The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

Aug 11, 2010 Emily rated it 1 of 5 stars

Well, that was...interesting...

Lierre Keith is a self-described radical, meaning that she basically wants to remake the world from (literally) the ground up. She lays out her idealized - well, not civilization because that's a bad word - but lifestyle for the world. While there are nuggets of value and interest in this book, they are mostly hidden in piles of sentimental, inflammatory, and repetitive filler.

The over-the-top sentimentality is eye-roll-inducing. Crying over slugs dying instead of...more Well, that was...interesting...

Lierre Keith is a self-described radical, meaning that she basically wants to remake the world from (literally) the ground up. She lays out her idealized - well, not civilization because that's a bad word - but lifestyle for the world. While there are nuggets of value and interest in this book, they are mostly hidden in piles of sentimental, inflammatory, and repetitive filler.

The over-the-top sentimentality is eye-roll-inducing. Crying over slugs dying instead of eating your garden? Really? Plants "make meaning...are capable of agency and courage and self-awareness." Huh? Inflammatory language abounded, too. The book would have been stronger, in my opinion, (maybe even two stars) if she had just stuck to the facts on the topic at hand rather than waxing eloquent about the "love for all beings" and how her "prayer pulses in me like another heart" or ranting about how "the brilliance of patriarchy is that it sexualizes acts of oppression."

Structurally, it's not an easy book to read, either. There is no index, so when I wanted to go back and see what she said about celiac disease or irrigation I had to do a lot of flipping and skimming. The three loooooooong chapters really needed to be split into several smaller chapters or at least to have section subheadings on them.

The main thrust of Ms. Keith's book is about our food choices and their consequences. I actually agree with her up to a point; many of us don't fully consider the moral, political, or nutritional implications of what we put into our mouths. Especially in first world countries, we consume far more than our fair share of the world's resources and have completely lost touch with where our food comes from and how it gets to us. As a recovering vegan herself, Ms. Keith specifically targets the three main rationales for following a vegetarian or vegan diet.

In a nutshell, moral vegetarians believe that killing is wrong and, therefore, eating meat is akin to murder. They believe that animals shouldn't have to die to feed them. Ms. Keith points out that even a vegetarian diet results in deaths: rodents caught in farm machinery, insects killed by pesticides on crops, even microbes in the soil and plants themselves are alive. All life, she claims, not just animal life, is precious, but for one being to live, something else must always die. We must come to grips with the fact that we must kill in order to eat. But she doesn't stop there. According to her, agriculture itself is responsible for most if not all the evils in the world: imperialism, class distinctions, misogyny, and slavery to name a few. Not to mention the damming and draining of rivers and wholesale destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems. "Soil, species, rivers. That's the death in your food. Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole." So participating in modern agriculture by eating annual grains like wheat is condoning thousands of years of oppression and male domination as well as the death of the earth itself.

Then there are the political vegetarians who don't eat meat because they believe an animal-free diet is best for the environment and the only way to feed the number of people on the earth. Here Ms. Keith again lays the woes of the world at agriculture's feet. But she legitimately points out that modern farming takes a great deal of fossil fuel, a non-renewable resource, in the form of fertilizers, so being a vegetarian doesn't solve that problem. The farm subsidies that promote the production of huge surpluses of corn, for example, are problematic from a nutritional standpoint as well as for their effects on poor farmers in other countries. She starts to hint here about her ideal solution by praising Joel Salatin's ten-acre perennial polyculture in Virginia and bemoaning the fact that there are about six billion too many of us on the planet.

Finally she attacks vegetarianism from a nutritional angle, using her own twenty-year history of failing health on a vegan diet as the example. I actually thought this was her strongest argument as she makes good use of many scientific studies and demonstrates how vital nutrients are extremely difficult to include in a strictly vegan diet. For example, cholesterol, protein, saturated fat, vitamin D and vitamin B12 are all required by our bodies for growth and repair and come mostly from animal sources. Low tryptophan, also difficult to get on a vegan diet, can lead to severe depression. On the flip side, I know several vegetarians who are very healthy. One is even a triathlete (Hi, Nicole!). While I have my doubts about a strict vegan diet, I'm not convinced a well-balanced vegetarian diet is not nutritionally sound.

