El mito vegetariano: alimento, justicia y sustentabilidad

by Lierre Keith

Se nos ha dicho que una dieta vegetariana puede alimentar a los hambrientos, defender a los animales y salvar al planeta. Lierre Keith creía en esa dieta de base vegetal y fue vegana durante veinte años. Pero en El Mito Vegetariano argumenta que hemos errado el camino… no por nuestro anhelo de un mundo justo y sustentable sino por nuestra ignorancia.

Lo cierto es que la agricultura es un ataque implacable contra el planeta e insistir en esa práctica no es lo que nos salvará. A favor de los granos anuales, los humanos han devastado praderas y bosques, extinguido incontables especies, alterado el clima y destruido el humus, la base de la vida misma. Keith plantea que, si pretendemos salvar al planeta, nuestra alimentación debe ser un acto de reparación profundo y perdurable. Lo que comemos debe provenir del interior de comunidades vivientes, no ser impuesto a través de ellas.

El Mito Vegetariano es al mismo tiempo un libro de memorias, un manual de nutrición y un manifiesto político, y desafía todo lo que creías que sabías sobre alimentación.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Health, Nutrition, Science, Politics, Environment

360 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

Reviews

[Keith Akers · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an anti-vegan book which will be a difficult book for vegans to read. The text resembles more a stream-of-consciousness monologue than an organized discussion. The author is an ex-vegan, after having been a vegan for 20 years, and blames most of her numerous health problems (skeletal problems of some sort, evidently) and mental problems (depression, anger) on her vegan diet.

But this is an indictment not just of veganism, but of agriculture in general, and indeed our entire civilization, and needs to be read in that context. Obviously as a vegan I don’t go along with the anti-vegan part, but there are also several significant things she has stated accurately. Her book would also have benefited from an editor and an index.

I want to examine the book’s moral context, the author’s treatment of nutrition, and the author’s treatment of agriculture and ecology. Since this is a fairly minor book in the scheme of things (just a notch above "self-published") I also want to evaluate the significance of the book in the overall scheme of things. (Not to get ahead of the story, but it's more significant than it initially appears.) And one final introductory note: I unequivocally condemn attempts to suppress Lierre Keith's freedom to express her views. 

Most vegetarians or vegans, even those wanting to understand "the point of view of the opposition," are not going to get past a couple of pages in this book. First, the author adopts a tone which is condescending and hostile, and seems to delight in causing mental anguish to vegans. Second, most informed vegetarians will be able to pick out a mistake or inconsistency here or there pretty quickly, so even if they can’t instantly refute every assertion she makes, they will conclude that this book is not worth bothering with. This is a minor author, with a minor publisher, talking to a minor audience. (Sort of like me, actually.)

However, there’s more to the book than an attack on veganism. There’s also the environmental issues which she addresses, and in my mind this is far more interesting. She is against factory farming — she regards it as cruel and unnecessary, so her book can’t be all bad. The book certainly is not a defense of conventional livestock production, nor even a defense of "happy meat" (animals reared in non-intensive situations). In fact, she is against all agriculture, a fact which may not sink in at first, but which she repeats in definite terms at numerous points throughout the book. "Agriculture has to stop. It’s been a ten thousand year disaster, as all life on earth will tell us if we listen" (p. 255). This is a really radical position, to which I will return.

All food, she argues, requires death; even vegetarians have to kill plants (and sometimes insects and animals) to eat. It’s not so much a food chain, as a food circle; even those at the top of the chain eventually die and are compost for the plants that start the cycle over.But what about the suffering involved in killing? Although she’s not clear on this point, she evidently thinks that plants are just as important ethically as animals. She details all the way in which plants are like animals. She asks, evidently rhetorically, "At what point are you, vegetarian or carnivore, willing to acknowledge that plants are sentient?" (p. 90)

This view is problematic. Eating animals that have themselves consumed plants kills more plants than just eating the plants directly. But just think about the level of suffering: let’s say you have a live chick, a handful of sprouts, and a blender. Evaluate your reaction as you think about putting the sprouts in the blender; if you are very sensitive, you may have some qualms as you do this. But now evaluate your reaction as you think about putting the chick in the blender. Which causes more suffering, do you think?

Her discussion on nutrition is largely found in the section on "nutritional vegetarians." She attacks the idea that vegetarianism is healthy.

She generally quotes sources friendly to the Weston Price Foundation point of view. If you look at the endnotes, you can see that she seems to be relying very heavily on a small number of sources for her information. In one case, there are 33 consecutive footnotes referencing Gary Taubes’ book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories," with a single interruption; in another case, there are 31 footnotes from Richard Manning’s "Against the Grain" which are consecutive except for a single interruption. There is no attempt to engage or refute any of the standard vegetarian evidence from, for example, "The China Study." She does, incidentally, actually refer to the China study once (the study itself, not the book by T. Colin Campbell), citing it second hand and apparently without realizing that its author was not only a foremost vegetarian advocate but this book is considered by vegetarians to be the latest and greatest defense of nutritional vegetarianism.

This leads me to my next topic, what sort of person is Lierre Keith? Since she has made her personal experience an issue, this is a legitimate subject. It appears that she hung out with some pretty strange vegan characters.

She does not seem to be familiar with the literature of people we think of as vegan leaders — people like T. Colin Campbell, Brenda Davis, John McDougall, etc. She does mention John Robbins, but does not attack any particular statement that he makes.Who does she cite, then, in order to refute? One source is David Wolfe, whose web site styles him as a "Health, Eco, Nutrition, and Natural Beauty Expert," and features ads for supplements and chocolate. She even describes her encounters with "breathatarians" able to live just on pure air — who turn out, of course, to be frauds.

During my 30 years as a vegan, I have encountered some pretty strange vegans and some pretty flaky ideas, but I have never encountered any breathatarians.So she apparently got through her vegan period without encountering any of the standard nutritional information that even groups like VRG and PETA are handing out (or if she did, she’s not telling us about it). It is, of course, not impossible that her experience and information in these 20 years took her nowhere near this literature.

But it is certainly pretty atypical for an otherwise well-informed ex-vegan, who now is moved to write a book on the subject, to be so totally uninformed about the views of her opponents, to be so completely unfamiliar with vegan literature, and to have such consistently bad luck in her choice of vegan companions.

And what exactly caused her health problems? If during her vegan period, she had found a competent vegan doctor or dietitian (or any competent doctor or dietician willing to deal with her veganism), could she have been "saved"? She cites both some sort of skeletal problems (a B-12 deficiency?) and depression (too much sugar?).

O. K., even a doctor would be loathe to diagnose someone through the book they write. But if you are citing your own example as evidence, we need to know what the diagnosis was. She refers to "angry vegans" and attributes this to their diet and tryptophan deficiencies. But of course, without any information about her particular condition or her diet either, she can’t really meaningfully claim that the problems she had have to do with veganism per se, rather than with (say) her faulty application of the dietary principles. We all know there are plenty of vegans out there that are eating really, really unhealthful diets, but this doesn’t make a case against veganism any more than meat-eaters eating really, really unhealthful diets makes a case against meat consumption.

The author is really against agriculture, period, because it has sent us into ecologically unsustainable overshoot. "We are a species on [ecological] overshoot, and have been for ten thousand years" (p. 119). "[Jim] Merkel [author of "Radical Simplicity"] . . . suggests 600 million as a sustainable number [of people]. My guess is his number is way too high" (p. 129).

The current world population is estimated at about 6.8 billion, but let’s round that down to 6 billion. 600 million would be 10% of the current population, and that’s probably "way too high." So that means that we have to (hopefully, nonviolently) reduce our population by over 90%. Indeed, if you look at the population before the advent of agriculture, which was probably the maximum number that could be supported on a hunter-gatherer type of technology, that was about 3 million. Even at 3 million, there was evidence of increasing conflict between humans over food resources (see "The Food Crisis in Prehistory" by Mark Nathan Cohen). To get back to that level — assuming that even 3 million hunter-gatherers is sustainable — would mean reducing our population by over 99.9%.

All right, let’s get this straight. You’re going to reduce the human population by 99.9%? Just how do you propose to do this? I’m happy to help out — I’m not having any kids. But even assuming that the entire world agreed to it, I don’t see a realistic way that you could reduce the population by 99.9% or even 90% by nonviolent means without agriculture, at least as an interim measure, for quite a while. And as long as we have agriculture, what would be relatively more sustainable?

And if a hunter-gatherer utopia is her objective, what is this going to look like? Once we’re back to 3 million humans, will there be books? Will there be civilization at all? Based on her other statements, one would assume not.

