Press Action ::: Soil Isn’t Just Dirt: A Review of The Vegetarian Myth

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Soil Isn’t Just Dirt: A Review of The Vegetarian Myth

By Mark Hand

Review of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith (PM Press, 2009).

On the cover of Lierre Keith’s new book, The Vegetarian Myth, there’s a blurb by environmental activist and author Derrick Jensen that says, “This book saved my life.”

I don’t think I’m prepared at this time to make such a bold pronouncement. However, I may change my mind if my health radically deteriorates and I decide to follow the advice on diet and nutrition dispensed by Keith.

After reading the book, though, I am prepared to write this about it: The Vegetarian Myth tackles a set of related topics—the food we eat, how it’s produced, and how it affects us—with a substance and style that I’ve never read anywhere else.

My summary assessment isn’t as dramatic as Jensen’s “This book saved my life” blurb. Such an opinion would be hard to match, given the consequences at stake in Jensen’s life. Another test of a book’s redeeming value is to determine whether it effectively challenges one’s long-held beliefs on a particular topic. For me, as a vegetarian, The Vegetarian Myth passes this test because it effectively challenged my strongly held belief in the merits of vegetarian and vegan diets.

And The Vegetarian Myth has many other merits, including explaining the awesome destructiveness of agriculture—and the role played by the corporate giants in this sector—in a manner that I, as a layperson on the topic, had never read anywhere else.

The heart of The Vegetarian Myth is composed of three chapters—“Moral Vegetarians,” “Political Vegetarians” and “Nutritional Vegetarians.” Keith defines moral vegetarians as people who believe life is possible without killing other animals. Political vegetarians believe a plant-based diet is more just and sustainable. Nutritional vegetarians believe that animal products are “the root of all dietary evil.”

On a rudimentary level, someone could come away from reading The Vegetarian Myth, particularly the “Nutritional Vegetarians” chapter, thinking the U.S. meat, poultry and dairy industries will love the book—except those pesky parts where she states factory farming of animals is cruel, wasteful and destructive.

In one such pesky part, Keith writes: “Factory farming is a nightmare, from every angle: ethically, ecologically, nutritionally. There’s not word besides torture to describe the experience of laying hens in battery cages, so crowded they can’t lie down or open their wings, driven insane by the bright glare of lights that stay on forever. Torture also describes what happens to pigs, animals that are smarter than dogs, so smart in fact that if they had digits instead of hooves they could probably learn some rudimentary sign language. … This tortuous life ends at the slaughterhouse, where, if not properly stunned and killed, they may be boiled alive in a rendering vat. No moral person can face these facts without a sickening of the spirit.”

In the minds of the executives at these companies and their marketing gurus, would drawing attention to Keith’s fierce opposition to any type of factory farming—the exact type of farming in which each of these industries engages—outweigh the benefits of publicizing her impassioned case against vegetarianism and veganism?

Would it benefit these industries to leverage Keith’s life story—from a meat eater in her youth to 20 years of veganism and back to a meat eater—to promote the supposed nutritional value of consuming their food products?

Will these industries ever know The Vegetarian Myth exists?

Released by PM Press and Jensen’s Flashpoint Press, the book likely will get very little exposure due to the publishers’ limited marketing budgets. But let’s say an executive with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association does get her hands on the book. What will she discover? She will learn that Keith believes humans need to embrace the consumption of animal products, including beef, or else face severe and chronic health problems.

A vegetarian diet, most especially a vegan one, “will damage you. I know,” Keith writes. “Two years into by veganhood, my health failed, and it failed catastrophically. I developed a degenerative joint disease that I will have for the rest of my life. It started that spring as a strange, dull ache deep in a place I didn’t know could have sensation. By the end of the summer, it felt like shrapnel in my spine.”

Keith says her spine now “looks like a sky-diving accident.”

Six weeks into her veganism, Keith says she had her first experience with hypoglycemia. Three months into it, she stopped menstruating. She felt exhausted all the time and had an ever-present cold. Her skin became flaky and itchy. At the age of 24, she developed gastroparesis. She suffered from depression and anxiety.

