult" I think a solution needs to be realistic and have at least a snowball's chance in hell of being successfully implemented and what she outlines just doesn't. She advocates humans "stepping aside" and allowing the earth to return to its natural state from 10,000 years ago, tearing down dams, and ceasing all agricultural pursuits. Her three specific suggestions at the end of the book are: 1) don't have any children; 2) don't drive a car; and 3) grow your own food. I've already spent way too much time on this review, so let me wrap it up by just saying suggestion 1 is not a solution. Suggestion 2 is great if you're in a position to do it, but many people simply aren't. (I noticed that Ms. Keith's bio mentions that she lives in both western Massachusetts and northern California. Now that's a tricky commute on a bike or on foot.) Suggestion 3 is likewise fabulous if you have the climate and space to do it, but again many don't. And they all still have to eat, too. There may be six billion too many of us on the planet, but which ones are you going to resign to starvation to achieve your Garden-of-Eden utopia?
My grandpa used to say, "You have to start with the world where it is, not where you want it to be." Ms. Keith doesn't seem to have grasped that concept, despite good intentions and a deep desire to save the earth.
For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.
Lierre Keith is a self-described radical, meaning that she basically wants to remake the world from (literally) the ground up. She lays out her idealized - well, not civilization because that's a bad word - but lifestyle for the world. While there are nuggets of value and interest in this book, they are mostly hidden in piles of sentimental, inflammatory, and repetitive filler.
The over-the-top sentimentality is eye-roll-inducing. Crying over slugs dying instead of eating your garden? Really? Plants "make meaning...are capable of agency and courage and self-awareness." Huh? Inflammatory language abounded, too. The book would have been stronger, in my opinion, (maybe even two stars) if she had just stuck to the facts on the topic at hand rather than waxing eloquent about the "love for all beings" and how her "prayer pulses in me like another heart" or ranting about how "the brilliance of patriarchy is that it sexualizes acts of oppression."
Structurally, it's not an easy book to read, either. There is no index, so when I wanted to go back and see what she said about celiac disease or irrigation I had to do a lot of flipping and skimming. The three loooooooong chapters really needed to be split into several smaller chapters or at least to have section subheadings on them.
The main thrust of Ms. Keith's book is about our food choices and their consequences. I actually agree with her up to a point; many of us don't fully consider the moral, political, or nutritional implications of what we put into our mouths. Especially in first world countries, we consume far more than our fair share of the world's resources and have completely lost touch with where our food comes from and how it gets to us. As a recovering vegan herself, Ms. Keith specifically targets the three main rationales for following a vegetarian or vegan diet.
In a nutshell, moral vegetarians believe that killing is wrong and, therefore, eating meat is akin to murder. They believe that animals shouldn't have to die to feed them. Ms. Keith points out that even a vegetarian diet results in deaths: rodents caught in farm machinery, insects killed by pesticides on crops, even microbes in the soil and plants themselves are alive. All life, she claims, not just animal life, is precious, but for one being to live, something else must always die. We must come to grips with the fact that we must kill in order to eat. But she doesn't stop there. According to her, agriculture itself is responsible for most if not all the evils in the world: imperialism, class distinctions, misogyny, and slavery to name a few. Not to mention the damming and draining of rivers and wholesale destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems. "Soil, species, rivers. That's the death in your food. Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole." So participating in modern agriculture by eating annual grains like wheat is condoning thousands of years of oppression and male domination as well as the death of the earth itself.
Then there are the political vegetarians who don't eat meat because they believe an animal-free diet is best for the environment and the only way to feed the number of people on the earth. Here Ms. Keith again lays the woes of the world at agriculture's feet. But she legitimately points out that modern farming takes a great deal of fossil fuel, a non-renewable resource, in the form of fertilizers, so being a vegetarian doesn't solve that problem. The farm subsidies that promote the production of huge surpluses of corn, for example, are problematic from a nutritional standpoint as well as for their effects on poor farmers in other countries. She starts to hint here about her ideal solution by praising Joel Salatin's ten-acre perennial polyculture in Virginia and bemoaning the fact that there are about six billion too many of us on the planet.
Finally she attacks vegetarianism from a nutritional angle, using her own twenty-year history of failing health on a vegan diet as the example. I actually thought this was her strongest argument as she makes good use of many scientific studies and demonstrates how vital nutrients are extremely difficult to include in a strictly vegan diet. For example, cholesterol, protein, saturated fat, vitamin D and vitamin B12 are all required by our bodies for growth and repair and come mostly from animal sources. Low tryptophan, also difficult to get on a vegan diet, can lead to severe depression. On the flip side, I know several vegetarians who are very healthy. One is even a triathlete (Hi, Nicole!). While I have my doubts about a strict vegan diet, I'm not convinced a well-balanced vegetarian diet is not nutritionally sound.
Ms. Keith frequently refers to becoming an adult, using our "adult knowledge", completing our "adult task" of saving the planet. But to be "adult" I think a solution needs to be realistic and have at least a snowball's chance in hell of being successfully implemented and what she outlines just doesn't. She advocates humans "stepping aside" and allowing the earth to return to its natural state from 10,000 years ago, tearing down dams, and ceasing all agricultural pursuits. Her three specific suggestions at the end of the book are: 1) don't have any children; 2) don't drive a car; and 3) grow your own food. I've already spent way too much time on this review, so let me wrap it up by just saying suggestion 1 is not a solution. Suggestion 2 is great if you're in a position to do it, but many people simply aren't. (I noticed that Ms. Keith's bio mentions that she lives in both western Massachusetts and northern California. Now that's a tricky commute on a bike or on foot.) Suggestion 3 is likewise fabulous if you have the climate and space to do it, but again many don't. And they all still have to eat, too. There may be six billion too many of us on the planet, but which ones are you going to resign to starvation to achieve your Garden-of-Eden utopia?
My grandpa used to say, "You have to start with the world where it is, not where you want it to be." Ms. Keith doesn't seem to have grasped that concept, despite good intentions and a deep desire to save the earth.
For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.
thesmashbotdiaries's review against another edition
Very informative about food culture in America including vegan and vegetarian diets, industrialized food and waste, growing your own food and the old cliche of the circle of life. Definitely recommended.