This is not an impossible vision — I think that Derrick Jensen (who enthusiastically endorsed the book) actually foresees something like this happening. But, don’t we need just a few additional details here about what this means? Will there be health care resembling what we have today? Will there be birth control? Will there be industry or making of tools?

In other words, reducing the population to this level provokes a flood of questions that basically have nothing to do with the vegan question at all. If this is really her vision, then vegans are the least of her problems. I would have preferred her to talk, just a bit, about the future world of hunter-gatherers (or whatever) that she envisions. I really wonder if the people endorsing her book (or reviewing it) have really read it, except Derrick Jensen, with whose point of view the book really is consistent.

Now for the final question. How significant is this book? In the context of the public at large, not very significant at all. But most people are still pretty oblivious to the impending financial collapse and energy decline. We need to look at this as a contribution to the debate in the energy descent community. This is where vegans need to start paying attention: as a rule, most vegans are just as ignorant as the general public to peak oil and related issues, other than climate change. 

This book echoes a lot of the ideas throughout at least the internet portion of the "Transition" movement (preparing for a low-carbon future). People are bad-mouthing veganism and talking about backyard chickens, goats, and all manner of other livestock. (Fewer people have actually tried this, and I think that these options are going to be less attractive once it becomes apparent what is really involved.) There is talk about "holistic resource management," meaning livestock management, which will actually increase the number of cattle on the land.

An emphasis on livestock agriculture in the energy descent is just a really unsustainable idea, and I’m not talking about just or even mostly Lierre Keith. This whole area just hasn’t been thought out. People are just putting out plausible-sounding arguments because it allows them to continue their meat-centered diets and still claim to be radical environmentalists.

Livestock grazing is as old as the hills and is the single most destructive form of human activity on earth. (See Akers, "A Vegetarian Sourcebook," 1983). Much of the biologically "productive" area on the planet has been degraded or destroyed by livestock agriculture. Look at much of the Sahara Desert, look much of the "desert" in the American southwest — this is a result of overgrazing. Vague and unsupported statements to the effect that "well managed pasture builds soil" or that "we need perennial polycultures" are not going to convince me.

This whole discussion appears to be a way to continue the nutritional status quo (everyone gets to eat meat, and lots of it) under a facade of environmentalism. So while the most interesting feature of Lierre Keith’s new book to me is its radical demand for population reduction, I suspect that its appeal in the energy descent community will mostly be the appeal of continuing our meat consumption behind a "green" facade.

[missy jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Get ready for my longest review ever. And if you feel like following what I expect will be a lively conversation, I'm also going to post it on ourmotherskeeper.com.

I am giving this book 2 stars although on balance I disliked it. There were pieces and passages that I found lovely and illuminating, and they deserve a star. But on the whole, this book was packed full of false choices.

From the title onward, Keith aims her knife blade in strange directions. The foundational argument of this book is based on an anti-agriculture, anti-civilization critique. She clearly has a bone to pick with veg*ns, but the whole first half of the book I kept thinking: If you really want to critique industrial agriculture, why focus on vegans? The vegans I know put way more thought into their food sources and choices than the average American does. The vegans I know are more likely to grow their own food or eat locally-grown food. It's not like vegans are the only ones eating industrial monoculture crops like corn and soy. In fact, I guarantee I eat less of those things than any of my neighbors. So why does the book have a smug, condescending, join-with-me-meat-eaters-of-the-world-in-laughing-at-the-ignorance-of-the-veg*ns tone?

In fact, I had a hard time figuring out who her target audience really was. Was she aiming her book at veg*ns with the hope of converting the back to meat-eating? (If so, maybe it would have been wise to be less assuming and insulting.) Was she aiming it at Americans who eat meat, the regular old factory-farmed way? (Which is the vast, vast majority of meat-eating Americans, and so maybe it would have been a good idea for her to spend a little bit of time on why the factory farming system is so bad—she acknowledges that it is in passing, but then assumes that base of knowledge from her readers. And obviously the deplorable nature of factory farms is not common knowledge, or else why would they still exist?) Or was she aiming for fellow anti-civ sympathizers?

Keith makes repeated references to the “ignorance” of veg*ans (“What vegetarians need to understand is…”) then follows them up with mind-numbingly obvious factoids. (Yes, veg*ns know that insects die in the agricultural process. Yes, vegans know that cows eat grass. These are not revelations.) I agree with her that most of us are woefully disconnected from our own food chains. Not just veg*ns though; the vast majority of people living in industrialized societies are. The parts of her book where she tried to help the reader connect with the roots and processes of plants and soil were, for me, some of the most touching and impactful.

In the end, the strength of Keith’s argument rests upon her efforts to remake the world from the bottom up. Her vision may make sense in the context of a world inhabited by only 3 million people (I think that’s the number she said would be ideal) divided into self-sufficient non-industrial bioregional communities. Perhaps post-apocalypse she and I could have a very different conversation. When you try to apply her arguments to the present day, though, unless you include a clause of voluntary human extinction, they don’t make as much sense. What would Keith’s non-agricultural vision of the world look like right now, applied to the 7 billion people who actually exist? What are concrete steps that people can take to eat in more ecologically friendly ways? (No, eating more steak is not an answer that works in the here and now.)

(Also and completely tangentially, I’m sorry if this is an unfair misreading of her point, but it’s hard to take seriously her stated concerns about infant mortality and decreased human fertility due to soy consumption when her book also states the need to eliminate 99.9% of the people in the world in order for the world to survive.)

My overall sense is that this book will not produce very many anti-civ, anti-ag activists--because that is a really, really hard thing to commit to. Rather, it will create readers whose consciences are assuaged into meat-eating as an ethical choice--because that is an easy thing to commit to.

Every pro-meat eating argument starts with the disclaimer, “Of course, factory farming is reprehensible, but…” But most people don’t go away from books like this committed to move to the country and raise their own animals. The diluted take-home message ends up being that our ancestors ate meat so we should too (a la paleos) or that you really can’t live without animal products so you shouldn’t bother trying (a la Weston Price Foundation).

In other words, when people read Pollan and Kingsolver and Keith, they may come away from the books with a sense that it would be more ethical for them to raise and slaughter their own animals--but of course they can't do that [they have a job, after all] and so the message that remains is the moral justification for meat-eating. So maybe one year for Thanksgiving they buy a "humanely-raised" local turkey, and then feel that they have done their part. Or maybe they occasionally buy cage-free eggs at the grocery store, not realizing that's basically meaningless to the chickens involved. Then the rest of the time they continue to eat the daily special at the restaurant and rush to the grocery store to take advantage of "meat sales" and stop by McDonalds or Burger King on the way home from work.

Listen, this may be an unpopular veg*n position to take, but my beef (haha) is not with Keith’s choices, necessarily. [Some more staunch animal abolitionists will probably disagree with me here, and I welcome hearing their opinions, too.] She decided to feed herself from the ground up, an effortful and responsible choice. My big issue is when she starts telling other people—people who don’t have the resources, gumption, know-how or commitment to follow suit—that eating animals is going to save the world. There may be a handful of people [I know there are a couple of them who read this blog and will probably be commenting] who follow her lead. But most people will just order a steak the next time they’re at a restaurant, and feel even less guilty about it.

And so this is exactly what I'm trying to say: In a world where the vast majority of people are not willing or able to live as full-time sustenance farmers, raising and slaughtering their own animals for food, a defense of “ethical meat-eating” is really no more than a defense of meat-eating. And the industrialized style of meat-eating is frankly indefensible.

Really, I have this lingering sense that the "ethical meat" argument must be a dream for the meat industry. It doesn't provide any solid critique of meat-eating as a general practice--and factory farms don't care if people have vaguely negative opinions of them, as long as everyone keeps buying their products. And because it is so difficult to avoid factory farmed "products," the "ethical meat" argument (and its inherent supposition that meat can, in fact, be ethical) provides people with some psychological wiggle room, keeping them from considering whether they should eat animals at all.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[else fine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the more controversial books we carried this year. A quick look at the online reviews will tell you the same thing - people are worked up about this thing. Lierre Keith is a brave, brave woman. I wouldn't want to pick a fight with every vegan in the world at the same time.

What I think has been lost in the furor is that her point - the heart of her point, at any rate - is very simple, and very hard to argue with. We take turns eating and being eaten - we consume today, but will be consumed in our turn. If you stop to think about this simple fact, and how it weaves all of us on earth together into an unending cycle of renewal and need, it can give you shivers. It's holy. And it's an idea that encourages us to be more reverent towards all of our food - not just the food with faces, but all of it, the seeds and fruit and leaves, and even the soil itself, richly and deeply alive.

