Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My friends and I think this book is so problematic that we have started a blog for the purpose of breaking it down. If you're interested: vegetarianmythmyth dot wordpress dot com . Firstly, the publishing company that has put this out is Flashpoint Press, founded by Keith's guru and teacher, Derrick Jensen, who has been quoted in the main blurb on the cover, saying, "This book saved my life." It's a no-no in the publishing world to get blurbs from your own self-interested publisher whose theories, popularity, and pockets all stand to gain greatly should this book become popular. This is huge intellectual dishonesty, and should not to be taken lightly. Derrick Jensen reads these amazon reviews (he's commented on one a few below mine), and I wouldn't be surprised if he were gathering allies to write reviews here to kick it up to four or five stars. As a critical person who has spent years researching both vegan and anti-vegan theory, I simply do not believe this many people see this book as revolutionary or above serious criticism. Part of me thinks that this book, with its pretty prose, lends itself to really lazy readers who are just looking for more reasons to dismiss veganism and embrace meat-eating without having to do a serious, balanced analysis. Anyways, this is mostly just my review of this first chapter, which goes over in general a lot of the issues touched in in detail in rest of the book. (Yes, I've read the whole book.) I had too much to say even just about this one chapter, let alone the whole book. I'll post more if I can. In the introductory chapter to this book, it's assumed from the start that we're all "in on" what Lierre Keith is talking about when she uses stereotypes and generalizations that amount to "the vegetarian myth". What this means is that she is able to do a lot of ideological gymnastics couched in fallacious logic, without offering true evidence. Keith uses her own experience via anecdote and memoir, generalizes into absurdity about all vegans based on her own personal experience (this is an extremely narcissistic lens through which to filter a revolution) and throws out veganism and vegetarianism with the bath water. This is the disingenuous argumentative style, or, fallacy. Anecdote is interesting and useful, and can add texture to evidence; in itself, it is not evidence. Keith constantly assumes, yet offers hardly any well-rounded statistics or solid evidence, that vegetarians are all naïve and know nothing about the politics of soy, industrial vegetable farming, or local food. There are too many examples of this to cite. For my part, save some teenage self-righteousness that's become a more and more complicated analysis as I get older, I see veganism as a way to minimize destruction and death--not eradicate it. I do not deny the fact that death and destruction exist, which is something Keith states about vegans in several different ways. I fully understand the destructiveness of agriculture-- this is a point on which Keith and I agree (and even the most "humane" farming is destructive.) I understand the politics of peak oil, permaculture, bioregionalism, local farming, soy production, industrial vegetable farming, etc. I'm not an expert, but I have been studying these issues for over 15 years. My diet is ethically imperfect as any diet is, due to the unfortunate state of the planet. Keith's is imperfect too. But she doesn't earnestly admit it, which is a shame, because this floods out her really important and critical points about the problems of agriculture and civilization. Are there ignorant vegans? Of course! Are there ignorant carnists? Of course! Ignorance is a trait that cuts through human life, far beyond dietary choices. Especially when consumer capitalism is brought into the equation, we see horrifying patterns in food production across the board. But, while it is entirely possible to eat an environmentally irresponsible diet as a vegan--just as it is as a carnist, or any other diet--it is not the fault of veganism, as a philosophy, that some vegans are self-righteous, or do not have information about ecology. Just as, for better or worse, there are lots of reasons why people eat meat, there are lots of reasons why people are vegan, and there are lots of ways that people are vegan. Not all of us-- maybe even not most of us-- fit into Keith's convenient stereotypes. My distaste and surprise at Keith's arrogance and tone is solidified on page 5, when she posits that vegetarians have the minds of ignorant children, while people like her have the minds of integrated adults: "The only way out of the vegetarian myth is through the pursuit of kas-limaal, of adult knowledge. This is a concept we need, especially those of us who are impassioned by injustice. I know I needed it. In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood. It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else has to die." I begin to wonder why I should read this book, since it feels extremist and insulting in tone, and I haven't been convinced to trust it, or her. Here is one of her first examples of fallacy: "I've heard vegetarian activists claims that