Keith, now in her mid-40s, says she wasn’t the only one in her circle of friends who developed severe health problems from going vegan. “All the friends of my youth were radical, righteous, intense. Vegetarianism was the obvious path, with veganism the high road alongside it. And those of us who did it long term ended up damaged,” she writes.

Now that Keith has gone back to eating meat and dairy, how has it changed her life? She says her spine “isn’t coming back” but that eating a diet of grass-fed [my emphasis] animal production “has repaired the damage a bit and made a moderate dent in my pain level.” Her insulin receptors “are also down for the count, but protein and fat keep my blood sugar stable and happy,” she says.

She hasn’t missed her period in five years and her stomach is “okay” as long as she takes betaine hydrochloride with every meal. She is now depression-free, but her cold and exhaustion are permanent due to her veganism, she says. And some days her breathing takes more energy than she can spare, all because she lived as a vegan for 20 years, she says.

Keith would be a perfect spokesperson for a national campaign against vegetarianism and veganism, as long as the sponsors of the campaign understood and, even better, shared her distaste for what “civilization” has done to the planet.

Second Thoughts

Keith’s transformation from vegan to campaigner for the human consumption of animal products reads similar to some notable figures who renounced their staunchly held beliefs or past associations in order to bring attention to their current causes. Some recent examples include David Horowitz, who spent most of the 1980s renouncing his “communist” and Marxist upbringing and early adulthood and is now a right-wing political activist; Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace who now serves as a shill for nuclear power; and Bjorn Lomborg, who also was a member of Greenpeace (although Greenpeace says it has no record of him being actively involved in the organization) prior to writing The Skeptical Environmentalist in which he argued that the world’s environmental problems aren’t as serious as many scientists’ claims and that environmental conditions “are going better and they are likely to continue to do so into the future.”

One might argue that Keith’s conversion can be easily differentiated from these three examples because her goals—one of which is putting an end to global biocide as quickly as possible—are much more radical. But one could also argue Horowitz’s support of a more powerful U.S. police state is radical and far out of the American mainstream. And Moore’s support for a nuclear power renaissance certainly runs counter to the beliefs of Wall Street banks, which have been reluctant to invest in new nuclear power plants over the past 25 years, viewing the energy source as too costly and risky. Perhaps Lomborg is the least radical of the group, given his support of the global economic status quo.

And yet, I agree with those who would argue that Keith’s fundamental critique of industrial culture is not represented anywhere in mainstream political discourse or media, unlike the beliefs of Horowitz (FOX News), Moore (Barack Obama/Stephen Harper) and Lomborg (BusinessWeek, Time, The Guardian).

Some might argue that Keith has simply become an advocate of “happy meat”—local, grass-fed, sustainably produced, and humanely raised meat. But that would be unfair. If there were ever a movement devoted to the principles set out in The Vegetarian Myth and if it proved successful, such a movement would easily result in a spectacular reduction in the suffering and torture of animals, compared to what they experience today in factory farms and due to ecosystem devastation.

The leading perpetrator of crimes against animals and the planet, according to Keith, is agriculture. “Liberal remedies will never serve a radical analysis,” she writes. “There is an inherent contradiction in understanding that systems of power must be dismantled while only embracing personal solutions. To put that more bluntly: if agriculture is a war, why aren’t we fighting back?”

In The Vegetarian Myth, Keith uses her 20 years as a vegan to lend credibility to her campaign against agriculture. Along the way, however, she may alienate a large segment of the vegetarian and vegan populations, the groups of people who she hopes to convert to her cause. Describing these segments of the population as a “subculture” with “cult-like elements” will certainly raise eyebrows. It also could prove counterproductive.

Throughout the book, Keith mocks vegetarians and vegans. She portrays them as adolescents. “In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood,” Keith writes. “It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else had to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose a different way, a better way.”

In Defense of Animal Fat

According to Keith, not only misguided and naive individuals like her, but entire nations have benefited from moving toward a diet based on large amounts of animal fat. The Japanese have been living healthier and longer lives since they started eating a more “Western” diet, higher in total fat and animal fat, she writes. The studies she cites run counter to conventional wisdom, which has told us that the health of residents in Japan and other Asian countries has grown worse since they increased their intake of animal fat.