To be reverent and respectful is to think about where your food comes from. It's not enough to give up animal products and think you're doing the world any favors. Monocrops and industrial agriculture, reliant as they are on huge amounts of water, fossil fuel, and chemicals, are not sustainable. And they're slaughtering animal and insect life all around them, so that even your vegetarian meal carries a heavy toll. And who is growing and processing your food, and how? How much fossil fuel is used to get it to your plate? It's at the very least a gross mistake for vegans to feel that their dietary choices have exempted them from considering these things. At worst it's a self-serving lie.

Honestly, I don't care if people are vegan or not. I have known healthy vegans and seriously emaciated unhealthy vegans, who really just needed to eat a steak or something. Keith's nutritional arguments in favor of meat eating are well constructed and meticulously footnoted, but I think it's a little beside the point. Which is hard to argue with: we are not, as a people, healthy, and we are quickly fucking up the earth.

There are some flaws in the book. People have taken issue with her flowery, personally revealing narrative, but I thought it was lovely and compassionate. She could have drawn from a wider range of books for her research, but that's a minor quibble. A larger point of issue is her attack on agriculture. It seems clear that the advent of large scale single crop agriculture brought with it a decline in ecological and human health. But the hunter gathering model, which she favors, isn't an entirely unagricultural enterprise. Many such societies managed certain resources - plants, berries, shellfish - for maximum yields, or controlled the environment in other ways, like by burning. If this is the model to strive for - semi-wild, with a diversity of plant and animal life mixed in (including meat and dairy animals) - then what we're looking at is starting to sound a lot like permaculture. Right? Maybe I'm just being too picky about terminology.

Anyway, there is a great deal to chew on in this book. I can see it stimulating some great discussions, and helping spur people to action. It's unfortunate that the online discussions I've seen have sort of devolved into mudslinging, though given the deep philosophical feelings of the vegan community, it's not surprising.

[Ellen Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 20-year vegan who started eating meat out of a desparate attempt to heal her constant and chronic health problems, the author had her eyes opened to both the damaging effects of a grain-based diet and the devastation agriculture has wreaded on the planet. And now she wants to let everyone know how she, and the vegetarians still practicing, got it all wrong. For one thing, she totally skewers the claims that eating a grain-based diet is better for the environment. The destruction of topsoil and entire ecosystems on behalf of wheat, barley, corn, etc. is a disaster on a par with global warming. I used to be vegetarian in my younger days, and I remember hearing that a huge amount of grain had to be fed to a cow to bring it to maturity, and that this was incredibly wasteful. This author points out that a cow is not supposed to be eating grain at all, since it's a ruminant who's natural diet is grass. And grass grows for free. But we don't let cattle freely graze because we need the land for agriculture, and since corn is so cheap to grow, it's given to the cattle instead of grass. Grass-fed beef doesn't present this problem of overconsumption. Also, the production of wheat, and therefore the bread on sale at the store, is highly dependent on fossil fuels because the topsoil is so depleted farmers use chemical fertilizers created by fossil fuels.

As for the health effects of a grain-based diet compared with a meat diet, she lays out the substanial evidence that meat is far superior. There's no contest. This is a good companion book to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which goes even further into the nutrition aspects of grains as opposed to meat. The author's heart is clearly in this book, as it was in her devotion to vegetarianism. It's really hard-hitting. She's on a mission to wake people up.

[Damien · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lierre Keith is a sick person. She was probably sick before she became a teenage vegan, and probably made herself even sicker by crying over baby ants. For 20 years she (by her own admission) was an ignorant vegan. So ignorant, that if I had met her then I would have laughed her out of my vegan club (if I had one that is). Now she is just an idiot, a very sick idiot who feels better now that she eats nothing but meat. Natural meat according to her, since her body is incapable of digesting plant life. But that is okay, because the plants send her all the chemicals she needs from them.
According to Keith, vegetarians don't know that COWS EAT GRASS. And THAT is the basis of "The Vegetarian Myth". Well, practically every book I have read about veganism has flat out said that cows should eat grass, and NOT the grains that are being fed to them in factory farms. She also tells us that vegetarians think the lions of the Serengeti can survive on grass because they have seen house cats eat grass! Every vegan I know has pretty much accepted the fact that natural carnivores eat other animals, and none of them are as horrified as she was in her 20 years of vegan sickness. Yes, we all know that death exists, that it is a part of life, that there is no way to escape it. I can't imagine what kind of vegetarians actually did allow her into their club but I'd just as soon feed them to the lions of the Serengeti than have to hear the nonsense that she claims they said.
So she was an incredibly stupid vegan who hung out with other stupid vegans and decided to assume that all vegans were just as stupid. None of the vegans I know, and I know A LOT, every said any thing as stupid to me as she has written.
A third of this book is written like REALLY BAD Goth poetry- SERIOUSLY!- while another third of it is mostly quotes from others and looks as if she copied it all from some nerd's homework. Most of it is a diatribe against agriculture, which for the most part I agree with. The remaining third is so incredibly insulting, I'm starting to wish the people who pied her added thumbtacks to the vegan whipped cream!
She is implying that vegans are totally responsible for agriculture, and in turn, slavery and deforestation. She further implies that the Mississippi River would be a crystal clear wellspring of life joyous life if it weren't for wheat and soy and that vegans are responsible for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. She doesn't for once mention that industrial pollution of several major cities from Minneapolis to New Orleans could possibly have any thing to do with it. So she doesn't flat out say that it's all the fault of vegans and vegans alone, but it's obvious that she's baiting the reader to make the connection.
Her logic is full of holes and contradictions. She tells us we can't be herbivorous because our digestive system is not like a cow's. Then tells us that our bodies are exactly like carnivores, from mouth to rectum. Then tries to sidetrack you by quoting scientific sounding mumbo jumbo that may or may not actually be true, about the amazing things that plants do- plants that no human really eats, I might add, to show you that vegetables also have rights.
She really seems to hate wheat. Actually, many vegetarians I knew since the 90s have explained to me how dangerous and destructive wheat is, long before I met vegan raw foodists, way before the current gluten free trends of this year. I think that permaculture is the best solution that the world has today, and that we need to be in a symbiotic relationship with animals, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse to eat them. And many vegetarians these days are limiting their intake of soy.
There might be people whose physical constitution actually does require excessive protein and other stuff that comes from dead animals, but I'm not one of those people. But then again, I never doubled up on grains and soy products. Instead, I increased my intake of fresh raw fruits, lightly cooked green vegetables, wild edibles and herbs and spices. The more healthy my organic vegan diet, the better my body has felt. But like I said, Lierre Keith is a very sick person.
And if I think she was an idiot the first 36 years of her life, why should I believe any thing she learned in the last 10? Chapter 4 is one long "Doctors Michael and Mary Dan Eades say this" and "Drs. Eades say that". I have a hard time trusting any nutritionalist, let alone a pair whose names remind me of Donnie and Marie, who have commercials trying to sell you a cooking machine called the Souz Vide. Oh, and she even reveres Dr. Atkins. She literally puts the word "revered" before his name.
She claims that vegetarians refuse to use manure to fertilize their crops. Which is a flat out lie. If any thing, they refuse to get manure from factory farms, and then there are strict vegans who decide not to care where the manure came from FOR THE TIME BEING. If animal rights people are putting up shelters for animals like cows, pigs, sheep etc., what makes her think we treat their shit as being so sacred that we won't use it now that we know we need it? Even Hare Krishnas, who refuse to kill cows, tell us that cow manure is just what the soil needs.
According to Keith, 40,000 year old cave paintings of bison prove that our ancestors ate meat. Okay sure. I guess we also ate our own hands and lots of erect penises too. Another fun fact: as soon as our fruitarian ancestors dropped from the trees, they used their opposable fingers to pick up rocks to bash in skulls and eat brains. That's what made us humans, you know. All the vegetarian books compare our bodies to natural carnivores and natural herbivores and claim that humans are closer to herbivores in general. Keith takes us one step closer by comparing us to dogs and sheep to show us that we are almost identical to dogs. (Yay! Score a point for gangstah rap!!) However, she skips over our similarities with other primates with a swift vagueness that is suspicious.
If some how this book can influence enough people to end factory farming soon, then let them all eat as much meat and creme brulee as they want. I will even help her to end industrial agriculture, so long as she keeps her talking to a minimum. I would be happy to see the entire farm land east of the Mississippi River allowed to turn back into a prairie. So would most vegans I know.
I first wondered how this book saved Derrick Jensen's life, since he never was a vegetarian and never intended to be. Now I know; since it goes on and on about how bad wheat, corn and soy are, maybe he thinks these things were killing him but now he'll never touch the stuff again. In fact, she hates wheat, corn and soy so much I've concluded that all she ate as a vegan for 20 years was nothing but wheat, corn and soy; with maybe a few fruits and vegetables as condiments, maybe? I'm also willing to bet that she is probably allergic to gluten, which is probably why it made her sick.
One thing that she got right was the myth that all the grains fed to factory farmed animals could actually be used to feed the world. Maybe the math does add up, but none of us intelligent vegans ever thought that it was more than hypothetical, or we really weren't concerned about those starving people, or we knew that capitalism would not let it be possible even if we really wanted to give it to starving third world countries.
The worse part about this book is not what she says, but all the important things she never bothers getting around to saying.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Ginny Messina · Rating 1 out of 5]

(I reviewed this book back in the fall on my blog. This is a slightly tweaked version of that post.)

