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A review by emiged
The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
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.