The Japanese have “increased their consumption both of total fat and animal fat over 250 percent since 1961—and they are now the longest living people in the world,” Keith writes.

And in the United States, the past 15 years have seen a reduction in fat consumption of almost 25%, but our health has only gotten worse, according to Keith. Americans have done what the experts have told them—“ate less fat, more carbohydrates – and have gotten sicker,” she writes.

Clinical studies, according to Keith, have found that low-fat diets increase anger, depression and anxiety. Low cholesterol levels occur more often among criminals, individuals diagnosed with violent or aggressive conduct disorders, and homicidal offenders with histories of violence and suicide attempts related to alcohol.

Currently, 40% of Americans are killed by coronary heart disease. The rate of coronary heart disease has increased at the same time that the proportion of animal fats consumed by people in the United States dropped from 83% to 62% and the consumption of vegetable oils has increased by 400%.

“You tell me what to blame: the saturated fats we’ve always eaten—for four million years—or the industrially manufactured oils that until recently were used in paint,” she writes.

Unlike the general meat-eating population, a large percentage of the target audience of Keith’s book—the “subculture” of vegans and vegetarians—have studied the impact of factory meat production on the environment. This subculture has concluded that it is not only more humane, but better for the entire planet and more efficient to refrain from eating animal products. They’ve probably read that it takes approximately 16 pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat in a factory farm. Much of this grain is grown in developing countries, where a large percentage of their land is used for cattle-raising for export to the United States, instead of being used to grow staple crops, which could feed local people directly. In a world where a child starves to death every 2 seconds, it seems impossible to justify such waste.

Oops! Grains and staple crops are products of agriculture, Keith reminds us. “The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us,” she writes. “The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems.”

Unlike the general meat-eating population, a large percentage of vegetarians and vegans will not get lost or utterly confused when Keith states, “What’s looming in the shadows of our ignorance and denial is a critique of civilization itself.”

“Critique of civilization”? The average American, who might have been nodding in agreement while reading the “Nutritional Vegetarians” chapter, in which she slams vegetarians and vegans, will grow suspicious when Keith speaks of bringing down civilization in order to save the planet and ourselves.

“The words ‘animal rights,’ ‘vegetarian,’ and ‘vegan’ are some of the most mocked and emotionally loaded terms in our language, even in very liberal circles. One has to wonder if a multibillion dollar meat industry hasn’t had a part in making these words and the ideals behind them seem so laughable to so many people,” Sunaura Taylor and Alexander Taylor write in a recent essay.

Looking beyond her case against vegetarianism and veganism, Keith’s book is essentially a well-researched indictment of the U.S. food industry—and, yes, civilization itself.

The food industry has developed more than 100,000 new processed foods since 1990, she writes. She spends several pages discussing soy and how big agriculture has heralded soy as a panacea for everything from hot flashes to world hunger. “Soy contains so many anti-nutrients that it isn’t edible for humans without a lot of processing, substantially more than other seeds,” she writes.

In discussing Asian cultures’ relationship with soy, Keith writes, “The Chinese ate soy as a protein source only when they were starving—when they also ate their children.”

The Vegetarian Myth is at its strongest when Keith avoids using attention-grabbing “ate their children” polemical ploys. In the “Moral Vegetarians” chapter, she goes into wonderful detail about soil and how one tablespoon of it “contains more than one million living organisms, and, yes, every one of them is eating.”

“Soil isn’t just dirt,” she writes. “A square meter of topsoil can contain a thousand different species of animals.”

Grasping the Concept of Domestication

Keith explains the reciprocal relationship between animals and plants and how she didn’t fully understand this relationship when she was a vegan. She writes about the concept of domestication and how it’s not well understood by people who claim to be against it.

“I saw domestication as bringing animals and plants under human control and it was appalling to me, a short trajectory that ended in hens tormented in battery cages and primates brutalized in head injury experiments,” she writes. “Of course, my entire diet was composed of domesticates, with the exception of a serving or two of fiddlehead ferns every spring, but they were plants, so I simply didn’t think about it. It was the animals I wanted to save from human exploitation, and in the vegan outlook, exploitation begins with domestication.”

