secondly let us stop bashing vegans, yes they may not be absolutely perfect and cause so harm what so ever, but really tell me who does? they are trying! I have had so many people attack me when I say I’m vegan therefor expecting me to be some sort of angel of the earth who doesn’t drive a car or anything else, I said I was vegan not a one woman crusader against leaving any kind of mark what so ever. and let us also stop pretending that vegans cannot be sustainable without meat or that they are all ignorant.

now can we pleas stop ignoring the VERY IMPORTANT fact that most agriculture( grains, soy etc etc etc) is used to feed animals for meat! HELLOOOOO!!!!!

and now other VERY IMPORTANT POINT…..vegans etc are certainly by no means the ONLY PEOPLE WHO EAT AGRICULTURALLY GROWN VEGETABLES, GRAINS ETC. what does VEGETARIAN even have to do with it? unless your talking about those few very unhealthy people who only eat meat and absolutely nothing else, we all eat grains, veg etc! HELLOOOOO AGAIN!

let us also stop pretending that meat is not agriculture too! the book is not called how to live sustainably which might have been good…..
and that killing a snail from your lettuce is the same as slaughtering and butchering a cow to eat, or that in nature where animals live off each other, is the same or an excuse for us being cruel and killing( often very cruelly) tons and tons of animals to eat, we are not part of “that” nature, we mostly shop for food, go on the internet, live in houses , can be racist, sexist, evil, hateful and also resourceful, compassionate, caring and aware.

urg!

What I find also find interesting is to see how angrily the vegetarian/vegan community has responded to this book, and to the author personally as well (including attacks on her while she was giving a talk).

Ok, so vegetarian/vegan people say they value life, so much so that they won’t eat other living beings. What Keith is trying to explain in her book is that even if you don’t eat animals directly, as a human you are still indirectly involved in animal deaths simply by displacement of habitat to make space for the rice fields, the grain fields, and the soyabean fields. It’s the sheer number of humans (and in this case in the western world in particular) that need feeding, be it vegetarian, vegan, or including meat, that is an issue. It’s not a personal attack on anybody, it’s just a fact of life of having to feed a western world. Watch the documentary ‘Our Daily Bread’ and you’ll get an idea of what food production (both meat and vegetable) involves in our society, it’s NOT a pretty picture.

And if you say you value life, you have to look at the whole picture of our western world and food production. This also includes how many offspring you produce to burden an already overburdened world (yes I’m still talking about the western world, overpopulation is not just an issue of the third world). Do you have one child or less? Do you care enough about the planet and other life on the planet to consider having just one kid or no kids at all? Those are all questions that come into this discussion, not just whether you eat local or not, or whether you eat meat or not.

So how come that no one has actually responded as to what they do to grow their vegetables? Do you use organic fertiliser which often consists of seaweed but also blood & bones? How do you make your soil healthy to grow vegetables if you don’t use any animal matter? Do you kill snails that eat your lettuce, and if yes, why is that more justified than killing a chicken for food?

All Keith might have tried to do is to get some discussion going. So far I’ve not seen much discussion, but a lot of anger and even hatred, even by those who haven’t even read the book.

David’s comment above is a prime example of that – he ‘only saw the trailor’ and ‘gets the impression’ she doesn’t grow her own food. As a matter of fact, she does, and she explains this in her book. By not reading it and slandering the author in this manner, it makes you a very mean-spirited nasty kind of person.

Unfortunately a lot of the vegetarian/vegan community engages in this slander as a response to the book (whether they’ve read it or not) and thereby reconfirms preconceptions about the veg*n community already in place – that they are a militant, angry group of people with whom a polite discussion on differing opinions is not possible.

Our actions affect the world around us and vice versa. There are basic facts & realities that go above and beyond our personal politics that we can choose to pay attention to or ignore.

I don’t believe anyone here is advocating for people to run out and start stabbing animals in the neck for their dinner.

