In short, if you think about what you eat, how it got to you, and the issues of nutrition, morality, politics and spirituality come with it, it is paramount that you encounter what The Vegetarian Myth has to offer.

My full review continues:

Keith‘s central point is that in order for you to live, something else has to die.  While it may seem like a simple enough statement, it may become pretty controversial pretty quickly, especially if you’ve tried to build your diet (or any part of your life, for that matter) around the avoidance of killing other creatures for food or otherwise.  She essentially says that not only are the practices of vegetarians and vegans misguided in their effort to help us lead a more sustainable and just life, they actually often propagate a harmful cultural story about food and the relationship we have to it.  By necessity, I won’t even try to support those statements in this review, as the whole substance of the book is about doing that meticulously; please don’t ask me to summarize her thinking for you.

Given how much being a veg*n becomes a matter of identity for so many, Keith acknowledges right off that these assertions are painful ones to make, let alone to hear and receive.  The potentially biting nature of her premise can only be alleviated by her willingness to explore it so thoroughly and sympathetically, and to share about the close relationship she has to the subject matter.   She tells her personal story of being a long-time vegan, and how she journeyed from an approach to diet that inherently required malnutrition and delusion to one that led to health and awakening.  She knows what’s it’s like to question the foundation of the choices we make about food because she’s been doing it rigorously and relentlessly for much of her life:

I know what you want to be true, vegetarians.  You want to open the circle of concern to everything sentient.  With all your hearts, you want us humans to be meant for cellulose or seeds or berries or anything that you believe can’t feel pain.  And I’m telling you the truth: it doesn’t work.  What you are made of — bones, blood, brain, heart — needs animals.  This is not the universe you wanted.  But it’s the way the world, always alive and always hungry, works.  You can try to live on those other things — the cellulose you can’t digest, the seeds that fight back, the berries and their sugar.  If you’re like me, you’ll do it until you’re half dead.  If you’re smarter than me, you’ll learn.  You want to open that circle, but in fact there’s no way out of it. We’re all of us, seeded and feathered, rooted and furred, already in it.   (p. 243)

Despite her empathy, Keith is still ruthless in her exploration of modern thinking on food.  She tackles, chapter by chapter, all the reasons that one might have for being a vegetarian or vegan: moral, political, nutritional.  She turns the writing of food scholars like Peter Singer, Frances Moore Lappe and Jim Merkel on its head, calling out the flaws in the thinking and research that is so often held up to support commonly held viewpoints around veg*n lifestyles.  She does make extensive use of other recently trending writings by authors like Michael Pollan, whose books The Omnivore’s Dilema, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food provide a great conceptual framework for Keith’s particular messages.

Of course, the question that naturally arises when one encounters material “attacking” a given approach to make the world a better place is “well, what does she suggest we do instead?”  It’s important to note that Keith is not at all suggesting we stand down from the calls issued by the veg*n communities and many other kinds of concerned citizens about stopping the horrors of CAFOs and industrial agriculture, and the book is not just a permission slip to eat meat without consideration of how it came to be dead on your plate.  To the contrary, she asserts that she wants an even more full accounting of our thinking about food production and the values, morals and assumptions that are behind it – an accounting that goes beyond turning to soy, or raw foodism, or other kinds of well-intentioned alternatives to a carnivorous diet.  As she notes in her concluding chapter, Keith doesn’t just want an alternative to mainstream thinking on food, she wants us to build a new approach that is self-consciously opposed to the dominator culture that fuels that thinking.

Despite my request above to avoid trying to summarize Keith’s work, I will provide a few of the questions she suggest you ask in considering what you eat (p. 248):

1. Does this food build or destroy topsoil?
2. Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers?
3. Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?

She also offers three strong recommendations for those interested in personal solutions:

1. Refrain from having children
2. Stop driving a car
3. Grow your own food

(I list these here in hopes that they make you want to understand more about why those questions and recommendations are relevant; again, please don’t take them out of the context of the larger book, or ask me to defend them here.)

