An amazing read: The Vegetarian Myth

I'm not in the business of telling vegans and vegetarians their diet is wrong. Frankly, I don't care what they put into their bodies as long as they keep their nose out of my dinner plate. You know, do unto others and all that good stuff.

But when I noticed The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability on Tovar Cerulli's list of recommended books the other day, I was immediately intrigued.

The description on Amazon said the book addresses the destructive impacts of 10,000 years of agriculture and explores a more sustainable way of living. That fit right in with one of my favorite topics these days: the notion that both humans and the planet were much better off when we were hunter-gatherers, living off of what the earth gave us. You know, Paradise. Before the fall. The tantalizing life I can see, hear, smell and taste when I'm hunting.

I ordered the book immediately and tore into it as soon as it arrived. Holy moly, what an amazing read!

Author Lierre Keith had been a vegan for 20 years and suffered serious health problems - some irreversible - because of her diet. The book takes us through her process of learning that there is no escaping the fundamental truth that living things must die for us to eat and live. It then explores evidence that the diets of civilization - vegetarian or not - are doing grave damage to the planet and our health.

A lot of vegans hate this book because Keith methodically attacks their worldview, including the notion that their diet does not require sentient beings to be used, harmed or killed. But honestly, I think the book would have been just as riveting without the focus on debunking vegan dogma, because it addresses the foods and beliefs that make up everyone's diet.

Here are the two ideas from the book that I enjoyed the most:

Plant sentience. Keith explores the notion that plants are way more sentient than we'd like to believe.

In The Lost Language of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner presents page after page detailing what plants do. They defend themselves. They protect each other. They communicate. They call out to other plant species, asking them to join in forming a resilient community. They sometimes sacrifice themselves for the good of all. ... Where we use locomotion and opposable thumbs, plants use chemicals. That is the difference between us...

Plants are in constant communication with each other. "Each plant, plant neighborhood, plant community, ecosystem, and biome has messages flowing through it constantly - trillions and trillions of messages at the same time." Any place that roots touch other roots or their shared mycelial network, they can also exchange chemistries, medicines. One plant will send out a chemical distress call. The others respond with precise antibiotics, antifungals, antimicrobials or pesticides to help.

That section alone was mind boggling. If you're a fan of Lord of the Rings, you won't be able to stop yourself from thinking of the slow-to-act but powerful Ents here. And if you're an Avatar fan, the plant communication idea will sound awfully familiar.

What I loved about it is that Keith - using science, not fantasy movies - forced me to think differently about plants and substantially broadened my view of the interdependent life forms on Earth. I definitely want to do more reading on that subject.

The perils of the civilized diet. Keith cites research that finds better - sometimes perfect - health in communities with primitive diets, particularly animal-based diets (and yes, this too pisses off the vegans). She notes that when communities of perfect health begin consuming the refined agricultural products that civilization gives them, they begin to experience the diseases of civilization: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis and other degenerative diseases.

She quotes extensively from the research of Dr. Weston Price, who with his wife Florence searched the globe for communities of people with perfect health and studied their diets.

The Prices ... found perfect health in Torres Strait islanders. The government physician for the islanders stated that in his thirteen years among the native population of four thousand, he had never seen cancer. He had operated on several dozen malignancies among the white population of about three hundred. In fact, among the indigenous, any conditions requiring surgery were extremely rare. The indigenous people resisted assimilation, especially to industrial food. They understood that government stores were a danger, and on a number of occasions almost took up violence against such stores. ...

Other doctors have also observed near-universal perfect health of hunter-gatherers. Dr. Edward Howell, a pioneer in enzyme research, reported on another doctor who lived with the indigenous people near Aklavik (northern Canada), stating, "He has never seen a single case of malignancy." One report from a doctor who examined hundreds of indigenous people on their native diets found that 'there were no signs of any heart disease ... No case of cancer or diabetes.' Such observations are common in the anthropological literature and are completely ignored by the medical institutions that control the public health policies of our country.

Keith also spends a great deal of time in the book attacking grain and soy. She makes a compelling case that cultivating these foods has devastated the planet, and eating them has wrecked our health. I don't think Keith ever uses the word "paleo" in her book, but it's clear she has much in common with adherents to the paleo diet, which embraces anything humans ate before the rise of agriculture and eschews most or all that came after it - particularly grains. (If you're intrigued by that diet, be sure to check out Hunt Gather Love, a blog by Melissa McEwen, a New York City hunter who eats paleo.)

I've got to say this aspect of the book really challenged my infatuation with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because I love grains. I've long said that if civilization collapses in my time and plunges us all back into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, one of the things I'd miss the most would be bread. But if Keith and the research she cites are right, perhaps we'd all be better off without it.

I had learned about the potentially harmful effects of industrially farmed food - starting with Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and continuing with the movie FOOD, Inc. - long before I discovered Keith's book. But Keith expanded on those works with breadth and detail. And while I'm not inclined to purge grains from my diet anytime soon, Keith's book left me feeling that my diet rich in wild game, unapologetically in love with animal fats and filled with locally grown produce is putting me on the right track.

One of the things I love about this book is that it's clear Keith has done a great deal of research into her topics, and hundreds of footnotes tell you exactly where she got her information. Of course, I'm well aware that research can be flawed, and even when it's not, it can be cited misleadingly or selectively. So the key question here is how seriously can we take Keith's assertions?

The answer is that I don't know. There were several spots in the book that set off my B.S. detector. In one section, for example, Keith praised Weston Price's study of the communities of perfect health because "(h)e wasn't distracted by the variations in macronutrients or by differences in basic food stuffs." But earlier in the book she had criticized researchers who didn't control for variables. Sounds inconsistent to me.

The problem is that I haven't been able to find a thorough critical analysis of the book, and I sure don't have time to do one myself.

A group of vegans have started a website to debunk the book, vegetarianmyth.com (and yes, Keith totally blew it by not registering the domain name of her own book). But the site is incomplete - it primarily addresses Keith's assertions that relate directly to veganism.

And aside from a San Francisco Chronicle story about Keith getting pied by masked vegans when she was speaking at an anarchist book fair earlier this year (seriously - I couldn't make up something that weird), I haven't been able to find any mainstream coverage of this book at all, much less any coverage that would look at it critically.

That said, I still recommend it. It's not as crazy as Paul Shepard's The Tender Carnivore & the Sacred Game, which advocated eating proteins synthesized from petroleum and offered an advanced hunter-gatherer utopia in which women wouldn't be allowed to hunt big game. But it's every bit as thought provoking.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010