Nobody is ‘promoting’ the book. It was suggested that this would be a publication covering a topic of interest that could make for a stimulating discussion – and it has indeed provided us with exactly that.

I think she has accomplished something pretty remarkable by challenging herself and her beliefs in as objective a manner as one could possibly expect. It obviously wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination – but her desire to be true to her aim of doing as little harm to the Earth as reasonably possible prompted her to change course in some very significant ways.

There’s no ulterior motive or underlying agenda I assure you. I have no interest in trying to ‘convert’ people – that’s not my place. But I firmly stand by the idea that sometimes we are slow to let go of notions or beliefs that have little or no basis in fact and are frankly rooted in ignorance.

Geoff & Craig mentioned in an earlier post that the key is to eat from food sources as close to home as possible. For some, that would include the consumption of meat – be it wild game or domesticated animals raised and cared for in your immediate area. For others, it would come mostly in the form of annuals & perinnials(sp?) close by. That’s really what it comes down to.

A wise man once said (paraphrasing): “If you are ignorant about a matter, don’t be afraid to admit your ignorance…and once you have admitted your ignorance, don’t be afraid to learn about it.”

For what it’s worth…

The whole claim of a single diet meeting the “nutritional requirements of the basic human template” are dubious. We can survive on a variety of foods. There are very old, healthy vegetarian cultural traditions around the world as proof, just as there are many traditions that include meat. Why can’t we accept that humans vary widely and there is no universal diet, just like there are no universal solutions devoid of local context?

Rhamis, I enjoy your posts and would love to believe you as well as the others I have spoken with that this book deserves my time and money over the other hundreds of books I’d like to acquire and read with the little disposable income I have. But I have yet to see why and I am puzzled in seeing it being so heavily promoted. What I have gotten so far is that due to her own personal health complications the author has it out for non-meat eaters with some divisive ethics and a general critique of agriculture (that can apply to any diet). Hasn’t the Weston Price Foundation been saying the same thing for years?

Lierre has basically written the book in 3 sections addressing the major categories of vegetarians:

Moral Vegetarians
Political Vegetarians
Nutritional Vegetarians

She fleshes out the main issues and arguments and covers them on their merits according to her experiences in facing them herself. The last chapter is called “To Save The World”.

All I can say is that it deserves a read – a careful, objective one. A passage I found particularly powerful in the Moral Vegetarians chapter is a follows (from pg. 76-77):

“‘Thou shalt not kill’ – or the Buddhist version ‘Abstain from killing’ – is a fine moral guideline for human society. It is nonsensical when applied to the natural world…Nature is no more moral than it is immoral. It’s amoral by definition. Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether its bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. ‘All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat’, in the words of William Ralph Inge.”

“The paradigm that asks us to reject death certainly provides a simple ethical code, a code that can rally the righteous, but it is the black-and-white thinking of a child. The tremendous moral vigor that is the gift of youth seems to demand such rules, but they are essentially slogans and ethical platitudes, which are the root of fundamentalism. Adult knowledge demands more, starting with new information, and it includes the ability to incorporate that new information, to recast as necessary the behaviors informed by our values. Adults don’t just absorb, they learn. The challenge of adulthood is to remember our ethical dreams and visions in the face of the complexities and frank disappointments of reality.”

“I used ideology like a sledgehammer and I thought I could bend the world to my demands. I couldn’t. The needs of the soil, the truth of the carbon cycle, and the nutritional requirements of the basic human template were a reality of brute, physical facts that would not be moved. I had built my entire identity on death being an ethical taboo, a moral horror, one that provoked a visceral shudder through body and soul. But ‘death-free’ is not an option that the processes of life offer us.

“‘We can dominate or we can participate, but there’s no way out,’ a friend who grows her own food offered.”

“We can rail and cry all we want, but in the end we have to make peace with the world, the good, green earth we claim to love so much but understand not at all. In dreams begin responsibilities, yes, but with understanding comes more. Eventually we see our only choices: the death that’s destroying life or the death that’s a part of life.”