The Vegetarian Myth Book Review

By Don Matesz


Bottom line: If you believe eating a vegetarian diet improves your moral standing, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will solve world hunger, you need to read this book. If you believe that mass adoption of a vegetarian diet will “save the Earth” from environmental catastrophe, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will give you health and longevity, you need to read this book.

Although Ms. Keith directs her prose to those who eat a vegetarian, particularly a vegan diet, I think everyone needs to read this book. If you believe in agriculture as a way of life, i.e. you believe that agriculture will sustain civilization, and feed people indefinitely, you need to read this book.

Ms. Keith writes from the perspective of a 20-year veteran of vegetarian and vegan dieting who has sustained irreparable damage to her body as a result. As she watched her health deteriorate under the influence of vegan dieting, and made efforts to actually grow her own food, she gradually lost faith in the holy trinity of vegetarianism:

1) Moral vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet reduces bloodshed.
2) Political vegetarianism, based on the belief that widespread practice of a vegetarian diet would produce a sustainable agriculture and social justice.
3) Nutritional vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet produces better health than an omnivorous diet.

In my view, these three legs of vegetarianism are merely logical extensions of the near universal belief in moral, political, social, and nutritional superiority of agri-culture in comparison to hunting-and-gathering culture.

Moral Vegetarians

Moral vegetarianism espouses a principle of non-violence. The advocates wish to eat without killing or stealing from any other organism. As Ms. Keith puts it, the vegetarian nearly prays:

“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.”

This chapter recounts Ms. Keith’s inner and outer struggles with life and death on her path to realizing that, of course, life and death are not really two opposites.

“If killing is the problem, the life of one grass-fed cow will feed me for an entire year. But a single vegan meal of plant babies—rice grains, almonds, soybeans—ground up or boiled alive, will involve hundreds of deaths. Why don’t they matter?”

Throughout this chapter, Ms. Keith shows us how her own moral understanding evolved from the juvenile ethical code of veganism to an adult understanding of how nature really works, as a result of her engaging directly in food production herself. Ms. Keith tells us how, as a vegan attempting to garden, she learned that plants need to eat animal products to thrive. Her garden would not grow without the nitrogen and minerals packed up in blood and bone. Even apple trees eat meat:

“I found one small comfort in The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips. He quotes a book called The Apple Culturist from 1871, recounting the story of an apple tree near the graves of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and his wife Mary Sayles. The roots of the tree were found to have grown in to the graves and assumed the shape of human skeletons while ‘the graves [were] emptied of every particle of human dust. Not a trace of anything was left’”

As she developed her own garden, it attracted other animals. As she puts it, she got “locked in mortal combat with the slugs.” Eventually she had to decide whether to save the slugs or save her garden for her own needs. After much internal struggle, she settled on getting chickens and ducks to eat the slugs. She rationalized that the killing would fall on the ducks and chickens, not herself because “it was their nature, their instinct to hunt insects.” Which led her to ponder:

“Wasn’t death natural? Was it? Or wasn’t it? Which way did I want the answer to fall?

“Because if death was natural—a part of life, not an insult to life—then why was I a vegan?”

Why indeed.

Moral vegetarians believe that agriculture does no damage, that grains and legumes have no blood spilled in their fields. Ms. Keith points out that only someone who has never really understood agriculture could believe this:

“So here is an agriculture without animals, the plant-based diet that is supposed to be so life-affirming and ethically righteous. First, take a piece of land from somebody else, because the history of agriculture is the history of imperialism. Next, bulldoze or burn all the life off it: the trees, the grasses, the wetlands. That includes all creatures great and small: the bison, the grey wolves, the black terns. A tiny handful of species—mice, locusts—will manage, but the other aimals have to go. Now plant your annual monocrops. Your grains and beans will do okay at first, living off the organic matter created by the now-dead forest or prairie. But like any starving beast, the soil witll eat its reserves, until there’s nothing—no organic matter, no biological activity—left. As your yields—your food supply—begin to dwindle, you’ve got two options. Take over another piece of land and start again, or apply some fertilizer. Since the books, pleading and polemical, say that animal products are inherently oppressive and unsustainable, you can’t use manure, bone meal, or blood meal. So you supply nitrogen from fossil fuel. Do I need to add that you can’t produce this yourself, that its production is an ecological nightmare, that one day the oil and gas will run out?

“Your phosphorous will have to be made from rocks. There’s a reason for the popular image that equates hard labor in prison with chopping rocks. How will you mine it, grind it, or transport it without fossil fuel, using only human musculature and without using slavery? …Meanwhile the soil is turning to dust, clogging the rivers, blowing across the continent. In 1934, the entire eastern seaboard was covered in a thick haze of brown, the topsoil of Oklahoma plowed to cotton and wheat, drifting like an angry ghost to cover the eastern cities and further, to ships hundreds of miles out to sea, a final, fitting tribute to the extractive economies of the civilized. This is where agriculture ends: in death. The trees, the grasses, the birds and the beasts are gone, and the topsoil with them. More of the same is no solution.”

So what does she settle on as the ethical solution?

“It’s so simple, as simple, really, as my vegan morality: we need to be a part of the world to know it. And when we join, when we participate, we see that life and death can’t be separated any more than night and day. I will face what is dying to feed me and I will do my best to ensure that it is individuals—cared for, respected—not entire species; that soil—the work of our grandparents for half a billion years—is built, not destroyed; that the rivers keep their waters and their wetlands and that the oil stays in the ground. Only then can I claim the title ‘adult.’”

Ms. Keith’s struggle with to reconcile life and death is a classic example of the suffering endured in a culture based on a juvenile philosophy of dualism. Western philosophy has long suffered from dualistic thought, in which life/mind/male/action/hardness/white is good and death/body/female/rest/softness/black is bad. This has led to a culture that tries to pull nature apart at the seams, to isolate the good from the bad, to kill death and everything that resembles it because of its dimness. Think of how hard we strive to eliminate the night by powering up the lights. It is a losing battle.

Image source: Wikipedia

Chinese philosophers and scientists represented the non-dual nature of nature in the Yin-Yang symbol. Yin represents death and yang represents life. The symbol shows how they mold and feed one another; each ultimately transforming into the other. The play of yin and yang is simply the course of change. Reality moves and this movement naturally produces polar phenomena like life and death. Long ago the Chinese realized that dualistic thought is really a mental illness, a state of mind that does not accurately reflect reality. If you try to eliminate death, you will undermine life; and if you try to exaggerate life, you will also exaggerate death. It makes you crazy.

Next time I will reflect on Ms. Keith’s chapter on Political Vegetarians.