Ms. Keith frequently refers to becoming an adult, using our "adult knowledge", completing our "adult task" of saving the planet. But to be "adult" I think a solution needs to be realistic and have at least a snowball's chance in hell of being successfully implemented and what she outlines just doesn't. She advocates humans "stepping aside" and allowing the earth to return to its natural state from 10,000 years ago, tearing down dams, and ceasing all agricultural pursuits. Her three specific suggestions at the end of the book are: 1) don't have any children; 2) don't drive a car; and 3) grow your own food. I've already spent way too much time on this review, so let me wrap it up by just saying suggestion 1 is not a solution. Suggestion 2 is great if you're in a position to do it, but many people simply aren't. (I noticed that Ms. Keith's bio mentions that she lives in both western Massachusetts and northern California. Now that's a tricky commute on a bike or on foot.) Suggestion 3 is likewise fabulous if you have the climate and space to do it, but again many don't. And they all still have to eat, too. There may be six billion too many of us on the planet, but which ones are you going to resign to starvation to achieve your Garden-of-Eden utopia?

My grandpa used to say, "You have to start with the world where it is, not where you want it to be." Ms. Keith doesn't seem to have grasped that concept, despite good intentions and a deep desire to save the earth.

For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.(less)

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Jul 17, 2012 Katie rated it 1 of 5 stars

I'm reading this book because I am a seeker of knowledge and I appreciate Truth, even in painful forms. That having been said, this book was not logical at all, and contained twisted truths at best. The examples given are highly emotional, yet utterly ridiculous anecdotal evidence that the author was a non-educated vegan, and instead of eating healthy, whole foods, she admittedly ate bread for every meal (pg. 69), and had very poor health overall (she mentions alcoholism and mental illness in ad...more I'm reading this book because I am a seeker of knowledge and I appreciate Truth, even in painful forms. That having been said, this book was not logical at all, and contained twisted truths at best. The examples given are highly emotional, yet utterly ridiculous anecdotal evidence that the author was a non-educated vegan, and instead of eating healthy, whole foods, she admittedly ate bread for every meal (pg. 69), and had very poor health overall (she mentions alcoholism and mental illness in addition to reproductive and skin disorders, which she apparantly did not seek medical treatment for). She uses this as evidence that humans are meant to eat meat, when in truth, she had been a vegetarian who never ate vegetables. Admittedly, there are vegetarians and vegans out there who share her mistake, but the vast majority have made the decision to go vegetarian because they are highly educated about being conscious consumers and advocates of their own health. She attempts to make vegetarians looks like bumbling idiots, by making arguments like vegetarians think "Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey." (pg. 7) This is a ridiculous concept, and I the vast majority of vegans would be highly offended at being villianized to the extreme of libel.
Instead of argueing the compelling arguments of Dr. Neal Barnard(Physicaians Council of Responsible Medicine) or T. Colin Campbell (The China Study), she instead makes fun of a charicature of the idiot vegan. Her arguments include such concepts as we exploit and kill trees by not eating and pooping out the seeds, as trees intended by making fruit, so we are really raping and killing plant life, therefore, what is the difference if it is a tree or a cow? You can not kill and rape a tree and say that I may not use a cow. She says that deforestation to produce grain is killing our planet and the topsoil, which is the truth, but she doesn't address the fact that 90% of the grain produced goes to feed livestock. She says that if we all ate vegetables, we would have to clear the planet to farm, but the fact is, we already produce more food than could feed twice the people on our planet, we just use it to feed our meat, and the rest sits in the supermarket until it spoils and must be thrown out. Surely you've heard the statistic that it takes 15 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef. She does not address that at all. She mentions it in her introduction, but does not address it.
Anyway, I could write an entire book refuting her uneducated arguments, but the fact is, hundreds of those books are already published. If you are curious, read her viewpoint, but I beg of you, don't abandon logic because you want her to be right. Her arguments just don't stand up. At times they even made me laugh out loud.(less)

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Dec 19, 2009 Bryce Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: health

This is a must read for anyone who considers vegetarian/agricultural eating to be either morally or nutritionally superior or even comparable to a preagricultural/hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Lierre also makes a devastating case for the insustainability of agriculture.

She gets a little off topic at a few points by letting her anti-masculinity and anti-religion views shine through. I don't really mind this, but I think it detracts from, rather than contributes to, the major points in the book.

