Vegetarian Myth

Lierre Keith

Description

We've been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we've been led astray--not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won't save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil--the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them. Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

Sujets

• Activism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604861822
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for The Vegetarian Myth
The Vegetarian Myth is one of the most important books people, masses of them, can read, as we try with all our might, intelligence, skill, hope, dream and memory, to turn the disastrous course the planet is on. It’s a wonderful book, full of thoughtful, soulful teachings, and appropriate rage.
Alice Walker
Anyone who has ever read a book on writing has come across the hackneyed piece of advice to cut open a vein and bleed on the page. Lierre Keith has come closer to literally doing that than almost any writer I’ve ever read. Not only does her passion for her subject bleed through in almost every sentence, she is a superb lyrical prose stylist. My book is dog eared, underlined and annotated from front to back – I can’t remember anything I’ve read that has contained so many terrific lines.
And if you have or know anyone with a daughter who is contemplating going vegetarian, please make this book available. It could be the most important thing you ever do for the long-term mental and physical health of a young woman.
Dr. Michael Eades , author of Protein Power and The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle
This book saved my life. Not only does The Vegetarian Myth make clear how we should be eating, but also how the dominant food system is killing the planet. This necessary book challenges many of the destructive myths we live by and offers us a way back into our bodies, and back into the fight to save the planet.
Derrick Jensen , author of Endgame and A Language Older Than Words
Everyone interested in healthy eating should be grateful to Lierre Keith. Her book will help many seekers to avoid the lesson she had to learn through bitter experience.
Sally Fallon Morell , President, The Weston A. Price Foundation
What I thought would be a book filled with disgruntled accounts of a has-been vegetarian justifying the excuse to pig out on double cheeseburgers again, was actually a well-researched, statistically sound discussion of agriculture and its effects on land, society, animals, and the relationship between all three. For those who insist on one way versus another, The Vegetarian Myth presents us with enough information to wisely weigh whatever we choose to put on our plates.
Olupero R. Aiyenimelo , FeministReview.org
Lierre Keith has written a compelling tale of her own near self-destruction from a vegan diet and a broadside against its being perpetrated upon or adopted by any other victims. She has converted 20 years of pain and suffering, and permanent damage to her health into a galvanizing passion to demolish the myth that she believes underpins the worldview of most who adopt vegan diet: "I want to eat without killing." You can’t, she says, and if you try you’ll die.
Keith has transmuted her anger and seasoned it well with a self-reflective humor that sweeps us along this road to recovery from a scorched earth. As I read her description of her first meat meal in 20 years (a can of tuna eaten reluctantly with a plastic fork), I found myself in tears. Ten years recovering from a quarter century of vegetarian folly myself, I knew the shattering epiphany she experienced with that first bite coming home to the truth of her body, and of life itself.
Peter Bane , Permaculture Activist
Everyone who eats should read this book. Everyone who eats vegetarian should memorize it. This is the single most important book I’ve ever read on diet, agriculture, and ecology. And as a farmer and ex-vegan, that’s saying a lot. Aric McBay , author of What We Leave Behind and Peak Oil Survival
The Vegetarian Myth puts together in coherent and passionate form all the arguments about meat and agriculture that have been running around in my head for fifteen years. It’s not easy to transmute outrage and pain into something so full of love and wonder, but Lierre Keith has done it beautifully. Toby Hemenway , author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Also by Lierre Keith:
Conditions of War
Skyler Gabriel
Deep Green Resistance (with Aric McBay and Derrick Jensen)
Also from Flashpoint Press:
Resistance Against Empire Interviews by Derrick Jensen
Mischief in the Forest A graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan
Now This War Has Two Sides A spoken word CD set by Derrick Jensen
Lives Less Valuable A novel by Derrick Jensen
Songs of the Dead A novel by Derrick Jensen
How Shall I Live My Life? Interviews by Derrick Jensen
The Day Philosophy Died A Novel by Casey Maddox
To Annemarie Monahan, one of my favourite animals, and in memory of Terry Lotz.
Copyright © 2009 by Lierre Keith
A Flashpoint Press Sixth Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Flashpoint Press
PO Box 903
Crescent City, CA 95531 www.flashpointpress.com
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009921671
Book design by Aric McBay
Printed in the USA on recycled paper
9 7 8 1 6 0 4 8 6 0 8 0 1
Contents
Why This Book?
Moral Vegetarians
Political Vegetarians
Nutritional Vegetarians
To Save the World
Acknowledgements
Appendix
Resources
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
Why This Book?
This was not an easy book to write . For many of you, it won’t be an easy book to read. I know. I was a vegan for almost twenty years. I know the reasons that compelled me to embrace an extreme diet and they are honorable, ennobling even. Reasons like justice, compassion, a desperate and all-encompassing longing to set the world right. To save the planet the last trees bearing witness to ages, the scraps of wilderness still nurturing fading species, silent in their fur and feathers. To protect the vulnerable, the voiceless. To feed the hungry. At the very least to refrain from participating in the horror of factory farming.
These political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it. I want my life my body to be a place where the earth is cherished, not devoured; where the sadist is granted no quarter; where the violence stops. And I want eating the first nurturance to be an act that sustains instead of kills.
This book is written to further those passions, that hunger. It is not an attempt to mock the concept of animal rights or to sneer at the people who want a gentler world. Instead, this book is an effort to honor our deepest longings for a just world. And those longings for compassion, for sustainability, for an equitable distribution of resources are not served by the philosophy or practice of vegetarianism. We have been led astray. The vegetarian Pied Pipers have the best of intentions. I’ll state right now what I’ll be repeating later: everything they say about factory farming is true. It is cruel, wasteful, and destructive. Nothing in this book is meant to excuse or promote the practices of industrial food production on any level.
But the first mistake is in assuming that factory farming a practice that is barely fifty years old is the only way to raise animals. Their calculations on energy used, calories consumed, humans unfed, are all based on the notion that animals eat grain.
You can feed grain to animals, but it is not the diet for which they were designed. Grain didn’t exist until humans domesticated annual grasses, at most 12,000 years ago, while aurochs, the wild progenitors of the domestic cow, were around for two million years before that. For most of human history, browsers and grazers haven’t been in competition with humans. They ate what we couldn’t eat cellulose and turned it into what we could protein and fat. Grain will dramatically increase the growth rate of beef cattle (there’s a reason for the expression "cornfed") and the milk production of dairy cows. It will also kill them. The delicate bacterial balance of a cow’s rumen will go acid and turn septic. Chickens get fatty liver disease if fed grain exclusively, and they don’t need any grain to survive. Sheep and goats, also ruminants, should really never touch the stuff.
This misunderstanding is born of ignorance, an ignorance that runs the length and breadth of the vegetarian myth, through the nature of agriculture and ending in the nature of life. We are urban industrialists, and we don’t know the origins of our food. This includes vegetarians, despite their claims to the truth. It included me, too, for twenty years. Anyone who ate meat was in denial; only I had faced the facts. Certainly, most people who consume factory-farmed meat have never asked what died and how it died. But frankly, neither have most vegetarians.
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. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.
I want a full accounting, an accounting that goes way beyond what’s dead on your plate. I’m asking about everything that died in the process, everything that was killed to get that food onto your plate. That’s the more radical question, and it’s the only question that will produce the truth. How many rivers were dammed and drained, how many prairies plowed and forests pulled down, how much topsoil turned to dust and blown into ghosts? I want to know about all the species not just the individuals, but the entire species the chinook, the bison, t