Lierre Keith suffers from numerous chronic health problems. Unable to secure a diagnosis for most of them, she decided that the vegan diet she had followed for twenty years was to blame. But she wasn’t content to add a few animal products back to her diet. Instead, she set out to prove that healthy diets require copious amounts of animal foods and that small-scale animal farming is the answer to sustainability. To prove it, she has cobbled together information from websites (yes, she actually cites Wikipedia!) and a few popular pseudoscientific books.

I read the section on nutrition first. Since it’s my area of expertise, I figured it would give me some idea of the quality of her research and analysis. But quality isn’t at issue here because there is no research or analysis. Keith doesn’t bother with primary sources; she depends almost exclusively on the opinions of her favorite popular authors, which she presents as proof of her theories.

For example, when she writes about evolution as it affects dietary needs, and suggests that “the archeological evidence is incontrovertible,” she is actually referencing the book Protein Power , written by two physicians who have no expertise in evolution or anthropology. It’s a neat trick, of course, because we have no idea where the Protein Power authors got their information. By burying all of the actual studies this way, she makes it laborious for readers to check her facts.

I doubt she did this on purpose. And I don’t think she was being sloppy or lazy, either. She just doesn’t understand how complex the research is and she certainly doesn’t know much about basic nutrition. Worse, her conclusions are indebted to the Weston A Price Foundation, a non-credible group that bases its recommendations on the opinions of a dentist who wrote up his observations of indigenous populations in the 1930s.

As a result, we get page after page of contradictions, fabrications, and misinterpretations. For example, Keith is woefully confused about fats, believing that saturated fat is needed for absorption of vitamins and minerals and that humans have a dietary need for cholesterol (Neither saturated fat nor cholesterol are needed in diets; there is no RDA for either.)

Like most anti-vegetarians she is vehemently against soy, insisting that it reduces testosterone levels and therefore male libido (there is no evidence of this) and she speculates that African-American girls reach puberty faster because they are more likely to be enrolled as infants in food assistance programs like WIC and therefore, to be fed soy infant formula. It’s true that African-American babies are less likely to be breastfed, but I couldn’t find any indication that they consume more soy formula. And, it’s not soy that produces abnormally fast growth in kids; it’s animal foods. Recent research has linked animal protein to earlier puberty, and cow’s milk to excessive growth in children. In contrast, preliminary research suggests that soy could slightly delay puberty in girls and also reduce their lifelong risk for breast cancer.

On page 227, she notes that “Mark Messina, a champion of soy, thinks the Japanese eat 8.6 [grams of soyfoods] per day,” or less than a tablespoon. Really? Well, I happen to be married to Mark Messina, so I have a fairly good idea of what he “thinks” about soy intake. But even if I didn’t know him, I could read his 2006 analysis of soy intake data that was published in the medical journal Nutrition and Cancer. Apparently, Keith didn’t or she would have seen that Asian soy intake is the equivalent of 1 to 1 ½ servings or more per day. (She gets this wrong because she doesn’t understand the difference between grams of soy protein and grams of soy food.)

I’m less able to evaluate her discussion of the environmental consequences of animal farming, although it seems reasonable to assume that she gets as much wrong in this section. Notably, she points out that ten acres on Polyface Farm (much lauded by Michael Pollan as an example of sustainable animal agriculture) can produce enough food to feed 9 people for a year. But on his blog Say What Michael Pollan, mathematician Adam Merberg performs calculations which suggest that Polyface requires more calories in feed (for the chickens) than it produces in food. The numbers aren’t nearly as egregious as those for factory farming, but they suggest that there is no such thing as truly sustainable meat production. (For more on environmental questions associated with Polyface, I highly recommend Adam’s review of the Omnivore’s Dilemma)

But Keith didn’t give up veganism because of concerns about the environment; she gave it up because she didn’t feel well. And she mistakes her cravings for animal protein for an actual need for animal protein. When she decides to eat her first bite of tuna fish after 20 years as a vegan, she says “I don’t know how to describe what happened next. […] I could feel every cell in my body—literally every cell—pulsing. And finally, finally being fed. Oh god, I thought: this is what it feels like to be alive.”

This, more than anything, shows that Keith’s conviction about her need for meat has to do with something other than nutrition—-because food just does not work like that. Eating a bite of tuna—-no matter how deficient you might be in a nutrient that it supplies-—does not cause all of your body cells to start pulsing. It wouldn't cause you to feel too much of anything. (At the very least, you’d have to digest and absorb it first!)

It’s true that some vegans are not healthy. They don’t eat enough fat or enough protein or calories or they refuse to supplement with vitamin B12. There is tons of bad nutrition info out there for vegans, some of it from pretty popular sources. But Lierre Keith insists that a vegan diet will damage us all--she is 100% certain of this--and it is simply not true. It’s not supported by nutrition science and it isn’t supported by simple observations of long-term vegans, not to mention vegan from birth kids.

Interestingly, she never tells us what she ate when she was vegan or what she eats now that she is an omnivore. Except to say that she used to eat “all carbohydrates” (All? No wonder she was sick) and that she now eats mostly animals and their secretions. And while she thinks she understands “moral vegetarians,” she reveals her total disconnect from a vegan ethic with three short sentences in the closing paragraphs of the book, “I have looked my food in the eye. I have raised some of it myself, loved it when it was small and defenseless. I have learned to kill.”

This is ultimately a sad book. Lierre Keith was desperate to find an answer to her health problems; she landed on vegetarianism and then spun a tale to support her theory. Her intent seems heartfelt; she sees herself very much as a savior of vegetarians and wants us to learn from her mistakes. And the book has been widely embraced by those who want to believe that meat-eating is healthy and just. The problem is that there is truly nothing in this book that accurately supports that conclusion.

[Ryan Holiday · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Ferriss (highly) recommended this book to me. I've always felt that there is nothing more impressive than seeing someone turn over a long held belief in light of new evidence. That's essentially the premise of this book-a 20+ year vegan finds it impossible to keep denying that meat is a natural part of the human diet and that it's certainly more "natural" than the heavily processed grains and crops that vegans eat. Her solution is sustainable farming and agriculture, harkening back to the dawn of domesticated animals. She's a bit crazy (interspersed with her predictions about factory farming are calls for "the revolution" and rants about patriarchy and too many citations of Wikipedia articles). I've rolled back my grain and carb consumption since I read this and felt shockingly better. I like to judge books by the questions that stick with you after. One of hers: hunter gatherers work somewhere around 15-20 hours a week to acquire food and did so for hundreds of thousands of years. So what makes a society turn to agriculture-where they work 40+ (really unlimited) hours to get less nourishing food? Her answer, after looking at the examples of other species who get high on things in their natural environment, is that carbohydrates are a drug we began addicted to. Still mulling it over. This book was a nice counterweight to Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer.

[Bryce Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone who considers vegetarian/agricultural eating to be either morally or nutritionally superior or even comparable to a preagricultural/hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Lierre also makes a devastating case for the insustainability of agriculture.

She gets a little off topic at a few points by letting her anti-masculinity and anti-religion views shine through. I don't really mind this, but I think it detracts from, rather than contributes to, the major points in the book.

Anyone who knows a vegetarian, is a vegetarian, or who lives in a society based on agriculture, must read this book.