Anyon...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Scott Cameron rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book took me by surprise, to put it mildly. More like it slapped me in the face. After learning that the author is a former vegan and a self-described "radical", my expectations for intellectual rigor and the pursuit of the hard truth were fairly low. But what I got was quite the opposite.

I loved this book. I can't remember the last time I read something so thought provoking and invigorating. Lierre Keith's writing is wonderful and at times borders on poetic. Throughout the book she intersp...more This book took me by surprise, to put it mildly. More like it slapped me in the face. After learning that the author is a former vegan and a self-described "radical", my expectations for intellectual rigor and the pursuit of the hard truth were fairly low. But what I got was quite the opposite.

I loved this book. I can't remember the last time I read something so thought provoking and invigorating. Lierre Keith's writing is wonderful and at times borders on poetic. Throughout the book she intersperses bits and pieces of her own personal story with manifesto-like rage and opinion, solid critical thinking, common sense, and a ton of thorough research to back it all up. She not only understands and respects the scientific method, but powerfully uses it to dismantle a significant amount of conventional thinking (and less conventional vegan beliefs). Somehow along with relating her personal experience she is able to cut her way through subjectivity and emotion right down to the bone where she proceeds to pick over the true nature of things. She claims to be deeply committed to justice, fairness and morality and she proves it page after page by pursuing the naked truth and assessing the state of things based on what she actually sees not what she wishes or feels. There actually isn't that much of her personal story in the book but the language is so alive and passionate that by the end I felt a connection with her as a person and admired her very much (even when I disagreed with what she was saying, which I did in some cases near the end of the book). Her story about the day she gave up veganism nearly brought me to tears.

The Vegetarian Myth is sort of like an angry, R-rated version of Omnivore's Dilemma, although that probably doesn't entirely do it justice. I don't share Ms. Keith's views on certain subjects and found the last chapter of the book to be slightly detached from reality in terms of what can really be expected of human beings in this world, but by the time I got to that part I already admired the book and the person so much that it didn't really matter anymore.

Ms. Keith talks a lot about the adult knowledge that life and death are inextricably connected, and there are descriptions of sustainable human-managed systems respecting and honoring this idea that are just truly beautiful to behold. This book captures that beauty and elegance better than any I've read so far (including Omnivore's Dilemma, which I love) and is compelling enough to be truly life changing. It's not a message I will soon forget.(less)

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Feb 06, 2013 Daniel Lowen rated it 2 of 5 stars

The prose is good; the reasoning less so. She lays out some very important facts, but many of the conclusions she twists out of them don't hold. She accuses pro-vegan medical evidence as confusing correlation with causation, but then she promptly does the same with pro-meat medical evidence. She correctly argues that agriculture, especially since WWII, is destroying the environment, so that when the oil runs out, the whole system collapses. She correctly points out that the carrying capacity of...more

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Nov 22, 2012 Jaime rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: grow

The interesting thing about this book is that the author spends almost the entirety of it eviscerating radicalism when it comes to what we eat and then drives off the cliff of radicalism with prescriptions for society at-large.

The strongest sections in this work are when she touches on her personal journey from vegan to person-made-sick by veganism to what I think we would generally call a moderate eater of the Pollan persuasion. The entire takeaway point is the necessity of moderation in our di...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Wildrose VuVu Magoo rated it 5 of 5 stars

An extremely well written, well thought out and depressing book. I'll start with the things I did NOT like about it:

The tendancy of the author to sort of meander, and occassionally slip into feminist rhetoric. While I'm all for feminism in countries that really need it, I find it alienating when people seem to blame it all on men. Who invented agriculture in the first place? The men hunting or the women gathering? What do you bet it was the women, who wanted a steady food supply so they wouldn't...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Ryan Holiday rated it 4 of 5 stars

Tim Ferriss (highly) recommended this book to me. I've always felt that there is nothing more impressive than seeing someone turn over a long held belief in light of new evidence. That's essentially the premise of this book-a 20+ year vegan finds it impossible to keep denying that meat is a natural part of the human diet and that it's certainly more "natural" than the heavily processed grains and crops that vegans eat. Her solution is sustainable farming and agriculture, harkening back to the da...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Jodi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: health-books

This book is as the description says, 'part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto.'

