Book # 3

"The Vegetarian Myth : food, justice and sustainability"  by Lierre Kieth.

Thinking about writing this particular post has been stressing me out. Then last night I realized that it is silly to be stressed. Nobody is making me do this, I am doing it because I want to and for my own personal growth and pleasure.

So here we go.

This book had me riveted from the moment I picked it up, to the moment I put it down. Not everyone may feel the same way, it would probably depend on interest level in their personal health and their concern about the health of the world. My interest is high, thus I found the book quite absorbing. But I am not going to summarize the book with as much detail as I did with the last two. This is a book that I want you to be curious about, enough to read it for yourself. It isn't just about vegetarianism.  It is so much more!

The book has 5 chapters plus a useful Appendix, Resources section and Bibliography. The three main chapters are based on the premise that vegetarians have basically three different reasons for becoming vegetarian. Moral reasons, political reasons and nutritional reasons. Although I have read books that argue the case for moral or political vegetarianism, and I have vague feelings toward these issues, my main reason for being vegetarian was for nutritional purposes.

Chapter one is titled, "Why this book?" It is a fairly short chapter in which the author tells why she wrote the book. Lierre Kieth was a vegan for 20 years. The reasons that compelled her as young woman to embrace such an extreme philosophy were "justice, compassion, a desperate and all-encompassing longing to set the world right. To save the planet....to protect the vulnerable, the voiceless. To feed the hungry. At the very least to refrain from participating in the horror of factory farming." She is no longer a vegan, not even a vegetarian. She said that  "this book was written to further those passions...It is not an attempt to mock the concept of animal rights or to sneer at the people who want a gentler world...those longings for compassion, for sustainability, for an equitable distribution of resources are not served by the philosophy or practice of vegetarianism." She then briefly describes how her many years of vegan-ism wrecked havoc upon her body. And then she drops a bomb. Factory farming has only been around, for about the last 50-60 years. Yet agriculture, which is devastating the planet, has been around for multiple millennia.  Agriculture? What the...?? Who ever thought that agriculture could be a bad thing?

In Chapter two, "Moral Vegetarians",  Ms Kieth lays out the moral issues that drive many vegetarians. They do not want to be part of the killing of sentient beings. Her discussion on sentient beings is at times amusing, and at others, eye opening. She argues that if you aren't going to eat anything that shows intelligence, then what are you going to eat? She describes the many ways that plants survive and thrive. "Plants produce millions of chemicals to attract, repel, immobilize, or kill animals....it's how they fight back...just because they can't locomote doesn't mean they're passive. And every so often in the evolutionary crapshoot, one of them throws the gene dice and beats the house, producing a perfect match with the pleasure centers in the human brain." Anyone ever hear of cocoa and coffee beans? Wheat? Sugar Cane? She quotes Michael Pollan, the author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma"...."Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a co-evolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees." Interesting thought.

She is quite serious about agriculture being a major force of destruction in the world. She spoke about the soil and how it is alive with millions of micro-organisms, many of which are destroyed with our non-sustainable methods of farming.  She said that most of the world started out as a poly-culture; many species living in one area. Man comes along, picks a piece of forest, rips or burns everything out of his way and plants a monoculture. And plants it over and over again, until the soil is dead. "Agriculture is like ethnic cleansing, wiping out the indigenous dwellers so the invaders can take the land....In the history of civilization...the plowshare has been far more destructive than the sword."

Her basic argument against moral vegetarians is in order "for someone to live, someone else has to die" and besides in the big circle of life, we all have to die sometime. And over the years that she fought the battle with herself, she learned more and more about how the world really was, and she finally asked herself, "Where was I going to draw the line? That was the question, my personal, political, spiritual agony. Mammals, fish, insects, plants, plankton, bacteria? Was the least of us going to be an "us"? And if "what" became "who," then what would be left to eat? I have my answer, finally. I'm not going to draw a line. I'm going to draw a circle."

Chapter Three is titled "Political Vegetarians" and is for those who eat vegetarian in order that they may feed the hungry, based on the belief that agriculture is more earth friendly than factory farming. That you can feed more people, more nutritiously, and using less resources by growing plants, than you can by raising animals. She presents a boatload of evidence that would suggest otherwise. It is worth reading and thinking about. I read John Robbins book, "Diet For a New America" many years ago and believed everything he wrote. And it is true that factory farming is inhumane and disease inducing, but there is more to the issue than just saying it is better to grow grain to feed humans, than to grow grain to feed animals, which then feed man.  Much more!

Chapter four is "Nutritional Vegetarians". I struggled with this one. I don't know if I agree with everything she presented. She believes we are more like a carnivore physiologically than an herbivore. While it is true that we are not built like a cow, horse, or deer; we are also not built like a mountain lion. But I must admit, she presented a lot of information that was thought provoking. Like, the fact that many researchers have manipulated the data to make it look like animal products are the biggest contributor to the increased cases of cancer and heart disease in our society. Like, many of the cheap crops grown today and pushed upon us as healthy, are really anything but that. Like, at the same time that we started being bigger meat eaters, we also began to eat more refined carbohydrates, so couldn't they be just as responsible for our ill health?

The last chapter is titled, "To Save the World".  It is obvious to me that Ms Kieth is a very passionate person. All throughout this book, she has thrown in a lot of information about slavery, war, power, corruption, abuse, and all the "isms" that have ruled and reigned with blood and horror on the earth. Ever since she was a young teen she has sought for a better world. It sounds as if she has spent her life searching for answers. I had to chuckle at times because there were a few similarities between her life and mine, such as when she considered becoming breatharian, which has been a very attractive impossibility to me. She says, "I'm going to assume that you know our planet is in trouble. Maybe you mostly turn from the depths of that knowledge, afraid of its emotional acid. Or maybe you live with it like barbed wire tightening around your heart. The promise of personal solutions can ease both denial and despair: most of us are a mixture of those. So if you need your personal fix, here are the three most effective things you can do; Refrain from having children, Stop driving a car, Grow your own food.

My thoughts were that she is evidently not a religious Mormon or a Catholic, has never heard of the Word of Wisdom, has property where she can raise food and animals, and either rides her bike considerable distances, or else lives the life of a hermit. Or maybe she is like many environmentalists who toot their horns at the rest of us, and then fly home in their Leer jet. 

I really don't know.

But what I do know, is that she has given me a lot to think about.

I am thinking about adding a little meat to our diet. Not hot dogs certainly, but meat as natural as I can get it. And then we will see how we feel.

I am thinking about how I can grow my garden differently from now on. This one really excites me! Just today I took my kids on a home school field trip to a local company called Liquidry. They take raw materials, such as grasses, fruits and vegetables, juice them, then dry them using a healthier method to preserve the vitamins and minerals. They sell the finished product to customers all over the world. But of course, I wanted to know what do they do with the pulp left over after they have juiced the product. I learned that they sell it to farmers to feed animals and to spread on their fields. I want some of that!

I am thinking about how often I drive my tank, when I could walk, should walk. How I often go places by myself, like the temple, when I could carpool, just because I want to be by myself or do only what I want. 

I am thinking about all those things I throw away because I am too lazy to fix them, clean them, recycle them or compost them. 

I am thinking that I shouldn't stop seeking for knowledge, even when I think I have all the answers about a particular subject. I think I could even learn from those that I don't particularly agree with.

Until next time..... ;o)