If I can offer any criticism of The Vegetarian Myth at all, it’s that the book is so dense with information, and Keith often takes such a significant amount of time to make a point from multiple perspectives and with multiple supporting arguments, facts, etc. that it almost becomes overwhelming.  I fully understand the necessity of this approach given the resistance her arguments are sure to encounter, but it makes the book unsuitable as a starting point or introduction to these issues for someone who is not already exploring them in some form, or for whom there isn’t already some deep cracks in their own previously solid thinking about their veg*n lifestyle.  (In fact, I’m sure many vegetarians and vegans will be insulted by her statements and find her condescending, despite her great care to note, “hey, I was just like you once.”)  I don’t think Keith intends the book as said introduction, so maybe that’s just a fair warning to readers of this review, instead of anything wrong with her text.  But, at the risk of over-simplifying what is definitely not a simple topic, perhaps a future project could include a version of Keith’s book that can get the core assertions and arguments across in a shorter form, with pointers back to the full book and related resources for those wanting to know more.

For me personally, The Vegetarian Myth was a great unpacking of a phrase that I heard Daniel Quinn use many years ago to describe the practice of those who choose not to eat meat: “Kingdomism.”  In other words, discriminating against one kingdom of beings in the taxonomy of life in favor of another.  Lierre Keith does an excellent job of making the case that by practicing such discrimination, we deprive ourselves of and disconnect ourselves from the cycles of life in which we were designed to participate.  Some of the ideas were not new to me, but I’m still figuring out what this means for my own diet and food politics, as it was just this past January that I started trying to eat less meat, a project that has withered as I’ve turned the pages of this book.  And as with every experience that transforms our thinking, I’m left somewhat disoriented and full of questions, but also set on a new and exciting path of exploration and challenge.  As Keith kindly inscribed in my copy of The Vegetarian Myth, “First the Fight and then the Feast.”

(I linked to the Amazon.com product page for the book above, but if you buy it from Lierre Keith directly, she gets the most compensation, and you have the opportunity for a personalized inscription too!  If you’re in Richmond, you’re welcome to borrow my copy.  You can read the first 14 pages of the book online.)

Updated, from the comments: I should add that I find this book important and useful because of the important questions it raises and the challenges it offers, not because I can personally endorse every conclusion made. By no means have I followed all the primary research, and there are certainly people out there who offer the possibility that much of it is incorrect or misleading.  -Chris

Updated 8/3: In a private e-mail exchange after this review appeared, Keith noted that “many reviewers are focusing on my suggested personal actions, when I tried to be so clear that there are NO personal solutions. What we need is a serious political resistance movement–that’s the *only* solution. We need huge institutional change, and have been sold a useless bill of goods by both corporate America and liberalism as to the efficacy of personal consumer and lifestyle choices.“

[W]here does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable. University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt classifies such efforts as attempts to attain (and potentially guilt others into) a sense of moral purity. “Food,” he says, “is becoming extremely moralized these days.”

The problem, of course, is that purity is hard to come by in a world as complex as ours, and simplistic answers often have consequences that their proponents do not intend. Consumers should think twice before jumping on the localvore bandwagon.

I’m all for thinking twice before jumping on any sort of wagon, but I think Mr. Hisrich’s logic is flawed in a number of places. Read on for my point-by-point analysis of his column:

In April, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University published a study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that all of the transportation associated with the American food supply chain accounts for only 11 percent of foods’ climate impact.

You can view the full study online. The basic conclusion that they make is that the transportation of food isn’t as big a factor in carbon footprint as the production and other factors, and so that we might be able to reduce our footprint more by changing our diet — eating less meat and dairy, which create the most pollution — than we will by changing where it comes from.

This study seems well done, and convincing in its assertion that food miles are only one part of overall considerations when it comes to the environmental impact of food choices. Of course, carbon footprint is not the only reason many people like to eat local; there are lots of other benefits, including the relationships that come with knowing who is growing your food and how, and the proud self-reliance that comes from being able to eat off of the land we live on.

And, “It’s still useful to think about transport,” says David Pimentel of Cornell University, an ecologist who has conducted life-cycle analyses of food’s energy use. He recently calculated that if a typical American drives home with a 1 pound can of corn, 311 calories of fossil fuel energy are used to transport the 375-calorie corn in the can.