Lots of books talk about the harm eating processed foods and high levels of sugars and grains on our health, but this book is one of the few that combines this with information about the effect all these many grain crops have on our environment and on many different ecosystems.

The author talks about all the hidden death that is involved in the production of foods such as grain crops, and why vegan me...more

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Mar 03, 2012 Mary Overton added it

A sermon on how we will all be better off when we return to our noble-savage roots and live as hunter-gatherers. As is often the case with passionate screeds, Keith discusses many interesting ideas & theories.

"I didn't call this book THE VEGETARIAN LIE. I called it THE VEGETARIAN MYTH for a reason. It's not a lie that animals are sentient beings currently being tortured for our food. It's not a lie that the rich nations are siphoning off the life of the planet for literally oceans full of en...more

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Feb 22, 2012 Athena is currently reading it

Lately I have been interested in books about the ways we obtain, prepare, and eat our food. I picked this book up yesterday and was excited to read about this stance--a once vegetarian (specifically vegan) practice that went back to a meat eating one. It seemed it would be a bit more level-headed and information-based, rather than an extremist point of view that we sometimes see on the vegetarian side AND the carnivorous side (keyword: sometimes. I do see some vegetarian reasonings explained tho...more

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Feb 03, 2012 Leran Minc rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: food

This is definitely an interesting read, but I found many things about the book itself problematic and generally disagree with her conclusions despite agreeing with some of her arguments. Until I find a superior book (which I hope will be easy to find)I would recommend conscious omnivores and vegetarians alike to read this book.

Let's start with her motivation to write the book. She was vegan for over 20 years and developed physical and mental health issues due to her diet. While it truly is sad...more This is definitely an interesting read, but I found many things about the book itself problematic and generally disagree with her conclusions despite agreeing with some of her arguments. Until I find a superior book (which I hope will be easy to find)I would recommend conscious omnivores and vegetarians alike to read this book.

Let's start with her motivation to write the book. She was vegan for over 20 years and developed physical and mental health issues due to her diet. While it truly is sad that others, like Keith, have destroyed their bodies and in some cases their minds with a destructive diet, I don't think that applies to all vegans and certainly not to all vegetarians. She uses this to strike a very personal and often angry tone throughout the book that frankly detracts from the evidence she cites. I'm glad she does not hide her bias, but she certainly lets it cloud her thoughts. I have a real issue with people jumping from one extreme to another and this is a clear example of that. She goes from being staunchly vegan to staunchly anti-vegan.

My biggest issue is with how her anti-veganism manifests. Her main argument seems to be that civilization and primarily agriculture has been destructive to our planets and we should revert to a simpler life where we grow only historically locally available plants, raise only historically locally available animals, don't have children, don't drive and live in partnership with the natural world. As someone who trying hard to become more of a locavore, I am sympathetic to her desires, but find it unrealistic and absurd to live in a world as she describes it. Not to mention she splits her time between Massachusetts and California. So unless other people actively live in these two homes and she bikes between them, she is violated the kind of fossil fuel-free, small home, local world she seems to be advocating for.

What really hurts her argument are the tangents she goes on almost every few pages. She and I are both proud feminists, but despite agreeing that patriarchy has caused many problems, I see no need to link agriculture in it's past, present and future forms as wrapped up with patriarchy and nor do I find it to be a compelling argument. At many parts of the book she breaks down into this nonsensical feminist tirade for pages at a time with no mention of food,vegetarianism or agriculture. While these movements and issues are linked in some ways, she is trying to hard to create connections and loses sight of her thesis.

Structurally, the book is also very clunky. She has only 4 "chapters" divided by moral, political and nutritional vegetarianism and finally a concluding chapter on how to save the world. Each chapter is more like a section and her thoughts and arguments may have been more coherent if she imposed chapters on herself.

Not all was bad, for I gave this 2 stars, not 1! I think Keith does an incredible job arguing that agriculture based on annual grains that require significant augmentation of their soil, often with fossil fuels, is problematic. Perhaps as or more problematic than factory farms and certainly more problematic than incorporating animal products that were humanely, sustainably produced into your diet. She also makes the powerful argument that in order to sustain annual plants that may not be suited for the area they are grown in and certainly not in the scale they are grown, substantial life is lost. Much of this life is microscopic, but the death of these organisms and the ecosystem as large effects many other lifeforms plant and animal alike.

