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The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability |  | Author: Lierre Keith
Publisher: PM Press
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
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Rating:  49 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
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Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1604860804
Dewey Decimal Number: 613
EAN: 9781604860801
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| • | ISBN13: 9781604860801 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
Part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto, this controversial examination exposes the destructive history of agriculture—causing the devastation of prairies and forests, driving countless species extinct, altering the climate, and destroying the topsoil—and asserts that, in order to save the planet, food must come from within living communities. In order for this to happen, the argument champions eating locally and sustainably and encourages those with the resources to grow their own food. Further examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of both human and environmental health, the account goes beyond health choices and discusses potential moral issues from eating—or not eating—animals. Through the deeply personal narrative of someone who practiced veganism for 20 years, this unique exploration also discusses alternatives to industrial farming, reveals the risks of a vegan diet, and explains why animals belong on ecologically sound farms.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 49
 Life-altering February 24, 2010
Snowbound
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This may prove to be the most life-changing book I've read in years. I've read Michael Pollan, Sally Fallon and others upon whom Ms. Keith draws, but she has pulled together a breadth of stunning facts (yet the books remains very accessible). I have been a vegetarian for years, but have grown more and more uncomfortable with the standard views that grains and other annual crops will save us and that raising them as opposed to livestock is better for the environment. Factory farming is undoubtedly a nightmare, and its products are tainted, but sustainable farming is a different thing altogether.
The book is not without its flaws. It pulls together lots of strands--Lierre's own health, environmental degradation, the global status of women, militarism, and other topics which I do believe are interrelated, but sometimes the book (perhaps for the sake of brevity and readability) fails to flesh out the connections. Also, the book could really have benefited from a good copyeditor (how, for example, does the word "unthaw" make it to print in a book?)
I have the sense that this could have easily been a much longer book, or more than one volume. Also, Lierre essentially apologizes at one point for going in to some detail about her health problems, but her recovery from problems that she believes were caused by veganism is something I am particularly interested in.
This is a work of courage and passion, and I would recommend it to openminded vegetarians and nonvegetarians alike.
This is delicious. Have some. February 6, 2010
John Locke
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Why is it that when you eat those ninety nine percent fat free Yoplait yogurts that come in unnatural flavors like boo berry crunch or coffee banana, you don't really feel like the women in the Yoplait commercials who act like their practically having an orgasm when consuming this tasteless, bland, pretty nasty fat free mush that's loaded with artificial sugars, sweeteners, hfcs and saccharin? And afterwards, you don't really feel guilt free. You just feel hungry. You feel like roaming around looking for subsidence. You might binge on the empty calories of Wheat Thins or chocolate doughnuts which starts off a vicious cycle of nutrient deficiencies. The more you binge on junk, the more nutritionally deficient you become.
Try a lifetime of this. It might lead to some pretty serious consequences like eating neurosis, constant bingeing on carbs and general deterioration of health not to mention the pure idea of living your whole life as a sacrifice to the slave of the fat-free.
Lierre Keith tells you why those fat free yogurts taste like crap in her compelling book, "The Vegetarian Myth". Before you get all defensive about the value of having desserts disguised as health foods in your diary aisle, consider the ideas presented in this book that are pretty valid even to the most middle of the road dairy enthusiast and deserve the critical thought Keith gives them.
First, the idea that civilization is a source of human happiness and contentment is a myth and you don't need to quote the statistics of sky high depression rates to believe it. Second, the idea that eating plants is better for you than eating animals and that plants don't want to be eaten any more than animals do and have some pretty nasty chemical tricks up their stems to ward off predators i.e. us. Third, the idea of symbiosis which has no expression in our industrial civilization at all. The idea that we evolved out of the need to consume the energy of the sun and since we can't photosynthesize, digest grass, but we can digest the animals who eat grass and thus the energy of the sun makes it to us.
