One of the reasons why I loved living in Iceland was that I always had some great books in my hands. It happened this time again, since I was given The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, who spent 20 years of her life as a vegan.By reading it, I wanted to challenge myself and my (political and nutritional) vegetarian beliefs, and sure this book is great for such enterprise. This is the reason why "everyone that eats should read this book", as stated on the cover. But thinking that I was reading about politics and nutrition, in fact the book surprised me as an authentic piece of neo-primitivist theory, ultimately stating that veg(etari)anism vs. meat is not the problem and it is not what will save the planet. The real critique is against our idea of civilization centred on agriculture. While on one hand it shares all vegetarianism's abhorrence of animal factory farming, on the other it is our diet and ultimately our society built on the cultivation of annual grains that is the problem, and the facts speak for themselves. After 3 years of vegetarianism and several thoughts about going vegan, I am now prompted to become an adult vegetarian, meaning that there is so much more that I, as a vegetarian, need to consider, first of all the destruction of huge ecosystems for supporting a grain-based diet - this being a common issue for everyone who eats grain and products of modern farming techniques, regardless of the meat intake.Here are pluses and minuses about the book. Comments are welcome... :)<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />+ the true problem of modern, "civilized" diet is not meat eating, but grain production, especially in monocrops. Large parts of such grain is fed to animals, but even if nobody ate meat, this huge portion of the earth destined to annual crops would in any case imply topsoil destruction and the disappearance of pastures, forests and complex ecosystems for human exploitation. Even a plant-based diet can imply mass killing.- true, soil needs animals, their manure and the corpses of dead animals, too, in order to be fertile. But not all soils are pastures: there are ecosystems that thrive without being fertilized by faeces of animals domesticated and/or hunted by humans. Animal farming is not so easy to justify in such terms. Plus, saying that the earth needs the corpses of dead animals doesn't really imply that it is our duty to kill and grind up cows or chickens (and why not dead humans?) and spray our fields with their blood and bones, or using manure from domesticated cattle and that that is the only alternative to fertilizers from fossil fuels. Permaculture (the cultivation of perennial, interacting plants) and especially the Fukuoka method proved that green manure and permanent mulching work just as fine for keeping the soil healthy and productive, and that even large-scale grain production is possible and productive with little or no human intervention. Masanobu Fukuoka demonstrated that rice fields almost don't need to be flooded, sprayed or weeded, and that a single field can support two different kinds of grain growing side by side, being thus much more productive than monocrops and if the stalks are returned to the field as green manure after harvesting, at the same time it improves the soil. Why is he still ignored?+ that adulthood starts with acknowledging death as a natural process is for me the most valuable point of the book. Our problem nowadays is that carnivores and many vegetarians alike seldom know where and how food comes from. Regardless of our diet, most of us are ignorant and kept such. Some people embrace vegetarianism like a new religion, others see it as a way to widen their given horizons, in a process that should never end. For me, giving up meat was a way to try something new, question what I held to be unquestionable, learn about food and the world around me. What I ate ceased to be a meaningless, automatic act, and became a meaningful, conscious choice. I discovered new foods, preparations, combinations. Began reading labels, and seeing through a steak or a piece of bread everything that lay behind it. Yes, everything dies and is born again in nature's endless cycle, and for a living being to live and thrive, someone else has to die, either by human hand or not. Like many others I believe, of course I considered this when I turned vegetarian. I am fully aware of this and that is why I would never think lions should eat grass, or that Inuits should eat salad and not whale, or I wouldn't really mind killing (or eating, why not) a swarm of snails threatening my garden. I am not against killing for food, I am against pointless suffering and a sick industrial system of food production that is just morally, environmentally and economically unacceptable. One needs to draw the right conclusions from the book. I don't think that the ultimate point of the author is that the reader should close the book and start wolfing on meat and diaries, but rather to fully understand how food and nature work, free of whatsoever ideological barriers. Although I mostly agree with the author, I am not going to run to the butcher's shop after reading this book. I will simply keep on thinking that if I ever will live in a successful organic farm, where absolutely no topsoil is destroyed, and where I act as a natural regulator of the animal population on the farm, or if I was living in Greenland or among some semi-nomadic tribes living the life of our ancestors in an unspoilt landscape, I will consider eating meat. But for the time being, I am not in any of such contexts, nor are many other people.