[Scott Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me by surprise, to put it mildly. More like it slapped me in the face. After learning that the author is a former vegan and a self-described "radical", my expectations for intellectual rigor and the pursuit of the hard truth were fairly low. But what I got was quite the opposite.

I loved this book. I can't remember the last time I read something so thought provoking and invigorating. Lierre Keith's writing is wonderful and at times borders on poetic. Throughout the book she intersperses bits and pieces of her own personal story with manifesto-like rage and opinion, solid critical thinking, common sense, and a ton of thorough research to back it all up. She not only understands and respects the scientific method, but powerfully uses it to dismantle a significant amount of conventional thinking (and less conventional vegan beliefs). Somehow along with relating her personal experience she is able to cut her way through subjectivity and emotion right down to the bone where she proceeds to pick over the true nature of things. She claims to be deeply committed to justice, fairness and morality and she proves it page after page by pursuing the naked truth and assessing the state of things based on what she actually sees not what she wishes or feels. There actually isn't that much of her personal story in the book but the language is so alive and passionate that by the end I felt a connection with her as a person and admired her very much (even when I disagreed with what she was saying, which I did in some cases near the end of the book). Her story about the day she gave up veganism nearly brought me to tears.

The Vegetarian Myth is sort of like an angry, R-rated version of Omnivore's Dilemma, although that probably doesn't entirely do it justice. I don't share Ms. Keith's views on certain subjects and found the last chapter of the book to be slightly detached from reality in terms of what can really be expected of human beings in this world, but by the time I got to that part I already admired the book and the person so much that it didn't really matter anymore.

Ms. Keith talks a lot about the adult knowledge that life and death are inextricably connected, and there are descriptions of sustainable human-managed systems respecting and honoring this idea that are just truly beautiful to behold. This book captures that beauty and elegance better than any I've read so far (including Omnivore's Dilemma, which I love) and is compelling enough to be truly life changing. It's not a message I will soon forget.

[Leran Minc · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is definitely an interesting read, but I found many things about the book itself problematic and generally disagree with her conclusions despite agreeing with some of her arguments. Until I find a superior book (which I hope will be easy to find)I would recommend conscious omnivores and vegetarians alike to read this book.

Let's start with her motivation to write the book. She was vegan for over 20 years and developed physical and mental health issues due to her diet. While it truly is sad that others, like Keith, have destroyed their bodies and in some cases their minds with a destructive diet, I don't think that applies to all vegans and certainly not to all vegetarians. She uses this to strike a very personal and often angry tone throughout the book that frankly detracts from the evidence she cites. I'm glad she does not hide her bias, but she certainly lets it cloud her thoughts. I have a real issue with people jumping from one extreme to another and this is a clear example of that. She goes from being staunchly vegan to staunchly anti-vegan.

My biggest issue is with how her anti-veganism manifests. Her main argument seems to be that civilization and primarily agriculture has been destructive to our planets and we should revert to a simpler life where we grow only historically locally available plants, raise only historically locally available animals, don't have children, don't drive and live in partnership with the natural world. As someone who trying hard to become more of a locavore, I am sympathetic to her desires, but find it unrealistic and absurd to live in a world as she describes it. Not to mention she splits her time between Massachusetts and California. So unless other people actively live in these two homes and she bikes between them, she is violated the kind of fossil fuel-free, small home, local world she seems to be advocating for.

What really hurts her argument are the tangents she goes on almost every few pages. She and I are both proud feminists, but despite agreeing that patriarchy has caused many problems, I see no need to link agriculture in it's past, present and future forms as wrapped up with patriarchy and nor do I find it to be a compelling argument. At many parts of the book she breaks down into this nonsensical feminist tirade for pages at a time with no mention of food,vegetarianism or agriculture. While these movements and issues are linked in some ways, she is trying to hard to create connections and loses sight of her thesis.

Structurally, the book is also very clunky. She has only 4 "chapters" divided by moral, political and nutritional vegetarianism and finally a concluding chapter on how to save the world. Each chapter is more like a section and her thoughts and arguments may have been more coherent if she imposed chapters on herself.

Not all was bad, for I gave this 2 stars, not 1! I think Keith does an incredible job arguing that agriculture based on annual grains that require significant augmentation of their soil, often with fossil fuels, is problematic. Perhaps as or more problematic than factory farms and certainly more problematic than incorporating animal products that were humanely, sustainably produced into your diet. She also makes the powerful argument that in order to sustain annual plants that may not be suited for the area they are grown in and certainly not in the scale they are grown, substantial life is lost. Much of this life is microscopic, but the death of these organisms and the ecosystem as large effects many other lifeforms plant and animal alike.

This brings us to what I think was the most profound argument of the book. Keith does a beautiful job in her Moral Vegetarian "chapter" reminding vegetarians, city dwellers and all of us about life cycles. The Circle of Life if you want to get all Disney about it. Plants eat animals as much as animals eat plants and each other. Being vegetarian does not remove your from this cycle, the plants you eat much eat and either you supply that food through fossil fuels (which were originally animals) or you supply it sustainably through animal waste, blood, bones and flesh. While I agree wit her, I find her argument of this being "adult knowledge" unnecessarily condescending. That said,

I hope despite the issues I had with her book, that vegetarians and those considering the vegetarian/vegan path take to heart that regardless of our actions animals or the planet itself will be involved in supplying us our meals even if choose not to directly eat animals or fossil fuel products. Many of the issues she argues I think apply to vegans much more than they do to vegetarianism as a whole, but whatever diet choices we pursue, we can be extra conscious about how our food effects other animals and the planet and strive to be more local and less destructive with those choices.

[سامي · Rating 4 out of 5]

المراجعة المرئية رقم 135 في ظل كتاب:
https://youtu.be/VEY95FleAqo

لو نظرنا إلى الأسباب التي دفعت بالنباتيين إلى اختيار هذا النظام الغذائي، فسنجد أنها لا تخرج عادة عن ثلاثة أسباب، وأفردت المؤلفة لكل سبب وفئة فصلًا كاملًا في كتابها، فهم إما نباتيون أخلاقيون والذين دافعهم إلى اختيار النظام النباتي اعتقادهم بأنه من الممكن أن نأكل بنظام غذائي لا يحتوي على معاناة الحيوانات أو موتها، وأن الحياة ممكنة بدون إلحاق الموت أو الضرر بالمخلوقات الأخرى.
وإما أن يكونوا نباتيين سياسيين وهم الذين يعتقدون بأنه بإمكاننا لو أصبح كل فرد منا نباتيًا أن نطعم العالم وأن نحقق توزيعًا للمصادر الطبيعية ونحل مشكلة الجوع.
وإما أن يكونوا نباتيين صحيين والذين دافعهم إلى اختيار النظام النباتي اعتقادهم أن منتجات الحيوانات سبب لأمراض البشر، وأن النظام النباتي يضمن صحة أكبر.
ترى المؤلفة بأن هناك عدم فهم متولد من الجهل أو التجاهل يطال الخرافة النباتية تجاه طبيعة الزراعة وطبيعة الحياة. فالمحاسبة الكاملة ليست فقط لما مات على صحنك، ولكن لكل ما مات في أثناء العملية، كل شيء قُتل لتحصل على الطعام على صحنك.
وأننا لو قمنا بمحاسبة كاملة لاكتشفنا أن الزراعة هي أكثر الأشياء تدميرًا التي فعلها البشر على الكوكب، وأنها تقتل يوميًا ملايين المخلوقات الحية، بالإضافة إلى استنزاف الأنهار وتدمير الأراضي والغابات، وتطرّقت لصور الحياة المختلفة على الأرض.
وأن الحياة غير ممكنة بدون الموت، فالنظام الطبيعي قائم على اعتماد الحيوانات على بعضها، وأن معظم التاريخ البشري وأسلافنا كانوا مجتمع صيد لا زراعة، وأن تكويننا الجسماني هو نتيجة تغذيتنا بالمصادر الغنية. وتطرّقت لما يلحقه الاعتماد على النظام النباتي بأجسامنا من أضرار.
وأن النتائج التي يكتسبها بعض النباتيين قد يكون مردّها عوامل أخرى، لكون الذين يختارون النظام النباتي عادة هم مجموعات لديها وعي صحي، فهم لا يدخنون، ولا يشربون الكحول، ويتجنبون الفاست فود والزيوت المهدرجة، ويمارسون الرياضة.

