Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5263 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

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.

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.

Good Ideas: Mistaken Conclusions
I like the fact that the book brings up the fact that Industrial Agriculture is really to blame.
I, unlike the author, have had the exact opposite experience. I grew up eating meat and had a host of problems; anemia, intestinal blockages, and severe migraines. I turned to a Vegetarian diet when my doctor informed me that my body resisted Animal Proteins. I have now been Vegan for 16 years and am in the best shape of my life by far!

I am no longer Anemic. I no longer had digestive issues. I have not had a Migraine in 16 years. My protein levels are up, my red blood cells have quadrupled, and my energy sky rocketed.

For many people out there the Vegetarian Diet is perfectly fine, you just have to make sure you get nutrients from a variety of places.

I HATE that this book is called the "Vegetarian Myth" because that title is wrong. Some Vegetarians bent on "saving the planet" are outrageous as well, but the fact of the matter is MOST people can be perfectly healthy eating only Plant based foods.

All in all....eat LOCALLY people, that is the true way of saving the planet; whether that is local Cows, Chickens, etc.. I, for one, will never tell people what to eat or how to behave; but Vegetarianism WORKS....don't believe the hype here!