an acre of land can only support two chickens. Joel Salatin, one of the High Priests of sustainable farming and someone who actually raises chickens, puts that figure at 250 an acre." In the text, the former point is based on literal heresay, with no citation. The latter point, however, has one, which is an unfair way to argue. She goes on to spend pages talking about her negative experiences with vegans on internet message boards. She is actually using anecdotal evidence from message boards--and she doesn't even tell us which ones, or who was talking. I hate to be a hypocrite and make assumptions myself, but I really think that most reasonable, curious people can understand why this does not equal reliable research. For instance, just now I googled "anti vegetarian" and found a facebook message board called Anti-Vegan Action Group upon which someone wrote: "since i'm in idaho for a year, i'm really picking up on my meat-eating, and it feels great - just like dennis leary said...vegatarians say, 'you know, you eat red meat and it stays in your colon for ten years.' GOOD! I paid for it, i want it there! anyway, i put a nice 3 inch steak on the grill for prob under 5 minutes last night and it was delicious. i like it bloody." Most writers would never refer to this genre of source in a book that is expected to be taken seriously. This kind of research is not even allowed on Wikipedia. Keith becomes very up front about, literally, how stupid she thinks her readers are when she states: "So, on the theory that many readers lack the knowledge to judge this plan, I'm going to walk you through this." Here's some more of her selective information: "Because without grazers to literally level the playing field, the perennial plants mature, and shade out the basal growth point at the plant's base. In a brittle environment like the Serengeti, decay is mostly physical (weathering) and chemical (oxidative), not bacterial and biological as in a moist environment. In fact, the ruminants take over most of the biological functions of soil by digesting the cellulose and returning the nutrients, once again available, in the form of urine and feces. But without ruminants, the plant matter will pile up, reducing growth, and begin killing the plants. The bare earth is now exposed to wind, sun, and rain, the minerals leach away, and the soil structure is destroyed. In our attempt to save animals, we've killed everything." In some ways this is right, in regards to how grazing works. But what she leaves out here is significant: Humans have evolved many ways to renew topsoil with no or minimal non-human labor: crop rotation, companion planting, ley farming, human tilling, composting, using human waste, and probably other ways we haven't figured out yet. In farming, there is no necessary connection between renewal of topsoil and grazing animals-- let alone killing them or using their products. Keith completely erases the well-established, thriving reality of vegan permaculture. Her only "evidence" against it is in chapter two, when she again offers an anecdote about an unnamed psuedo-vegetarian farm filled with people who she insultingly, and with no evidence, claims are "anorexic". I urge everyone to do their own research-- even just a google search-- on vegan permaculture. Furthermore, grazers in the wild are much different from grazers in domestication, who have been constructed for centuries to be of human use, by various forms of domination, and kept in captivity. It is my opinion that, if we are radical and looking to alter a paradigm, we must consider this wide-spread form of domination. Let's, then, touch upon the phrase "in our attempt to save animals, we've killed everything", which is an absolute falsehood. This is one instance of an innumerable amount of hyperbolic emotional reactions that make up the bulk of Keith's book-- it is an substantiated claim that is unsuitable for holding up a theory. "We've killed everything" is one of so many unfair, simplistic emotional manipulations Keith makes, and it doesn't admit to its own basis in biased ideology. Keith has completely erased the reality of vegan permaculture. She does not talk about it once in the entire book. She does not talk about how the oldest and most successful CSA in the US is Honeybrook Farms in New Jersey, a vegan farm. She does not talk about the abundant, thriving practices of vegan permaculture all over the world. It is unclear why. It is hard to believe that she doesn't know it exists. It seems more likely that she is ignoring it due to an unwillingness to face how much it would debunk and complicate her theories. The very existence of vegan permaculture overrides basically every single thesis of Keith's in this book. Page 9: "But I'm also writing this book as a cautionary tale. A vegetarian diet--especially a low-fat version, and most especially a vegan one--is sufficient nutrition for long-term maintenance and repair of the human body. To put it bluntly, it will damage you. I know." She goes on to talk about her negative experience with veganism, in terms of health. Here we go. Once again, Keith just "knows" and expects us to just trust her (after she's repeatedly insulted us no