[Rogers George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a former vegan and addressed to vegetarians from "inside the camp," as it were. Her rather biographical approach is frank and fact-based without being bitter. She is clearly sympathetic to the sensibilities of vegetarians. BTW--I am not a vegetarian, and I still found the book to be thought-provoking and informative.
Lierre (rhymes with Pierre) divides the book into three main sections, covering the nutrition, politics, and ethics of food as it applies to the idea of vegetarianism. In the ethics section she comes down strong against mistreatment of animals (read CAFOs), and strongly in favor of the deal animals make with us who care for them (give us animals a good life, and you can eat some of us) Her description of this deal is amusingly and well told. The politics discusses the workings of Big Food and how it influences the regulators. She's definitely not in the camp of Big Food. Nutrition: a fair amount of detail about what our bodies need and how they work, including the necessity of certain animal nutrients.
Well annotated, good bibliography.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book would be funny until you realize that people will read this and believe Keith's claptrap. Talking about the unfairness of eating "apple-babies and rice-babies" because it's preventing apples and rice from propagating is laughable.

If that's not bad enough, she cautions people against a vegan diet because two years into hers she developed mysterious health problems. Her conclusion: that vegan and vegetarian diets are dangerous. She evidently knows nothing about the millions of vegetarians around the world leading perfectly healthy lives.

Sure, it would be nice to eliminate mono-crop farming, and we should work towards that goal, but that's not an excuse to eat factory-farmed, tortured, and abused animals.

Keith is just a wanna-be vegetarian trying to justify her urge for meat. This book should be filed under "Humor" instead of "Nutrition." Shame on her.

[Петър Стойков · Rating 5 out of 5]

Напоследък стана много модерно да си здравословен, да се храниш природосъобразно и здравословно. Колкото хора има, толкова и идеи за това какво е здравословно хранене съществуват, но особено разпространено е вярването, че месото е вредно и най-добре е да се избягва. Вегетарианците са много, сила набират и веганите - които никакви животински продукти не употребяват, за да са здрави и да спасят планетата.

Авторката 20 години е била запален веган-активист, при което липсата на незаменими аминокиселини нанася непоправими вреди на организма й - костната и нервна система. Когато болките от заболяването й стават по-силни от идеологичните убеждения, тя започва да чете научни книги и материали, да изучава човешката физиология и хранене и разбира, че животинските продукти (протеини и мазнини) са жизненоважни за човека.

По-интересното в книгата обаче са представените факти и изводите относно еволюцията на някои растителни видове, по-специално зърнените култури и реакцията на човешкия организъм спрямо някои произвеждани от тях вещества. Накратко казано, авторката извежда тезата, че зърнените храни предизвикват у хората лека наркотична зависимост и именно затова е толкова трудно да се откажем от топлия хляб примерно.

Изключително забавна част от книгата пък са описанията и изводите относно вегетарианската и веганската част от населението, към която авторката се е причислявала толкова време. Става ясно, че това са хора които са изцяло движени от идеология (да спасим планетата, да не убиваме животни, да сме едно с природата) и вижданията им за природата и екологията са на елементарно, детско ниво, без почти никакви реални знания.

Частта относно индустриалното фермерство е особено информативна, за това как то разрушава почвения слой и екосистемите на Земята. Изводът на авторката е че изходът е в устойчивото фермерство, където животни и растения се отглеждат така, както едно време прабаба ти го е правила - телетата ядеш, а с тора им наторяваш градината. Което не е зле като идея, ако можеш да си позволиш с това да се занимаваш.

Като цяло, книгата засяга изключително широк кръг от теми, вкл. феминистични и социалистическите виждания на авторката, с които не съм съгласен, но е толкова добра в обяснението на мита за полезното вегетарианство, че я смятам за една от задължителните за прочитане книги, които препоръчвам на всичките си познати.

[ryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

a clear, impassioned, and comprehensive argument that there is no sufficient justification--whether moral, political, nutritional, or otherwise--for a diet based on the industrial agriculture of annual monocrops. this, i would emphasize, includes most standard American diets as much as it does veg[etari]an diets, and so i wish everyone i know (but most especially the veg*ns) would read this book.

[Jodi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is as the description says, 'part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto.'

Lots of books talk about the harm eating processed foods and high levels of sugars and grains on our health, but this book is one of the few that combines this with information about the effect all these many grain crops have on our environment and on many different ecosystems.

The author talks about all the hidden death that is involved in the production of foods such as grain crops, and why vegan meals may involve far more death than the more obvious death of a single animal to provide a meal for an omnivore. Many animals are made extinct when land is cleared for grain crops and billions of small animals such as mice and rabbits are killed every year by harvesting equipment, for example.

The book explains that buying a soy burger may give you an emotional quick fix but it does nothing at all to deal with any of the bigger issues, is terrible for your health, and gives money to some of the biggest corporations that are causing some of the worst problems in worldwide hunger and so on. To be truly moral in our eating habits involves more than just extending morality to a few animals who are most like us. The rest of the world, all those billions of other lives, count too.

The author also writes about how our soils need to eat and what they need to eat is either fossil fuels or animal products such as manure, and that there is no way around this. That we are part of a circle of life and trying to separate ourselves from this cycle is causing a lot of problems for our environment.

The author explains that we are designed to eat meat and that the shocking figures often quoted about the huge use of resources to produce meat are not only inaccurate but also misleading as they are always based on grain-fed animals that are factory farmed. Grass-fed and free range meats are a different matter entirely.

Some quotes:

"Soil, species, rivers. That's the death in your food. Agriculture is carnivorous; what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole."

"A vegan agriculture is an ecological wasteland."

This book warns against the very real health dangers of a low-fat and low-protein vegan diet. Despite the title, this book talks little about vegetarianism, and is really discussing issues around veganism, mostly.

The Weston A. Price Foundation, which I agree with the author is the best website on nutrition that is available, says that one can be healthy eating a vegetarian diet that includes liberal amounts of healthy fats such as saturated fats from coconut oil, organic/free range eggs and good quality fresh milk. A vegetarian diet can be done healthily, they explain, although you do still miss out on some of the most nutritionally dense and important foods such as liver and bone broths. So it can be done healthily but isn't exactly the same.

It is also true that some of us really can't feel well eating purely a vegetarian diet while for others, done right, it seems to work for them. People have biochemical individuality and just because some can be vegetarians it doesn't mean we all can.

Veganism is different to vegetarianism, nutritionally speaking, and is not supportable particular when it comes to pregnant women and children. (More information on this in the brilliant book 'Deep Nutrition.')

Some of the personal memoir parts of the book were very well done and very moving. The most moving was the author's description of the day she started eating meat again. I admire the authors writing style as well as her immense bravery in writing such a book and I'm sad she has had to cop so much unfair criticism. This book is not harshly written and the authors deep compassion for people and animals and all forms of life shines through every part of this book.

The sections on nutrition were excellent. The author discusses lectins, the problems of a high carb and high sugar diet, how little difference there is in eating sugar or grains - which the body turns into glucose just as it does with sugar, the cholesterol and saturated fat myths, the problem of opiates in grain and dairy products, the lack of vitamin A in plant foods and the need for fat in the diet to absorb fat soluble vitamins such as vitamin A, the huge problems with soy and especially pregnant women and babies, and small kids eating soy, and the importance of fat, protein and animal foods. The author also summarises the work of Weston A. Price and Sally Fallon, Gary Taubes, Schmid, Eades and Marg Enig PhD very well.

For more information on nutrition I'd recommend readers check out the books by all those authors, they are all excellent.

This book is essential reading if you are following a low-fat vegan diet, if you think any type of low-fat diet is healthy, or if you think eating lots of wheat or soy foods such as soy milk, soy burgers and soy shakes is a healthy and highly moral choice and makes you part of the environmental solution rather than the problem. Read the book with an open mind and then make up your own mind.

I'd also recommend this book to everyone who eats food as you are bound to get something useful from this book, whether it is a new way of thinking about food or the environmental impact of our food, or some new ideas on making different food choices. This book doesn't discuss every issue surrounding this topic, and isn't all you need to read all on its own, but does make some very valuable contributions to the wider discussion of this topic.

The idea that we need to eat the foods our genes evolved to eat to be healthy makes so much sense. It also makes a lot of sense that this applies to animals as well and that feeding cows grains, which make them ill, is a very bad idea - as is growing food in ways which aren't sustainable and which negatively impact our health, so many other living things and the health of our planet.

Despite its imperfections this book well and truly deserves 5 stars.

Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for M.E.

