Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4075 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781604860801
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review

About the Author

Customer Reviews

A few caveats
I'm not going to summarize the book. That's been done well in earlier reviews. This is just a description of some of my issues with the book.

The author interweaves her deepening political and environmental understanding - looking at the whole picture and realizing that pretty much everything in the supermarket, not just the meat, is produced by methods that make the world a crueler, more polluted and, worst of all, less sustainable place, and that to avoid contributing to the problem calls for much more radical solutions than merely leaving the animal products out of your diet - with her own story of worsening health on a vegan diet followed by recovery when she began to eat meat again. This is where my first caveat comes up: she implies, without coming right out and saying, that her vegan diet was also a low-fat diet. I have also been vegan for long periods of my life (although never the decades that she logged) and it was only during the last one, from 2004-2006, that I experienced the slight beginnings of the back problems she describes. No coincidence: that was the one where I went low-fat as well as vegan and actually lost my ability to digest fat. Fortunately I got an accurate diagnosis promptly, got nutritional therapy to regain my ability to digest fat, and lost the back pain within a year. In the latter half of her Nutritional Vegetarianism chapter, she devotes several pages to challenging the demonization of dietary fat by the mainstream medical community. Nevertheless, she continues to attribute her health problems mainly to lack of meat rather than lack of fat.

With my newfound understanding of the necessity of dietary fat, and in the context of my ongoing involvement with the radical food movement, I realized that if you want to be healthy and live in a temperate climate you can either be a locavore or a vegan but not both because temperate-climate plant foods just aren't fatty enough. Lierre Keith has chosen to stay in Massachusetts. Therefore this woman, so tenderhearted that she went through an extended moral agony over whether and how to kill the slugs that were eating her garden to the ground, now looks for what the radical diet community calls the happy meat, sustainably and humanely raised, not part of the factory farm system. In arguing for this choice, she digs deep into several technical subjects: ecology (with a particular emphasis on species extinction and habitat destruction for croplands), evolutionary biology, nutrition, anthropology, geology. I find her sources and her use of them pretty solid except for the last one. She really does seem to think that petroleum is dead dinosaurs and she considers genuinely possible that bogus theory that "[i]f all the methane is released from the melted permafrost...the planet [will be] hotter than Venus [and] there won't even be bacteria left; yes we can kill the planet." I wish someone had told her that there have been a few periods in the history of the Earth when all the permafrost was melted and the methane presumably released from it and there were enough bacteria to leave traces in the fossil record, not to mention descendants including ourselves. On the other hand, she seems to know the anthropological record pretty well and is admirably free of Noble Savage fantasizing. She acknowledges that a number of sustainable traditional societies are nevertheless, by our standards, profoundly unjust, particularly to women. If you idolize the Australian Aborigines and want to continue doing so, don't read this book.

As the book goes along she begins to weave in her other concerns, the ones on which her career as a writer is based: radical feminism, racial equality, the peace and justice movement. She also introduces, without actually naming it, the Peak Oil hypothesis: that we really are facing societal collapse on account of declining petroleum production within fifty years, and it's time now, while we still have the resources, to start preserving what we can of our culture and our values.

The Myth of Thinking You Know Everything: Or, the Dangers of Applying the Personal to the Whole
I read this book because it's gotten so much attention from the vegan community --- mainly in the form of anger and outrage. So, for the sake up being up front: I am a vegan. And I did read the book, with as open a mind as possible.

Let me also say from the get-go that not everything in this book did I find to be unfair and/or absurd. Keith certainly makes provocative, interesting, passionate arguments about many things --- much of which has already been pointed out ad nauseum from the fanclub here on Amazon. That's not to say that I agree with hardly anything (maybe "agree" is not the right word; maybe it's more accurate to say that I don't see the world the same way Lierre Keith does).

What's very bothersome for me about this book, and it's entire premise, is that it makes, on the issue of veganism in particular, such sweeping generalizations based on one person's experience and the observations made by that one person. In other words, every single person who is vegan is lumped together --- as if our entire process toward and experience of animal rights/veganism is exactly the same and will yield the same results.

And I have to wonder: Does Lierre Keith get out much?

