Another book review

I've been slightly obsessed (can you use the word slightly to describe an obsession?) with reading books about farming, food and food systems. Many of them are controversial, but none more so than "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith.

Ms. Keith had three categories of reasons for being a vegan/vegetarian: Moral. Political. Nutritional. After 20 years as a vegan, she gradually came to believe that her reasons were wrong, that they came from ignorance. She explains why in three lengthy, often angry, chapters of her book. I will very briefly explain the main points I took away from each of these chapters.

Moral vegetarians believe it is wrong to kill an animal for food. This is self-evidently incorrect to me, possibly because I grew up in a farming community or possibly because I took zoology and botany in high school. Creatures of all shapes and sizes kill and eat creatures of other shapes and sizes. It's how it works.

Here's another reason. If you're a vegetarian for moral reasons - you don't want to kill an animal for food - replacing meat with bread and tofu does not absolve you of death. Agriculture, specifically those big fields of wheat, soy and corn, has done horribly destructive things to our planet. Entire ecosystems and who knows how many animals and species of animals have been pushed out or directly killed by growing those crops.

Political vegetarians want to eat in a way that is best for the planet. You've heard the statistics about how many hundreds of people you can feed on the amount of grain it takes to feed one beef cow. But Ms. Keith makes the point, and many of us know this to be true, that we should not be feeding that cow grain in the first place. Their systems are designed to eat grass. That changes the financial and eco calculations dramatically, in addition to the happiness and healthiness of the cow.

We are fertilizing these grains (whether being grown for bread or cattle feed) with fossil fuels. And draining rivers to water them. And using taxpayer dollars to subsidize giant grain cartels who control everything and set the price lower than the cost of producing it. We export cheap grain to third world countries, making it impossible for farmers in those countries to make a living.

Nutritional vegetarians believe that eating meat is bad for you. Ms. Keith believes that her vegan years ruined her health permanently. She discusses in great detail that human systems were designed to be meat-eaters, that hunter-gatherer societies were far healthier than agrarian societies. That grain-based diets include too many starches and sugars, leading to autoimmune diseases, obesity, diabetes, and much more.

There is much in this book that is thoughtful; if you can read it with an open mind, it will cause you to look at some things differently. You might not change your mind about anything, but it is worth a read. Here, though, are the book's major flaws:

Ms. Keith is a radical femininst. She can be talking about permaculture or making topsoil with cow poop and all of a sudden rape and male domination pop into the paragraph. I just don't see the world that way, so to me it seemed unrelated to the subject matter, distracting and unnecessary.

She is also clearly bitter about her own health issues. She never actually tells us what she ate when she was vegan and what she eats now. It almost sounds like she ate 100% grains then (no fat or leafy greens?) and 100% meat, milk and cheese now (no grains for sure, but what about asparagus, spinach and tomatoes?). Both seem crazy, right? I don't think a vegan diet will necessarily cause depression and a crippled spine. But I also don't think eating mostly animal fat is the best diet. Moderation, please.

I disagree with parts of Ms. Keith's point of view and I do not think her conclusions/answers/next steps were correct or complete. However, I agree with her on many things: we need to understand where your food comes from, we should avoid "factory food," we need to use less fossil fuels in the process (for both fertilizer and shipping), we should grow some of our own food if possible. I even agree with her that there are too many people on the planet. Further, I would say she has actually convinced me that our diets typically include too much grain (morally, politically and nutritionally).