less.) But once again, personal anecdote cannot be substituted for fact and, once again, the healthiness of different kinds of diets is an issue that, in the most "objective" of scientific communities, is up for serious debate. If you do a simple google search right on "human as omnivore", you will find innumerable amounts of information regarding this complicated debate. Suffice it to say, vegans can be healthy or unhealthy or somewhere in between. Keith's bones, stomach, and other various parts were unhealthy, and no one should have to go through that. She was also depressed and anxious, which all of us can relate to. But again, she offers no evidence that this was related to veganism or not. I don't doubt that her experience of feeling better when eating meat is true for her, but again, it becomes an argumentative fallacy since it leaves out the possibility of third party or extraneous variables. In regards to mental health, she does state the following: "And now I know why. Serotonin is made from the amino acid tryptophan. And there are no good plant sources of tryptophan. On top of that, all the tryptophan in the world won't do you any good without saturated fat, which is necessary to make your neurotransmitters actually transmit." But there are plenty of plant sources for saturated fat (all nuts, avocado, vegetables oils, and many more.) Furthermore, it is straight-up untrue that tryptophan is hard to come by in plant sources (potato, sesame seed, sunflower seed, wheat flour, white rice, and even chocolate.) She seems unreasonably determined to blame her problems on veganism, as in the unsubstantiated statement "if end up with cancer in my reproductive organs, I'm blaming soy." Additionally, because veganism is a non-mainstream diet that even doctors and nutritionists don't know much about to be liscenced in the US, they must be educated under the USDA "food pyramid" model, which is largely based carnism and meat industry politics, it is easy to assume that veganism is the source of health problems when something goes wrong. Let me reinforce that I understand veganism can be unhealthy, if executed badly--like any diet. But Keith's argument here is again based on assumption and anecdote and offers basically no scientifically or ethically valuable, solid information as to the healthiness of either a vegan or carnist diet. Vegans argue that humans are "natural" plant-eaters, carnists argue the opposite-- both, largely, to support their ideologies. I do not use health arguments when advocating veganism for all these reaons. I think the controversial and unresolved question of health is often a distraction from the ethical issues issues that are almost impossibly hard to reconcile. Because of their difficulty, many of us throw these out the window altogether, but that doesn't make them go away: I'm talking about issues regarding the domination, killing, and keeping captive of individual sentient animals. In any case-- Keith's chapter on health vegetarians is so filled with objectively wrong statements that it is scary. It basically reads as an infomercial for paleo-diets and anti-carb diets. I can't write about all that here. Please check out other reviews that have already gone over this, websites that are deconstructing the book and its resources, and do your own research, etc. Suffice it to say, 80 percent of the citations in this chapter are non-peer reviewed books and articles, at least two of which are internet articles with no citations, almost all of which are written by people who have no training in paleontology or nutrition, and almost all of which are books by people who are associated with the controversial and pseudo-scientific anti-vegan organization, the Weston A. Price Foundation. Most of her sources, additionally, are from controversial fad-diet books such as those written by Anthony Colpo, whose only expertise is in weight training. This book, while completely complicating carnism (fair enough--meat eating is complicated), is so framed with little to no respect for the various complicated theories and practices of veganism. It's a one-sided debate that leaves no room for reasonable engagement in dialogue. Vegans are literally written of as ignorant children, and that's the end of it. What are people who disagree, or just want to engage in critical conversation, supposed to do with this? We have been defined and written out of the argument from the start. If you want to read a nuanced book about food politics for the sake of a radical future and building bridges, don't read this one. I guess if you take anything from this review, please take this: Be critical. Do your own research. Don't get swept away by Keith's admittedly pretty prose. She is not a nutritionist, doctor, anthropologist, or biologist. She was a sick vegan who didn't do veganism correctly and now has a fundamentalist, reactive, simplistic hatred of veganism. She shows a scary lack of ability to get out her own troubled psychology and its black-and-white reactiveness. Lierre Keith doesn't need to write books, she needs to see therapists. Don't believe everything you see on TV. (Or in a book.) This book is kind of like an infomercial in that way.