This brings us to what I think was the most profound argument of the book. Keith does a beautiful job in her Moral Vegetarian "chapter" reminding vegetarians, city dwellers and all of us about life cycles. The Circle of Life if you want to get all Disney about it. Plants eat animals as much as animals eat plants and each other. Being vegetarian does not remove your from this cycle, the plants you eat much eat and either you supply that food through fossil fuels (which were originally animals) or you supply it sustainably through animal waste, blood, bones and flesh. While I agree wit her, I find her argument of this being "adult knowledge" unnecessarily condescending. That said,

I hope despite the issues I had with her book, that vegetarians and those considering the vegetarian/vegan path take to heart that regardless of our actions animals or the planet itself will be involved in supplying us our meals even if choose not to directly eat animals or fossil fuel products. Many of the issues she argues I think apply to vegans much more than they do to vegetarianism as a whole, but whatever diet choices we pursue, we can be extra conscious about how our food effects other animals and the planet and strive to be more local and less destructive with those choices.(less)

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Jan 10, 2012 Gemma Seymour-Amper rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: most-treasured

To say that this book, or even the author Lierre Keith herself, is controversial is an understatement of the grandest order. This book came to my attention at a time when I was beginning for the first time in my life to attempt to unravel the very questions that Ms. Keith scrutinizes, and I came to many of the same conclusions, despite the fact that she and I are diametrically opposed in other areas of our politics.

I am not a vegan, or a vegetarian, and in fact I have been in my life rather disd...more To say that this book, or even the author Lierre Keith herself, is controversial is an understatement of the grandest order. This book came to my attention at a time when I was beginning for the first time in my life to attempt to unravel the very questions that Ms. Keith scrutinizes, and I came to many of the same conclusions, despite the fact that she and I are diametrically opposed in other areas of our politics.

I am not a vegan, or a vegetarian, and in fact I have been in my life rather disdainful of those ideas, but when I found myself later in life with a newly awakened desire to collaborate with and create sustenance for those in my community who follow vegan and vegetarian diets, I found myself in a rather odd place, because as the child of a physician and a nurse who is also well-trained in the sciences, I have always believed a vegetarian diet to be inherently unhealthy, and a strict vegan diet even more so.

However, it has become increasingly clear to me, thanks to my investigations into the origins of food and the effects of our food choices on human health and the environment, that the ways in which the human race has chosen to provide for our dietary needs over the last 12,000 or so years have been fraught with many, many decisions that have turned out in the end to be highly detrimental to us and to the planet, and that we also are only barely beginning to understand the depth of our errors.

Everyone should read this book, and everyone should do so with an open mind, bearing in mind that the book represents the personal opinion and experience of one person, whether they are vegan, vegetarian, omnivorous, or carnivorous, before reaching any conclusions about the veracity of the book's claims or their applicability to their lives. If you are a vegan or vegetarian, try not to become so incensed at with the author is saying and how she is saying it that you lay the book aside in disgust. Read it with compassion for the pain she has suffered. If you have a tendency in you, like I once had, to ridicule vegans and vegetarians, then I am hear to proclaim that this book will provide you with no comfort. Indeed, many if not most, of the indictments vegetarians and vegans have raised against the exploitation of animals retain their validity even in the face of newly-sussed information about the health and ecological effects of our food choices that seems to damn other vegan claims.

While Ms. Keith makes some errors in the manner of those committed by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth", like Mr. Gore's book and film, the main message still resounds, and that message is that we absolutely must, without further delay, re-examine everything we think we know about food, because everything we think we know about food is probably wrong.

The sad fact is that if you live in an area where your food choices are limited to those produced by the agricultural-industrial complex, there probably isn't anything that you're eating that can be considered truly healthy for you, or for the planet--neither the plant products nor the animal products as they currently exist in our mass-super-marketed food chain are what we might call real and healthy food, and if we have any hope of maintaining an advanced civilization for much longer, we had better wise up.

Doing so, of course, requires us to fundamentally rethink the very underpinnings of the idea of Civilization itself. Let us hope we of this modern era are equal to the task, and that time still remains in which to accomplish our salvation.(less)

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Oct 20, 2011 Experience Life added it

Writer, feminist and environmental activist Lierre Keith is intimately familiar with the heated debates that ensue when omnivores and vegetarians face off to defend their respective diets. A vegan herself for nearly 20 years, she staunchly espoused the view that avoiding animal products is a healthier and more sustainable, humane way of eating. But when she fell ill and remained ill for more than a decade, she was forced to rethink her food choices.