- embracing neo-primitivist philosophy doesn't mean being or acting as a hunter-gatherer. It means acknowledging the validity of (some) hunter-gatherers' societies as an environment-friendly, natural, and fair societal models. Adopting a grain-free diet is a possibility, but a diet largely based on game or even organically farmed meat is less possible for all mankind than a complete plant-based one, because the premises for it are just missing right now. Not everybody lives in the ideal environment for feeding on grass-fed animals. And even if Mr. Keith does, she misses a big point: what is she going to feed her animals during winter? Domesticated cattle and goats (the main source of milk for human consumption) don't naturally stay in the same spot all year around in a temperate climate, but they either need to be fed hay (from annual crops fields) or, in case you're nomad or semi-nomad, be moved to a winter pasture. Agriculture is not only about grain, it is also about animal farming, and if you criticize or refuse agriculture, you can't leave anything behind. Even assuming that a farmer rotates his fields and lets animals graze in a different one in turns, he'll still need a monoculture of alfalfa on one of them that is not grazed but turned into hay for the winter. He still remains an agriculturalist, with all it implies. I am not sure how this fits into the author's primitivist or anti-agriculture mental scheme, or how much land you'd need to feed how much meat to how many people. In other words, I'd like to know how many people per acre her friend farmers can feed with their grain-free farms, and if they are really self-sufficient and 100% grain-free... but that, she doesn't say.- milk. The author is a big fan of cow milk (called liquid meat, by extremist vegan propaganda). Too bad that the greatest part of the world population is lactose tolerant, and nobody really was originally. Those who are not can keep fooling their nature by taking diary pills, but is that not even less natural than feeding a complete plant-based diet to an omnivore? The reality is that our bodies neither want nor need milk. Most of the world's human population has made it so far without milk, which is but a recent innovation. In the America she dreams of, there shouldn't be any European-imported cows, and the bison-hunting natives who (or at least whose legacy) should inhabitate the region are naturally 100% lactose-intolerant. Like millions of other people, I grew up without cow milk and I'm perfectly fine.- the nutritional argument may make a lot of sense in evolutionary terms, but only until the industrial revolution and the advent of modern cities. Except for some pathological cases (such as the author's personal history), experience clearly shows that a vegetarian or even a vegan diet is not necessarily more harmful than eating meat. A wrong veggie-based diet can be as harmful as a wrong meat-based diet. It is just common sense. I suspect that the serious health problems she developed can be ascribed to such cases, plus additional causes that may have been aggravated by a wrong diet. She can blame soya for a cancer, but millions of Asians eating soya in all possible forms (beans, tofu, tempeh, soya sauce, sprouts...) simply prove her wrong. This is a huge controversy that cannot be solved by the personal clinical file of one single individual. 60% of all Indians are vegetarian and have been for centuries, maybe even millennia; some of them suffer from malnutrition, true, but how much of that malnutrition is due to actual poverty and how much to vegetarianism? Just as much as our progenitors changed diet and started hunting big ruminants because their landscape had changed (rainforest shifting to savannah), today our landscape has dramatically changed again and we have to cope with this in terms of nutrition. Vegetarianism may not save the world, but at least to a certain extent, I believe some version of it does make more sense than irresponsible meat-based diets in a time of overpopulation and overexploitment of natural resources. Maybe in some thousands of years, if humans will still be here, the brain mass of vegetarians will have shrunk, just as much as it grew from eating animal fat; but considering how much we use of our brain today, I don't see big dangers upcoming at least for the next few millennnia. Fighting annual monocultures is not on the veggy movent's agenda, true; we can start with reducing that, and doing it differently, more efficiently and less destructively. But by converse, can eating more meat really be a solution? I can concede that in some cases, it may well be (when grain and vegetables have to be imported at high costs from far away and ultimately damage domestic food production). But how much does that apply to those of us living in modern urban conglomerates that produce no food at all?- so, what should we really do? The last point concerns foodstuffs that has been completely forgotten by the author: so-called superfoods. In these last months, I read a lot about them and I came to believe that it will be neither mainstream veganism nor meat to save us and the planet, but (less known) foodstuffs that are extraordinarily rich in some nutrients. Some of them are very easy to obtain, like spirulina, a seaweed that contains more than 60% complete protein (more than beef), and like all seaweeds, is exceptionally rich in minerals. Also, the way seaweed is farmed does not have anything to do with conventional farming (nor with animal manure): all you need is a water-filled vat or transparent pipes, sunlight and just any plant waste as its "feed". This combination yields the most amazing food on earth, that can provide so much nutrition in exchange of such little effort. Seaweeds can also be used as an easy, cheap and sustaibable source of oils to burn as biofuel. And this is but one example. The benefits of many lesser known seeds, berries, nuts, sprouts, unrefined bee products, raw cacao, and much more (even insects!), many of which are already found locally in many places, are huge, and none of these really requires conventional farming in annual monocultures. But as long as we keep on ignoring them, we'll be stuck in this situation, thinking that either chickpeas or meat alone will save us.This is what I learned from this book: giving up meat is not enough. There is so much more to it, and nobody holds the truth: there is always more to learn, as many things as there are diets. Mediterranean, Arctic, macrobiotic, vegetarian, vegan, Ayurvedic, raw foodist, "paleodiets", urinotherapy (!!), even fasting and cannibalism... they all make sense to some people and situations. They are all ways humans have found to adapt to some contexts. Many of them are anthropological, i.e. they are indicative of a culture, or a sub-culture, like veg(egetari)anism, plus of a certain time of human history, and environment.The next post will be on paleodiets and extinctionism.
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