Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Book Review: The Vegetarian Myth I bought this after reading Dr. Michael Eades review of it[1]. If you have an interest in the book, I suggest you read that review also, as Dr. Eades views the book somewhat differently than I do. However, just as for Dr. Eades, this book now has more dog-ears and flags and marginalia than any other I have read in many years. There is only one word that describes this book: astounding. Lierre Keith is an astounding writer, with a true gift for writing prose that engages the reader. I found this book, in so many ways, a delight to read. And, in so many ways, very frustrating to read. Ms. Keith exudes three intense passions: vegetarianism, environmentalism and feminism. The first is, of course, the topic of the book, and she paints a vivid story of her path from the most extreme form (veganism) to becoming an omnivore. A fascinating and engaging story it is. Sadly, the lessons about knowledge, science, understanding, self-deception and enlightenment that she learns on her path from radical veganism/vegetarianism to accepting that there is a circle of life of which humans are a part, do not seem to have permeated in the least her beliefs about environmentalism and feminism. This makes for an astoundingly frustrating book. Regarding her diet, Keith's journey from veganism through vegetarianism to meat-eater is a fascinating story. She had to give up beliefs held for decades, and face the fact that she had believed in and promoted many falsehoods during these years, in order to make the journey. The intellectual honesty in this journey is inspiring. That Keith is now trying to spread the message of The Vegetarian Myth to other vegetarians and vegans is also astounding. One can only imagine the hate and vitriol that will be heaped upon her by the "true believers" who were her former comrades-in-arms. Sadly, the lessons she learned in this journey through one of her passions do not appear to have translated to the other two passions. Because of her (self-proclaimed) radical feminism and radical environmentalism, the book is also astoundingly wrong in so many easy-to-verify facets - I list a mere handful below. Keith's promulgating such falsehoods, without the slightest effort to verify them, casts a deep shadow of doubt upon the many things she says that seem to make sense to me. Yes, I agree with her on things such as the need for fat in the diet, but when she also tells me (first item below) an utterly inane and transparently ridiculous fact about forest in Indiana, why should I believe anything she writes? In short, while, in the interests of health, I would recommend this book to any vegetarian I knew, the only other people who might find it valuable are those studying captivating prose, as that is the only other redeeming quality of the book. Below are a few of the dozens of "facts" that caused me to do a bit of research, and thus to doubt the veracity of anything Keith writes. Page 41: "Indiana was once home to over two million acres of prairie and forest. Only a thousand fragmented acres remain." This is a mind-numbingly stupid assertion: a trivial Google search reveals that Indiana has a land area of 22,955,000 acres, of which there are currently 4.5 million acres of forestland and 4.3 million acres of timberland. These represent 38% of the entire state![2] Page 56: Answering "Who is destroying the place where you live?" she writes "A sociopathic economic system that turns corporate boards into legal persons with no responsibility to anything except shareholder profits?" I would find it a challenge to put so much falsehood into a single sentence. Economic systems do not create corporate boards - legal systems (i.e., governments) do that. Boards are not legal persons in any sense of the word, they are a legal committee charged with running a company, and they survive past any individual's membership (or life, for that matter). They do not enjoy the rights of legal persons, e.g., the right to free speech. And anyone who thinks corporations are not responsible for anything but profits is grossly ignorant of reality. Among other things, they are responsible for compliance with criminal law, civil law, securities law, human relations law, state and local environmental regulations, EEOC law, etc., as well as a host of private contracts such as bank covenants, supplier contracts, customer contracts, land and equipment leases, etc. Yes, profits are the goal, but they are but the tip of the iceberg regarding corporate responsibilities. Page 71 "I don't have an unbroken line back to a living, pre-agricultural tradition, but the fragments that survive whisper to a similar theology" This is more sloppy thinking than factual, but perhaps Ms. Keith can explain how she came to exist if her "line" back to her pre-agricultural ancestors was broken? Page 110: After spending a couple pages describing how US federal farm policies (such as price supports) distort the market for corn and grains, and discussing the variable costs of farming vs. manufacturing, Keith concludes "The point of the first federal farm price supports wasn't to make food available cheaply: it was to keep farmers in business. Because without farmers there is no food. And the free market doesn't work for basic foodstuffs." Setting aside her astoundingly sophomoric discussion of variable costs, Keith apparently does not realize that a market with all kinds of government meddling is not a free market, so its failure is not an indictment of the free market. Just the opposite: regarding foodstuffs in which the government does not meddle, which includes most meats, most vegetables, some fruits, and the vast majority of packaged food products, the free market does a perfectly good job of keeping them on the grocery store shelf, without government subsidies and without soaking the taxpayer. Page 114: "Cargill is the largest privately held [sic] corporation on the planet." (Italics in original.) Trivial to check, trivial to show wrong: #1 Glencore International AG (Switzerland, $142B), #2 Koch Industries (USA, $98B), #3 Cargill (USA, $88B). As important: so what that they are large? There may be reasons to dislike the company, but the fact they are large is not one of them. Page 261: "That endless struggle for power results in men committing brutal and violating acts as a matter of course. . . . We need to be questioning ordinary, normal men and masculinity." Or, perhaps, we need to be questioning rote, ignorant stereotypes. Imagine if I claimed, due to the inability of some women to master advanced mathematics, that "We need to question women's ability to pursue science careers." I suspect Keith would have a fit, and rightfully so. Sadly, her radical feminism is as blinding to her ability to think rationally as her radical vegetarianism was, until her failing health forced her to open her eyes on the subject of diet. Continuing on the same page: "[Battery is] one of the leading causes of injury and death to women in the US." It does not rank in the top ten in any of the lists of mortality or emergency room visits that I could find (e.g., [3]). #10 on most of these lists contributes 1% to 2% to the total, so battery contributes even less. What makes it "leading"? Page 270: regarding extinction of species: "Yet not one major environmental group is organizing to actually stop the daily biocide: over a hundred species, each and every day." Let's see, that would be over 36,500 species being extinguished every year! At what point would credulity be stretched so far Keith actually wondered about what she was writing? When does she stop regurgitating eco-foolishness and apply to environmental issues the same critical thinking she applied to her diet? In reality, the rate of extinction is believed to have increased from one species every four years about 150 years ago, too around one per year today. Since there are millions of identified species, and since all species eventually become extinct (estimates are that over 95% of all species that ever lived are extinct), this hardly constitutes a crisis [4]. Something to be concerned about, perhaps, but a crisis, hardly! Finally, the very last printed page of the book points out the utter lack of introspection and careful thinking that characterizes Keith's writing, and her life. After nearly three hundred pages of berating modern society, consumerism, over-consumption, use of fossil fuels, failure to "eat locally," etc. - the predictable blather of an environmental fanatic - we learn, in "About the Author," that "[Keith] lives in both western Massachusetts and Northern California." The hypocrisy is breathtaking: apparently the rest of us should minimize our footprint on earth and our use of fossil fuels, but it is ok for Keith to have two residences and (presumably) spend lots of fossil fuel flying across country to enjoy them both. In summary, this is a fantastic book and a fantastically frustrating book. Give it to your vegetarian friends whose health suffers from their diet. Otherwise there are far more thoughtful books on environmentalism and feminism to read. Jim [...] [4] See pgs 252-253 of The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, 1998. Includes numerous references to original sources.