These ideas are so important, so fundamental to life itself but yet so many modern civilized people have no idea abut them. So many people are removed from their food and are brainwashed to eat the differentiated products of the agriculture industry that many people have never tasted real food or don't even have the slightest idea of the cycle of big fish eating little fish.
Keith's at her best when she's explains the Cholesterol Myth and how the low fat diet was propagated in order serve the economics of an agriculture industry rather than telling people to eat what they want, which would be high fat delicious foods and actually enjoy their lives. Oh, Keith's chapters on this subject are fascinating, hard to put down and a well needed eye opener.
What it comes down to, is the old question of the Matrix-red-pill-or-the-blue-pill question that so many people would rather read the easy to digest food stories of Michael Pollan rather than really discuss the underlying issues that our food system represents. Those being agriculture leads to empires which leads to endless war for resources which leads to Peak oil, overpopulation, diseases of civilization and so much more.
Which is why I really highly recommend this book to everyone even those who are not vegetarian or interested in food issues. Keith goes where so many best selling authors can't go because they have to please a whole wide range of people to maintain their massive audiences.
My favorite part comes at the end when Keith goes so far as to envision, even if only for a few paragraphs, a world without agriculture or civilization for that matter and how we can go back to the wild, be fed indefinitely by bison and salmon. It may be idealistic, and Western concepts of property ownership and capitalist tendency would not survive. We'd have to teach our children the lessons of the circle of life, symbiosis instead of capitalism and exploitation. We'd have to do away with idea that he who owns the means of production has a right to exploit those who do not. We have to teach children the truth instead of the lies of Christopher Columbus so we can, as Keith puts, at least attain adult knowledge and act according and within the limits of our one and only finite planet.
Also, one last note, I know a lot of the reviewers of this book have and will go into great detail of their own dietary habits and what they eat or don't eat. I don't think that's as important as the question of what do you enjoy your life? Do you live a life of sacrifice to the Gods of Low Fat constantly worrying about early death or do you enjoy life and food? I know I enjoy my Greek yogurt with 14 grams of saturated fat. But don't take my word for it, try it for yourself and see what a difference it makes.
Beyond Pollan May 25, 2009
D. Levi (New York)
110 out of 150 found this review helpful
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.
Food for Thought March 17, 2010
Amaranth (Northern California)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Lierre Keith's "Vegetarian Myth" is a thought-provoking,fascinating tome on the implications of the vegetarian diet and its relationship to the environment. Keith herself was a practicing vegan for two decades,though it endangered her health (there is that important vitamin B12) She skillfully skewers the self-righteousness of vegans and vegetarians,and calls into question agriculture, patriarchy, and civilization itself. She doesn't glamorize indigenous cultures either. While she wants people to get back to the land with hunting,fishing,foraging-she doesn't get all gooey about the lack of civilization like James Cameron in Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora (James Cameron's Avatar) Keith dreams of a world without patriarchy, civilization, and farming--something more radical than Michael Pollan with his The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Keith studies history, religion, and civilization. She sees agriculture as the Original Sin against Nature (fundamentalist vegans take issue with her eating meat, while other sorts of fundamentalists would take issue with her matriarchy/being lesbian) She sees it as the wide swath of destruction. This is unrealistic when one looks at the situation of farmer suicides in India, or countries where they are forced to export their food and take in food aid. The Future of Food, with Jerry Garcia's widow Deborah Koons, questions industrial agriculture. Keith is more radical and sees organic farmers on par with Cargill.
Keith is an engaging and powerful writer and speaker. She's been a deemed a heretic in some circles,and received a chili pie in the face today in the Bay Area for daring to speak her views. She IS radical. And gives delicious food for thought.
5 stars - a must read! March 15, 2010
Gluten Sensitive (PA)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
If I could give this book 10 stars, I would. Yes, Ms Keith presents some feminist and political views that I don't agree with but her message about a sustainable polyculture is worth the slight annoyance. This is an excellent book. I am buying extra copies to give to all of my environmentalist friends because we have been taught that agriculture is the only way to feed this planet. In reality, it is ultimately going to destroy it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 49
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