My own coming to veganism is even related to Keith's experience, either. I do not have an eating disorder, nor do I have a rigid or sociopathic, angry personality (Keith claims that only ill people are drawn into the "cult" of veganism). I am not anorexic or orthorexic. Yes, it's true: some vegans are crazy people. There are crazy Scientologists, crazy fundamentalist Christians, crazy people who fight for civil rights, crazy people who don't really care about anything at all. Which is just to say: if you haven't noticed, there are crazy people everywhere. And there are also amazing people who fit into the categories I listed above --- people who have nuanced views of the world, and who attempt to lead ethical, compassionate lives. And most of the vegans I know are wonderful, caring, smart, hard-working responsible people who do not harbor illusions/delusions about the world.

I am particularly horrified by Keith's assertion that vegans are naive (read: stupid) when it comes to matters of life and death. I know full well that animals die in order to grow the plants upon which I live. I also am fully aware of the horrors of industrial agriculture and how destructive civilization is, in general, towards this planet. But I still don't think this discredits the merits and ethics of veganism.

Keith also implies that by virtue of being vegan, all vegans claim that eating animal products is bad for human health. I don't. I don't think science will ever unequivocally say that animal products, in moderation, are ever "bad" for humans when it comes to disease or health. That's not the point. I know it's bad for animals, regardless of how they are raised.

Keith very clearly blames her health woes on veganism. But veganism, in and of itself, is not a diet. There are a thousand different ways of eating vegan, and I am convinced there are very healthy ways and very unhealthy ways of doing it. Same for being an omnivore. Keith doesn't really describe the kind of diet she blames for destroying her health, other than the fact that it was plant-based. Certainly, some people's constitutions are more sensitive than others, and we all have different nutritional needs, but Keith doesn't provide any proof that human needs cannot be met on a carefully planned vegan diet. And just to reiterate: some people probably need to emphasize the careful planning. There are pro-vegan medical professionals -- like Dr Klaper, for instance, who's conducting the Vegan Health Study --- who clearly recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all vegan diet plan. There probably never will be --- just like omnivorism.


I have an auto-immune disease (a non-life threatening one). I was a meat eater when I was diagnosed with it, and to be perfectly honest, I was also one of those free-range, organic, grassfed, blah blah blah animal eaters--because I once thought that was good for animals. And I had been for quite a long time. By Keith's logic, my auto-immune disease should be blamed on my omnivorism. When I became vegan almost a decade ago, my auto-immune disease eased up a little, but it certainly hasn't gone away. I doubt it ever will, unless some sort of miracle occurs. Trust me: I want to blame my disease on eating animal products, and I want the cure to be eating plants. But that isn't to be the case. I find it disturbing that Keith plays nutritional authority, and with such zeal.

Finally, in my eyes, Keith comes off as exactly the same kind of personality she criticizes in her own experience of the vegan community: rigid and absolutist. Now that it appears Keith has found a savior in Weston Price and the vitures of eating animals, it's simply the same personality with a different set of values to preach to the world. But Keith claims that growing up and taking responsibility for her food and the "necessity" of eating animals means that she's grown up.

But being a grown up, in my most humble opinion, lies in the knowledge that not a single one of us is the absolute authority; being a grown up is realizing that the world is complicated and nuanced and messy. It's not this or that. It's this and that.

What makes veganism such a beautiful, appealing idea to me --- and it's really what I would always hope to convey to others --- is that there is magic in the intention to not harm. I don't think being a vegan makes me better than any one else. Or more wise or righteous. But it does contribute, in a very concrete way, in diminishing human domination --- a theme of this book --- in a way that is not addressed or explored. It also directly addresses the real lives of non-human animals --- whom I do not believe exist for human purposes. I believe, unlike other animals, humans have a choice about what we consume. Why shouldn't we make the decision that causes the least harm?

This book would be more intellectually honest, interesting and readable had the author simply reported her own experiences---acknowledging that individual experience is just that, rather than applying her life to all of us. A grown up wise person doesn't blame, s/he investigates, questions and searches her soul for answers. It's unfathomable to me that someone who claims to have once been a committed vegan, and understands the fullness of that path, would become an advocate for Happy Meat (TM). Just like the rest of us, I suspect there's still some growing up left to do.

Beyond Pollan
If I say that this book saved my life, I risk only slight exaggeration. After suffering with asthma for thirty years, I've now been completely free of it for over four months (btw, I got an advance copy... obviously, the book just came out). My last trip to the emergency room was only two years ago. I was on two maintenance medications until I read this book. I had already weened myself off a third, but multiple attempts to get off the other two met with failure. I was more than a little intrigued when I came across the part where Ms. Keith describes how the lectins in wheat can cause and/or intensify inflammatory diseases, including Crohn's Disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and asthma. I decided to make a few changes in my diet, including cutting out all grain. Right around then, I ran out of my asthma meds, so I decided to hold off on calling in new ones. I never needed them. Having nearly died of asthma more than once, I cannot say how grateful I am to Lierre Keith. I was not on the brink of dying of asthma, but it certainly was awful, and might eventually have killed me.