In fact, by focusing on local production, emissions may actually rise. This is because growing foods in the conditions best suited to their production can often offset the relatively small impact of transportation. In the United Kingdom, for instance, fewer emissions are released by importing milk and apples from New Zealand and tomatoes from Spain than devoting the energy and resources necessary to produce them locally.

One of the core tenets of the local food movement is not only to eat food that is produced locally, but to avoid foods that can’t be produced locally. Mr. Hisrich is correct that if we try to grow avocados and oranges here in Indiana in the dead of winter, we’ll of course use much more energy to do that than someone growing those foods in a climate naturally suited for it. So while the point is technically correct, it unfairly ignores some of the ethos of the local foods movement – few people are suggesting we try to grow every kind of food here just to satisfy our “exotic” cravings.

[W]hat the growing local advocates encourage often has less to do with an actual weighing of the costs and benefits of local farming than it does with a value judgment about what should be good for rural economies. While one might be able to argue that eating local improves the lot of a particular group, it is more difficult to argue that spending more for local produce improves the economic well-being of either local shoppers or the local economy as a whole.

I’d ask Mr. Hisrich to back that assertion up with some data, the “actual weighing of costs and benefits” of which he speaks. By definition, dollars that are spent on locally produced goods and services, given to vendors that live and work here, are dollars that will tend to stay in the geographical region to be spent again on other locally produced goods and services. This is why every economic development organization in the state works to bring businesses to their towns that will pay good wages to local workers who will then turn around and spend it locally. This is why local currency and time banks are popping up everywhere, and why our own Chamber of Commerce has a “buy local” program. Just because we’re talking about food, the principles don’t become any more mysterious.

What about impoverished farmers in developing countries who merely seek the chance to compete on a level playing field? This movement provides advocates of protectionism another rhetorical tool in their effort to prevent that from happening.

Quite to the contrary, the local food movement is part of a larger cultural perspective that seeks to remove the artificial protections that prevent people from sustaining themselves on their own land-base. If you take into consideration the subsidies, trade tariffs, import/export controls, immigration policies, monopolies and compulsory price controls, and injustices related to wage and labor standards that help create the “impoverished farmer in a developing country” in the first place, it’s clear that the leveling of the playing field needs to happen well before we get to the buying choices of the end consumer.

By encouraging communities to be more self-reliant, we actually help all communities move toward being able to make a sustainable living for themselves.

John Cloud, however, points out that local does not necessarily mean safe. When he asked Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a liberal Washington group that supports strong organic standards, whether local food should be favored, Mendelson replied, “I don’t know what local means. Do they use local pesticides? Does that mean the food is better because they produce local cancers?”

This is an unnecessarily flippant remark in a serious conversation, but I’ll address it anyway. Not every local food effort advocates the banning of all pesticides and chemicals from the growing process, and communities can set their own standards as they see fit.

The point is that when you can visit your local grower and see what practices they use to create the food you eat (or perhaps even help yourself!), you have much more control over and knowledge about what you put in your body. We only have to look back to this past summer and remember the food-borne illnesses that came from unsupervised, poorly conducted growing processes in an industrial agriculture setting to see how the safety of our food is improved when we’re more engaged in where it comes from.

So, back to the original suggestion Mr. Hisrich shared:

So where does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable.

I’ll promise not to be insulted by the suggestion that people in the relocalization movement only make certain decisions just because it might be the right thing to do, if Mr. Hisrich promises not to be insulted by my suggestion that he doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about here.

All across the country and world, communities are experiencing the forced contraction that comes with rising energy costs, failures of over-dependence on the global economy, and the isolation and disconnection of the culture of “suburbia.” Communities that are working to reclaim their identities and self-reliance are finding positive ways to move past those contractions, taking matters back into their own hands instead of waiting for the next factory closure or government bailout to set the course.

The local food movement is a core part of this, and while participating in it will mean different things for different communities, it deserves a bit more consideration than Mr. Hisrich’s column gives.  I do really appreciate that he’s taken this issue on and generated some conversation around it! I hope he’ll join us at the next 100-Mile Radius Potluck here in Richmond so we can continue that conversation together.

You can view highlights from the event, which was sponsored by ProgressiveWayneCounty.org, in this YouTube video:

Perhaps you’ll join us for our next potluck?