In the “Political Vegetarians” chapter, Keith explains that where she parts company with them is when they conflate factory farming with any and all meat.

She describes how a 10-acre non-factory farm “of perennial polyculture in a mid-Atlantic climate” could produce 3,000 eggs, 1,000 broilers, 80,000 stewing hens, 2,000 pounds of beef, 2,500 pounds of pork, 100 turkeys and 50 rabbits.

“This is the amount of food that Joel Salatin—one of the high priests of the local, sustainable movement—produces on ten acres of his Polyface Farm in Virginia. The chickens get some supplemental grain; everything else eats grass,” she writes.

If people ate nothing but the above, it would be enough food to support at least nine people for a full year and support them in full health by providing essential protein and fat, Keith writes.

Political vegetarians, on the other hand, are planning a planetary diet in complete ignorance of where food comes from, she writes. “Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all,” Keith writes. “Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and typography problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians like everyone else in urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. They seem shocked when I ask them what will feed their food.”

With regard to the top environmental issue of the day in mainstream circles, global warming, Keith argues it all began with agriculture. “Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization, an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer,” she writes.

Our Only Hope Is in the Soil

To save the world, we must first stop destroying it, according to Keith. “Cast your eyes down when you pray, not in fear of some god above, but in recognition: our only hope is in the soil, and in the trees, grasses and wetlands that are its children and its protectors both.”

Toward the end of the book, as she tries to rally the troops and unite the factions, Keith calls for a new populism and a serious political movement combining environmentalists, farm activists, animal rights activists, feminists, indigenous people, anti-globalization and relocalization efforts that fights for a new, and living, world.

I assume Neal Barnard and my other former colleagues at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, where I briefly worked almost 20 years ago, will be able to respond to Keith’s “Nutritional Vegetarians” chapter with studies and evidence of their own showing that people live longer, healthier, and happier lives on a vegan diet.

I’m not a dietician, so I can only use my personal experience and those of others I know to say that I have not witnessed vegetarianism and veganism produce the endemic harmful health effects that Keith chronicles in The Vegetarian Myth. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 15 years and I’ve never been healthier. I’ve always been physically active. But since becoming a vegetarian, my strength and stamina have improved to the point that I’m a faster marathoner, half-marathoner, 10-miler and 10-kilometer racer today, in my early 40s, than I’ve ever been, including when I was a meat-eating, dairy-loving captain of my cross-country team in high school.

However, I’m not going to rule out the possibility that I would run even faster if I started eating meat again. It’s certainly possible, but I don’t plan on giving it a test anytime soon.

With regard to Keith urging vegetarians and vegans to eat meat and dairy or else face chronic health problems and an early demise, I assume such a move would only hasten the oft-predicted ecological collapse. There are not enough farms like Polyface Farm to support all of the vegetarians and vegans in the United States if they were to begin eating locally grown, grass fed animals. This means that these vegetarians and vegans would need to eat factory-produced meat in order to get proper amounts of protein, Vitamin D and Vitamin B12. These are the same factory farms that rely on agriculture, and all of its devastating qualities, to provide the grains to feed their animals.

My advice would be for vegetarians and vegans to monitor your health very carefully (as I’m sure you already do), and to adjust the types of food you eat if you begin feeling the same symptoms and enduring the same debilitating conditions experienced by Keith. And if you do go back to eating meat and dairy, try to avoid, if at all possible, factory-farmed food products.

If you, as vegetarians and vegans, are able to read with an open mind the sections of Keith’s book where she slams the vegetarian and vegan lifestyles as naïve, unhealthful and destructive, I think you’ll appreciate the rest of The Vegetarian Myth because it gets to the root of the problems that are driving our culture toward ecological collapse.

Our industrial culture, including factory farming, is destroying our planet. The Vegetarian Myth is a tremendously helpful resource that can help guide us away from the abyss and toward sustainability.

Mark Hand can be reached at .