Ultimately, she wound up challenging virtually...more

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Oct 11, 2011 Rogers George rated it 5 of 5 stars

Written by a former vegan and addressed to vegetarians from "inside the camp," as it were. Her rather biographical approach is frank and fact-based without being bitter. She is clearly sympathetic to the sensibilities of vegetarians. BTW--I am not a vegetarian, and I still found the book to be thought-provoking and informative.
Lierre (rhymes with Pierre) divides the book into three main sections, covering the nutrition, politics, and ethics of food as it applies to the idea of vegetarianism. In...more

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Sep 02, 2011 melissa/missy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Get ready for my longest review ever. And if you feel like following what I expect will be a lively conversation, I'm also going to post it on ourmotherskeeper.com.

I am giving this book 2 stars although on balance I disliked it. There were pieces and passages that I found lovely and illuminating, and they deserve a star. But on the whole, this book was packed full of false choices.

From the title onward, Keith aims her knife blade in strange directions. The foundational argument of this book is...more

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Aug 30, 2011 Leslitamar rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lierre Keith, in Vegetarian Myth, presents her readers with several convictions she has thoroughly researched and argues passionately:

1. Agriculture (& diet) based on annual grains is ecologically devastating, inhumane, and unsustainable.

2. Despite our technological advances, humans are still fundamentally interwoven into Nature's cycle of life & death. In order for our planet to continue to sustain us, we must embrace our part in this cycle, acknowledge that death begets life, and recon...more Lierre Keith, in Vegetarian Myth, presents her readers with several convictions she has thoroughly researched and argues passionately:

1. Agriculture (& diet) based on annual grains is ecologically devastating, inhumane, and unsustainable.

2. Despite our technological advances, humans are still fundamentally interwoven into Nature's cycle of life & death. In order for our planet to continue to sustain us, we must embrace our part in this cycle, acknowledge that death begets life, and reconnect to our communities and to our food.

3. Vegetarianism is unsupportable ecologically, morally, or medically, and needs to be cured.

Keith's research and personal struggles around the first two points are stunning, terrifying, heartwarming, and compelling.
But blaming her past vegan lifestyle for her challenging health conditions, Keith is compelled to pound all vegetarians relentlessly. For Keith, as is clearly stated in her title, the purport of The Vegetarian Myth is to "cure" vegetarians. All of her brilliant research focuses on driving home her conviction that vegetarians are misled in their belief that their diet is healthier and more gentle to the planet & its inhabitants than a meat-eating lifestyle.

Keith most often refers to her population of concern as 'vegetarians, (especially vegans)', but fails to make a distinct separation. As a health care practitioner, I have seen many vegetarians (not vegans) move healthily into middle age and beyond. I have also seen many omnivores with unhealthy diets and the same digestive discomforts that Keith describes. All the arguments in Vegetarian Myth did not convince me that Earth can't support a number of thoughtful, perhaps religious vegetarians.
Sadly, the gem of her book will be largely overlooked, as vegetarians of all kinds will take to a writer on a mission to cure them as gracefully, I imagine, as non-heterosexuals take to similar gestures of compassion.

It is a little absurd to focus exclusively on vegetarians (especially vegans) when discussing the very real ecological plight of our planet. Vegetarian Myth side-steps the fact that most people in the U.S., omnivores or vegetarian, have grain-focused diets: pancakes, cereals, bread, pretzels, pasta, bagels, cookies, donuts, scones, hot dog & hamburger buns, chips, corn syrup, and mostly, grain-fed animals. But Keith isn't talking to them. Keith should have made all of us and our food choices the focus of her sharp, brilliant pen. But she is on a mission here, sadly, to enlighten vegetarians, when she comes so close to saving us all.

Please read the book. It's important and its controversial nature begs it to be discussed. I look forward to more from Keith. As a rigorous Save-the Planet manifesto, she has written a powerful book that I recommend to all who eat food.

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Aug 08, 2011 J-no rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For all the vegetarians I know and love, avoid this book, but read the nutrition chapter since I don't want you to die, deal with depression, or kill your brain with soy.