Aside from my remarkable recovery from asthma, I found the book enlightening, moving, and fun. Keith makes, in my opinion, a sound argument that agriculture itself is inherently destructive. Note that she defines agriculture, appropriately I believe, as the monocropping of annuals (i.e. endless rows of wheat or corn or soy or whatever). Indigenous humans planted seeds tens of thousands of years before the "agricultural revolution," perhaps even before we were homo sapiens. But planting seeds here and there, encouraging the growth of desired plants, encouraging permacultures of diverse perennial plants, fungus, animals, and microorganisms all intertwined, is all quite different from seizing a given piece of land, clearing every living thing off of it (a euphemism for killing every living thing), and then planting rows of annuals (usually grains) on the exposed and dying topsoil. That is agriculture. And while there are relatively better and worse ways of doing it, it is fundamentally and universally unsustainable. This is why agricultural societies expand... to take over new land and resources to exploit as they draw down what they already possess. This is why they create myths of apocalypse. Topsoil needs to be covered, and it needs a diverse community of life forms to live on it and in it, each contributing nutrients, structure, and protection. Clear the land for agriculture and it will eventually die unless it is reverted to a polyculture based on perennials. The wind and rain will erode it. The monocrops will strip the nutrients. The sun will bake it. Riverwater for irrigation will introduce trace mineral salts that will build up and gradually sterilize it. Any of these factors would suffice to kill the land, but together they make the inevitable all the more inevitable. Look at the "Fertile Crescent," the cradle of agriculture. Not so fertile these days. The same thing happened in Greece. The same thing is happening in the USA. The Dust Bowl should have been warning enough. Only now, with synthetic fertilizers, GMOs, chemical pesticides and herbicides, 2/3's of the topsoil and groundwater stripped from the Great Plains, a human population of nearly seven billion, 100-200 species going extinct every day, a couple hundred major "dead zones" in the oceans (mostly at the mouths of rivers churning out fertilizer and pesticide runoff), and the planet on the verge of runaway global warming, the stakes are rather higher.

Lierre Keith is a beautiful writer, careful researcher, passionate and compassionate advocate for the disenfranchised (human and non-human), brave iconoclast (arguing, very effectively, that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol can actually be good for you--if they're from pastured animals--and are precisely the kind of stuff we evolved to eat), and unflinching opponent of the systems that are destroying life on this planet, including extractive agriculture, most especially in its industrialized form.

Michael Pollan has reached a very wide audience, and while I wish all those Pollan readers would pick up this book, I doubt that most will. Pollan has done great work exposing the insanity of industrial agriculture (including industrial "organics"), and has been a great promoter of small-scale, local farming, especially based on rotational grazing, the sustainable model Keith advocates, too. What Pollan lacks (in his bestselling books, at least) is a cogent political, social, or historical analysis to help us understand our ecocidal food production system in an appropriate context. He also offers no call to actively oppose, let alone dismantle, the ecocidal system, seeming content with encouraging niche markets for enlightened consumers. Frankly, with the planet dying, that is just not enough. If Pollan is this generation's Wendell Berry and Derrick Jensen is this generation's Edward Abbey, Lierre Keith finally links the two strands, showing beyond any shadow of a doubt that the very foundation of civilization as such, and most especially industrial civilization, is a method of food procurement that is insane, ecocidal, and really, really dumb. And it sure isn't making us happy or healthy either.

Vegans, vegetarians, please read this book. I know you don't want to. But please read it. Ms. Keith was a vegan for two decades, and knows what that diet can do to a person. Let yourself learn from her mistakes, and be open to learning about why vegan and vegetarian foods are not the responsible, sustainable choices, least of all grains and soy, the twin staples of the modern vegetarian diet. Of course the worst food out there is meat and animal foods from feed lots. Ms. Keith hates these as much as anyone. She is not advocating that anyone eat such poison, such misery.

In sum, I don't want to one-up Diana, but this is one of the THREE most important books I've ever read (for what it's worth, Jensen's Endgame and Bly's Iron John are the other two). I cannot recommend it more highly.