[Wildrose VuVu Magoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely well written, well thought out and depressing book. I'll start with the things I did NOT like about it:

The tendancy of the author to sort of meander, and occassionally slip into feminist rhetoric. While I'm all for feminism in countries that really need it, I find it alienating when people seem to blame it all on men. Who invented agriculture in the first place? The men hunting or the women gathering? What do you bet it was the women, who wanted a steady food supply so they wouldn't have to kill their excess children when things were tough? Bet you a dollar.

Anyway, leaving that aside, I found this book very informative and well-written. The depressing part comes from the political vegetarian section, where the author is asking if it's even possible for us to use sustainable polyculture or if there's just too many of us. I'm grimly certain there's too many of us. Where this will lead I have no idea and I'm almost glad I won't be around to see it. But I would recommend reading this book, the author has clearly thought things through and my mother, who was a farmer, says she's spot on about chickens. :)

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lierre Keith's book makes a major logical error in that the majority of vegetable food grown today on the planet is grown to sustain animal agriculture. Growing plants to directly feed humans would save vast amounts of land/nature/habitats, as well as eliminating the cultural practice of eating animals, which causes such vast suffering to sentient beings. Humanely raised animals are a myth--even those that may live slightly better during the middle part of their lives, start in the same way (for example, chickens born in trays instead of with their mothers, male chicks--roughly 50% of the chicks born in the "egg industry"--killed gruesomely shortly after birth as they are of no use as "egg layers,") these animals slaughtered in the same horror-show slaughter houses as animals raised on CAFOs, and all these animals killed when they are still young. The logic in this book does not stand up to research and analysis.

[Daniel Lowen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose is good; the reasoning less so. She lays out some very important facts, but many of the conclusions she twists out of them don't hold. She accuses pro-vegan medical evidence as confusing correlation with causation, but then she promptly does the same with pro-meat medical evidence. She correctly argues that agriculture, especially since WWII, is destroying the environment, so that when the oil runs out, the whole system collapses. She correctly points out that the carrying capacity of agricultural land without oil inputs is a distressingly small fraction of today's population. But as long as we're stuck with modern agriculture, we'll use a fraction of the resources by eating plants rather than animals. And she.makes our lactose tolerance sound like a gentle blessing bestowed on us by the cows we domesticated, while our gluten tolerance is a wicked addiction inflicted on us by the wheat we got tricked into domesticating. Please.

And her horrible health, which she chalks up to being vegan, looks like the result of eating junk food that happened to be animal-free for 20 years.

[Emily Rosenberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really loved some parts of this books. Those were the parts when I accidentally walked too far away from my phone with my bluetooth headphones and I just couldn't hear the audiobook.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had the money I would buy a copy of this for everyone I know. So much important information, all carefully researched with citations. This book will change how you look at food and diets and give you a better understanding of what really dies to feed us. I highly recommend reading this!

[Kathleen Quillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-researched and well-written, this book makes a good case for why not to be a vegetarian. These reasons include both harm to the self and harm to the planet. Keith writes from the standpoint of a former vegetarian whose body was ravaged by the effects of a 20-year vegetarian diet. This came from neglecting her body of essential nutrients by cutting out protein and fat from her diet. In the meantime, tofu, the ubiquitous protein source vegetarians use to replace the protein that would otherwise come from meat is actually harmful to the body and the mind. In her argument she also highlights how a vegetarian diet (and dieting in general) perpetuates and glorifies male dominance and misogyny by convincing women to do harm to their body in order to fit some kind of unnatural ideal. Her most intriguing case though is about how the vegetarian diet harms the Earth by disrupting the otherwise natural order of the food chain. For half a century, the pro-vegetarians have worked to convince the rest of the world that the planet and all its living creatures would be better off by cutting out meat from its diet. But Keith lays the case for why this argument is illogical and indeed more harmful for the health of the planet. She simply states that we need to come to terms with the fact that there is a natural food order, which includes both life and death and that the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can restore health to the environment and all living creatures living on it. The biggest culprits in destroying the Earth are the industrial agricultural feedlots that have created an unnatural, unhealthy and unconscionable system for processing meat. She gives vegetarians credit for their political stance against them but warns them that they are approaching the issue from the wrong perspective. The goal, she states, should ultimately be to dismantle the global food trade and restore local agriculture systems, which, yes, includes meat.

My husband, a vegetarian of 10+ years, read this book and immediately changed his diet to cut out soy-based products and include meat. It concerned me greatly that one book could change a person's mind so convincingly, so I read the book for myself and now I understand. I'm not a vegetarian, but I still think it's a good idea to do some more research before preaching the pro-meat gospel, so I'm following up with Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and so far, the two arguments are complementary. I look forward to finding out more about what we can do to restore health to our planet and our bodies and I thank Lierre Keith for pointing me in the right direction.

[Kristen Ridley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish I could rate this a 3.5... there are parts of this book that I absolutely love and parts that are unscientific enough the undermine all the great parts... For reference, I come at this from the perspective of someone who has spent a great deal of time thinking about and, most importantly, researching the facts surrounding the issues that the author presents (and sustainable agriculture in general).

The ecological and environmental information here is all spot on. Her agricultural statistics are accurate and devastating to anyone who thinks that all we need to do to keep living sustainably is to go vegan. She presents a lot of largely unknown and uncomfortable information here that really needs to be heard by a broad audience. Keith writes beautifully, poetically even, about our place in the foodchain and the foolishness of regarding ourselves as somehow outside of, above, or apart from nature.

This makes her questionable nutritional information all the more frustrating. It's hard to expect your reader to swallow hard truths when some of the other pills you're pushing are of dubious veracity. Nutrition science is a murky field at best, with all kinds of mixed results and conflicting information. Keith takes as gospel the idea that a vegetarian diet is necessarily an unhealthy one. While one could perhaps make that argument regarding veganism, so say so about vegetarianism is not only demonstrably false, but in fact the opposite is often true. Humans are able to do well on a dizzying array of different diets, and many of those diets are vegetarian or nearly so (and in fact the benefits of a vegetarian diet are just as present, if not more so, in a so-called flexetarian or merely low-meat diet). Her points on the unhealthy quality of many vegetarian/vegan diet are well-taken, but she overreaches in her conclusions.

I did really appreciate the interesting perspective of someone who used to be a radical vegan and then slowly had reality forced upon her. The psychological discussions are perhaps the most fascinating parts of the book.

In short, this is a valuable entry in the vegetarian/vegan/omnivore debate, but the weak nutritional sections mar an otherwise strong argument. Look to Marion Nestle for a level-headed view on nutrition science.

[Patricia · Rating 1 out of 5]

WOW! Still processing.....

Miss Keith is a bitter ex-vegan that is trying to justify 20 years of personal struggles with mental and physical illness to what is apparently a poorly managed and nutrient deficient vegan lifestyle. She neglects to look at the true cause of her decline in health (which may or may not be diet related), her lack of nutritional knowledge.

I did find a few of her arguments in the first couple of (long)chapters valid.

BUT

The majority of her chapter on Nutritional vegetarianism is almost entirely based by a book called Protein Power - which is in essence just another low carb diet book. She goes on to talk about how we can only get saturated fat and essential fatty acids from meat, how we need to consume cholesterol, how plant based foods and grains are detrimental to our health because we can not digest cellulose.

As a clinical nutritionist, let me clear some things up: 1)Both coconut and palm oils are saturated fats, and the last time I checked, coconut was a fruit. 2) We can get essential fatty acids from various plant and plant based sources including walnuts, avocado, olive oil and flax. 3) We do not need to ingest cholesterol our livers produce it. 4)Cellulose- lets call it for what it really is : INSOLUABLE FIBER and yes it does serve a very important function in our diets. True, we are not capable of digesting it, however dietary fiber is important to consume on a daily basis for a number of reasons : 1. It decrease the amount of time it takes for food to pass through your intestines which in turn decreases the total time carcinogens are exposed in the colon. (this is why the real experts recommend that a high fiber diet may decrease the incidence of colon cancer) 2. Increases the bulkiness of the stool which helps regulate the bowels (a problem I see often in patients who follow high protein low carb diets), decrease hemrroids, IBS and diverticular disease.

I can't and won't even begin to comment on her opinions on soy - she is embarrassingly contradicting herself and gets her information wrong for instance on p 215 "Sixty grams of soy protein- that's one cup of soy milk- ..." 60 grams of soy protein in one cup of soy milk! LOL this must have been a typo, infact there is actually closer to 6-7gm of soy protein in a cup of milk. - sorry I know I said I wasn't going to comment, but I just had to mention this obvious mistake. Well obvious to me, an expert in nutrition, not for the average person with limited nutritional knowledge that will pick up this book and actually believe this gibberish. This angers me.