Definitely a diatribe and an emotional outlet for anger at the problems society has created and her inability to make a larger difference and almost starve herself to death in the process. I turned to someone while reading and literally said "This book makes me feel guilty about being human." Get past that and take it with a gra...more

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Jun 22, 2011 Sarah Keliher rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: food, read2011, theskyisfalling

This was one of the more controversial books we carried this year. A quick look at the online reviews will tell you the same thing - people are worked up about this thing. Lierre Keith is a brave, brave woman. I wouldn't want to pick a fight with every vegan in the world at the same time.

What I think has been lost in the furor is that her point - the heart of her point, at any rate - is very simple, and very hard to argue with. We take turns eating and being eaten - we consume today, but will b...more This was one of the more controversial books we carried this year. A quick look at the online reviews will tell you the same thing - people are worked up about this thing. Lierre Keith is a brave, brave woman. I wouldn't want to pick a fight with every vegan in the world at the same time.

What I think has been lost in the furor is that her point - the heart of her point, at any rate - is very simple, and very hard to argue with. We take turns eating and being eaten - we consume today, but will be consumed in our turn. If you stop to think about this simple fact, and how it weaves all of us on earth together into an unending cycle of renewal and need, it can give you shivers. It's holy. And it's an idea that encourages us to be more reverent towards all of our food - not just the food with faces, but all of it, the seeds and fruit and leaves, and even the soil itself, richly and deeply alive.

To be reverent and respectful is to think about where your food comes from. It's not enough to give up animal products and think you're doing the world any favors. Monocrops and industrial agriculture, reliant as they are on huge amounts of water, fossil fuel, and chemicals, are not sustainable. And they're slaughtering animal and insect life all around them, so that even your vegetarian meal carries a heavy toll. And who is growing and processing your food, and how? How much fossil fuel is used to get it to your plate? It's at the very least a gross mistake for vegans to feel that their dietary choices have exempted them from considering these things. At worst it's a self-serving lie.

Honestly, I don't care if people are vegan or not. I have known healthy vegans and seriously emaciated unhealthy vegans, who really just needed to eat a steak or something. Keith's nutritional arguments in favor of meat eating are well constructed and meticulously footnoted, but I think it's a little beside the point. Which is hard to argue with: we are not, as a people, healthy, and we are quickly fucking up the earth.

There are some flaws in the book. People have taken issue with her flowery, personally revealing narrative, but I thought it was lovely and compassionate. She could have drawn from a wider range of books for her research, but that's a minor quibble. A larger point of issue is her attack on agriculture. It seems clear that the advent of large scale single crop agriculture brought with it a decline in ecological and human health. But the hunter gathering model, which she favors, isn't an entirely unagricultural enterprise. Many such societies managed certain resources - plants, berries, shellfish - for maximum yields, or controlled the environment in other ways, like by burning. If this is the model to strive for - semi-wild, with a diversity of plant and animal life mixed in (including meat and dairy animals) - then what we're looking at is starting to sound a lot like permaculture. Right? Maybe I'm just being too picky about terminology.

Anyway, there is a great deal to chew on in this book. I can see it stimulating some great discussions, and helping spur people to action. It's unfortunate that the online discussions I've seen have sort of devolved into mudslinging, though given the deep philosophical feelings of the vegan community, it's not surprising.

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Dec 28, 2010 Keith Akers rated it 1 of 5 stars

This is an anti-vegan book which will be a difficult book for vegans to read. The text resembles more a stream-of-consciousness monologue than an organized discussion. The author is an ex-vegan, after having been a vegan for 20 years, and blames most of her numerous health problems (skeletal problems of some sort, evidently) and mental problems (depression, anger) on her vegan diet.

But this is an indictment not just of veganism, but of agriculture in general, and indeed our entire civilization,...more

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Mar 03, 2010 Rebecca rated it 3 of 5 stars

More accurately titled "The Vegan Myth", I think.