Lets really look at whats destroying this earth:
1) we are emmiting too much fossil fuel which is increaseing CO2, the main causes - fueling our cars, homes and generating electricity. (Im not saying that modern agriculture isn't doing its part I do agree with her arguments there but it is not the only piece of the puzzle)
2) we are emmitting too much methane into the atmosphere. Methane is released by : 1) EATING MEAT and 2) filling our landfills with organic waste.

Personally, I am not a vegetarian I eat all of the main food groups, however it is within my professional scope of practice (and experience) to advocate a plant based diet to help reduce the risk of disease. This is fact.

[Leslitamar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lierre Keith, in Vegetarian Myth, presents her readers with several convictions she has thoroughly researched and argues passionately:

1. Agriculture (& diet) based on annual grains is ecologically devastating, inhumane, and unsustainable.

2. Despite our technological advances, humans are still fundamentally interwoven into Nature's cycle of life & death. In order for our planet to continue to sustain us, we must embrace our part in this cycle, acknowledge that death begets life, and reconnect to our communities and to our food.

3. Vegetarianism is unsupportable ecologically, morally, or medically, and needs to be cured.

Keith's research and personal struggles around the first two points are stunning, terrifying, heartwarming, and compelling.
But blaming her past vegan lifestyle for her challenging health conditions, Keith is compelled to pound all vegetarians relentlessly. For Keith, as is clearly stated in her title, the purport of The Vegetarian Myth is to "cure" vegetarians. All of her brilliant research focuses on driving home her conviction that vegetarians are misled in their belief that their diet is healthier and more gentle to the planet & its inhabitants than a meat-eating lifestyle.


Keith most often refers to her population of concern as 'vegetarians, (especially vegans)', but fails to make a distinct separation. As a health care practitioner, I have seen many vegetarians (not vegans) move healthily into middle age and beyond. I have also seen many omnivores with unhealthy diets and the same digestive discomforts that Keith describes. All the arguments in Vegetarian Myth did not convince me that Earth can't support a number of thoughtful, perhaps religious vegetarians.
Sadly, the gem of her book will be largely overlooked, as vegetarians of all kinds will take to a writer on a mission to cure them as gracefully, I imagine, as non-heterosexuals take to similar gestures of compassion.

It is a little absurd to focus exclusively on vegetarians (especially vegans) when discussing the very real ecological plight of our planet. Vegetarian Myth side-steps the fact that most people in the U.S., omnivores or vegetarian, have grain-focused diets: pancakes, cereals, bread, pretzels, pasta, bagels, cookies, donuts, scones, hot dog & hamburger buns, chips, corn syrup, and mostly, grain-fed animals. But Keith isn't talking to them. Keith should have made all of us and our food choices the focus of her sharp, brilliant pen. But she is on a mission here, sadly, to enlighten vegetarians, when she comes so close to saving us all.

Please read the book. It's important and its controversial nature begs it to be discussed. I look forward to more from Keith. As a rigorous Save-the Planet manifesto, she has written a powerful book that I recommend to all who eat food.

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not since the reading that accompanied my exit from Mormonism have I encountered something that moves me to do something so radically different from what everyone around me is doing, that spurs me to question what no one around me wants to question, what I'm told is dangerous!, foolish!, selfish! to question.

Too bad I didn't find this when I was 20, too! (Though I suppose one world-shattering change at a time is enough? [Good thing I'm AD[H]D. We encounter world-shattering changes much more often than normals. We can get really good at them.])

This is not a book without error. But I embrace it wholly. It is amazing.

A positive review for this book may instantly garner distrust from veg(eteri)ans. Especially since I used to be one of them and now I'm not. Vegetarians : ex-vegetarians :: Mormons: ex-Mormons. No one gets 'em as upset as someone who has left the faith. The objections I hear to this book are so much like those I heard from Mormons about deeply wounded dissidents. Keith is too "angry"!, too "feminist"!, too imperfect in avoiding rhetorical fallacy. Also, if she was hurt it's her own fault; she is "stupid" and "doing it wrong" or she wouldn't have a problem.

Alas.

But I bet this positive review, metonymous for this issue, will also garner ignorance -- um, that is to say, ignoring -- from nearly everyone. Questioning annual monocrop agriculture is like questioning god. It holds dominion over a group much bigger than vegetarians.

This is a book with facts for all, but the audience she wants first (if not most) is vegetarians, and not because they are most wrong (though nutritionally they may be most in danger) -- on the contrary, because they already have so much going for them: because they are (broadly) moved by conscience, by will and yen to change the world. They are used to approaching eating with morality in mind. She writes, "What separates me from vegetarians isn't ethics or commitment. It's information."

Here get informed.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

More accurately titled "The Vegan Myth", I think.

Broken up into three sections - Moral, Political, and Nutrition. Moral was a retelling of the Omnivore's Dilemma and punctuated with (unintentionally) amusing anecdotes about attempts at "vegan" gardening (apparently plants are unable to comprehend their own cruelty at demanding animal bits in order to live). I skipped the Political section entirely and quit the Nutrition section (which is an amalgam of Protein Power, GCBC, and Nourishing Traditions) because it included the word "gyrls" closely followed by the non-word "wombmoon" (or was it "moonwomb"?). Keith loves to wallow in the tortured melodrama of how she was up at night worrying about the slugs in her garden and then how trying to eat vegan really fucked up her health. She punctuates all of this with random lashings out at "the patriarchy".

Anyway. I'm sick of reading about food. One more to go - I'm reading The China Study as an attempt at balance, but I suspect I am going to hate it.

[Richard Reese · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is an intense discussion about health, food, and ecosystems. She spent 20 years of her life as a vegan. It destroyed her body and damaged her mental health. Her spine has irreparably degenerated, and is a source of chronic pain. She can never have children. Nobody warned her, not even her doctors. Her chronic malnutrition made her incapable of clear thinking.

A primary objective of this book is to issue a loud and clear warning to current vegetarians, so that they might avoid learning important truths the hard way, before they suffer irreversible damage. If you are a vegetarian, and your health isn't perfect — if you have joint pain, if you are often cold or tired, if you never feel full after eating, if you have memory problems, if you are depressed or anxious or angry, drop everything and read this book. Keith critiques the fundamental vegetarian beliefs, many of which have developed a religious posture. She believes that all life is equally sacred, not just animals that are similar to humans. I agree.

At the same time, she is a sharp critic of the industrial manner in which animal foods are produced. Most of the meat for sale today is not raised in a sustainable, low-cruelty, low-impact way. Grass-fed animals are the only ethical choice. She writes: “It's ridiculous to the point of insanity to take that world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily subsisted on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, while building topsoil and species diversity.”

The Vegetarian Myth is a title that seems to be a bit too narrow. The main objective of this book is to present an illuminating primer on what everyone should know about food, and how it affects our minds, bodies, and ecosystems. This is super important information that they rarely teach in schools.

Growing rice, wheat, and corn causes no less suffering and harm than industrial meat. When farmers first arrive, millions of wild animals die, and the land is skinned alive. Corn-growing Indians caused substantial damage to soils and forests, like Old World farmers did. Industrial farming is far worse. It is rapidly converting wild land into cropland, cropland into wasteland, and aquatic ecosystems into dead zones. When you eat brown rice, you’re eating dead fish and dead birds from a dying river.

Keith doesn’t discuss wild grains. The Indians of California foraged for wild grains in a non-destructive manner that is described in M. Kat Anderson’s important book Tending the Wild. The Anishinabe have been harvesting wild rice for centuries without harming their health or ecosystem (wild rice from California is not wild).

Eating meat in moderation provides essential nutrients and is good for your health. Like the long-held belief in a flat Earth, the Lipid Hypothesis cult is stumbling in a rising tide conflicting evidence. In fact, the French, Greeks, Swiss, east Africans, and Pacific islanders enjoy a diet rich in saturated fats, yet have a low incidence of heart disease. Carbohydrates are killing our hearts, not cholesterol (be sure to read Weston Price’s masterpiece).

Our planet and its residents are being destroyed by agriculture, overpopulation, consumerism, and a lack of spiritual connection to the land. The solution is to immediately and enthusiastically pursue revolutionary change in the way we eat, travel, think, live, and breed. If we don’t remember how to live sustainably, we won’t have a bright future. “These are our choices, as bare as that dead rock: accept our place as animals, a place both humble and wild, or impose ourselves and our food across our living home of land and sea and sky until the planet dies.” Amen!