Broken up into three sections - Moral, Political, and Nutrition. Moral was a retelling of the Omnivore's Dilemma and punctuated with (unintentionally) amusing anecdotes about attempts at "vegan" gardening (apparently plants are unable to comprehend their own cruelty at demanding animal bits in order to live). I skipped the Political section entirely and quit the Nutrition section (which is an amalgam of Protein Power, GCBC, and Nourishing Traditio...more

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Oct 23, 2009 Ellen Young rated it 5 of 5 stars

A 20-year vegan who started eating meat out of a desparate attempt to heal her constant and chronic health problems, the author had her eyes opened to both the damaging effects of a grain-based diet and the devastation agriculture has wreaded on the planet. And now she wants to let everyone know how she, and the vegetarians still practicing, got it all wrong. For one thing, she totally skewers the claims that eating a grain-based diet is better for the environment. The destruction of topsoil and...more

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Aug 17, 2009 Kyle rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think this book can help a lot of people. As a vegan for twenty years, Lierre definitely has had first hand experience of what a vegan diet can do to the body. I have been a vegetarian off-and-on in my life and I will never again venture down that road after reading this book. The key point Lierre makes is that we cannot equate the horrors of factory farming with the act of eating meat. Of course, factory farming is brutal but using animal products (including digestion of their flesh) is not t...more

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Damien I just want to inform you that as a vegan, who knows a lot of vegans from the East Coast, West Coast, New Orleans to Minneapolis and even Lawrence, Ka...more
Jul 05, 2010 10:46pm

Pam Kyle - do you take into account that the sort of meat eating she's talking about (and seems to claim she does) involves raising your own animals and k...more
Aug 06, 2010 07:18pm

Claude This book is pseudo-science. She has done no research, and knows nothing about nutrition. She even contradicts her own facts in the book.
If you check...more
Oct 27, 2012 12:56am

Feb 21, 2013 Sabrina Cook rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Vegetarian Myth might aptly be titled The Myth of Civilization, as Keith's major accomplishment is to dismantle the misguided teleological view that time equals progress, that agriculture equals sophistication, that death is the end. This book is part personal narrative, part scientific exploration, which together form a reasoned plea for food justice and environmental sustainability.

I have read the oft-quoted Michael Pollan, studied Peter Singer's applied ethics, listened to my vegetarian f...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Brian Klein rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 13, 2012 Kelly Martin rated it 3 of 5 stars

This author is obviously angry at being fooled into believing that a vegan lifestyle would be better for her and the planet, and the book is an impassioned argument against such beliefs. Her arguments against the three main arguments for vegetarianism (ecologic, moral, and health) also appear quite strong, although I suspect there is some handwaving at times where the science gets beyond her. In particular, I noted the use of "chemfear" (the belief that "if you can't pronounce it it must not be...more

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May 10, 2013 Adam rated it 2 of 5 stars

This started out pretty good, but lack of purpose and close-mindedness shone through most of the second half of the book. People tend to not eat or use meat products for a variety of reasons. It seems like a large undertaking to try to convince all of them that they're wrong. I think that the author went about it the wrong way in some parts. She had her own issues with eating vegan, but she never presented her actual diet: just that it didn't work for her and she had myriad resulting health issu...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Adrian Charles rated it 4 of 5 stars

This controversial book has been a love-it-or-hate-it affair for many.

Some see it as a manifesto for those who reject militant vegan and eco-vegetarian approaches.

Others reject it strongly for its large lapses in substantiation for its sometimes-erroneous factual claims.

I would have thought myself a shoo-in for inclusion in the latter category, and yet...

I found myself captivated by this book, despite the sometimes-foundational factual and technical errors that pepper the pages.

For me, the book...more

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Dec 02, 2011 Edie rated it 4 of 5 stars

I agree with the basic premise and many of the arguments in this book, and I'd strongly recommend it to vegetarians and carnivores alike. I found it incredibly useful to help me understand and articulate the devastation that conventional agriculture and factory farming inflict on our planet and our health. The nutritional information here is also incredibly important - that processed soy, seed and vegetable oils, and a low-fat diet can be incredibly damaging to human health, and may indeed be to...more

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Dec 31, 2010 Amanda rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everyone

I was torn when trying to review this book. It should really have been called The Vegan Myth as alot of her arguments are based around people eating no animal products. Anyone with sense knows that a vegan diet is destructive to the body. You only have to look at Gillian mcKeith to know that! However I think it is possible to live healthy and sustainably on a vegetarian diet.

I think everyone should ask themselves what grows where they live? What can you eat that doesnt need to be imported from a...more

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