My brothers and I have embarked on an interesting journey together. We are separated by thousands of miles and a pandemic, but have been staying in toMy brothers and I have embarked on an interesting journey together. We are separated by thousands of miles and a pandemic, but have been staying in touch through a video messaging app and shared interests. One of those is what constitutes a healthy diet, by which I mean not only healthful for us, but for the planet and the beings with whom we share it. One of our primary discoveries in this inquiry has been that finding reliable evidence to answer the questions it raises is nearly impossible. For every claim made and backed with some science, there is an opposing claim, quite often with evidence seemingly just as reliable.
Among the competing claims there is a category I would call "received wisdom," a core set of beliefs that are so firmly held as to be considered by their promoters as beyond dispute. Usually, you can spot these because they begin with a statement like, "everyone knows..." or "it's beyond dispute that..." There aren't all that many of these, really. One could debate all day the virtues of almond milk versus its soy brother, or whether or not dairy is good or bad for you. It has even become fairly well-accepted that saturated fats are not nearly the scary monster they have been made out to be, and may in fact be good for your health. But in many circles, one piece of received wisdom reigns supreme: meat is a major contributor to climate change and a plant-based diet will not only save our lives but the planet, too. Unfortunately, there is precious little evidence that this is true, and quite a bit that the opposite is probably the case.
Let's get this out of the way at the very start: factory farming of animals is a disaster on every level. It is polluting, inhumane, cruel, nutritionally depleted, and just plain wrong. This is, in my opinion, not open to dispute. If you are looking for supporters of legislation making such animal husbandry illegal, sign me up. But the idea that we can't divide out these inhumane practices from the raising and consuming of meat is simply ludicrous. Just because one group of people do something very badly does not imply that it should not be done at all; imagine if we had to entirely give up singing if a few people (or even choirs full of them) sang off-key.
Yes, I know what the other objections are, the methane excreted and how many acres of land are required to raise a pound of beef and all the rest. But these ideas are once again based on the factory farming model, which we have agreed is unacceptable. The fact is that cattle can graze on lands that will not support other crops, meaning that, if you do not feed them grain (which they cannot properly digest in any case, thus excessive methane production) and let them eat grass, precisely zero acres of arable land could be used to raise that cow.
Still, you may say, surely a plant-based diet is more healthful in all of the ways I listed at the beginning. But is it? For a moment, let's ask one simple question: where are you getting the nitrogen to raise all these lovely Brussels sprouts and corn, all this soy and all those almonds? I can tell you this: there are two reliable places to get that nitrogen; one is from animal manure, and the other is from fossil fuels. It is not realistic to expect that the amount of nitrogen needed can be acquired from animals which are not killed for meat, so if you want to grow crops, you must choose between supporting the eating of meat or the oil industry. You don't have other choices.
But the problem is bigger than that. The soil is a finite resource. As any gardener knows, you cannot simply keep sucking life from the soil and expect it to keep producing more crops. Because we have destroyed so many forests, prairies, and wetlands (and the destruction is ongoing) for cropland, we have severely depleted the environmental resources required for our planet to be in any kind of homeostasis.
For 20 years I was a vegetarian, and I believed many of the ideas put forth by those who choose not to eat meat. But The Vegetarian Myth (along with other wonderful books, including Michael Pollan's superb Omnivore's Dilemma) have convinced me that we have blinded ourselves to the reality of how our food is raised and the cost it is imposing on our world. I will not advocate that anyone eat meat, but it is time for everyone who eats at all to face the realities of what goes into the food we eat. We can't afford any longer to blind ourselves to the devastation a plant-based diet is imposing on us and our planet. Non-dairy milks alone constitute an environmental and health disaster almost beyond reckoning. I understand; for years I did what I believed to be the right thing in my dietary choices. But I have come to believe I was wrong.
Lierre Keith is a recovering vegan who has become very passionate in her advocacy for the kind of close examination I am suggesting here. She has done her homework, and this book is one of the most well-sourced I have ever read on these subjects. She is also pretty angry, because she was lied to. Somewhere along the way, she was told that eating any animal products was immoral and unhealthy and that she could subsist on plants alone. But our bodies are not designed for this kind of food in isolation, and she suffered in ways that should have been a clear indication of something wrong; yet, she persisted, and did permanent damage to herself.
But Keith's anger is not wholly personal. She believes, and has evidence to back it up, that we have all been lied to in the name of profit. Monoculture crops such a rice, corn, soy, and wheat deplete resources while giving back not nearly what they take out, a net loss for which we are paying a price every day in the form of dead soil and desertification. These are our resources, but are being plundered for the benefit of a few multinational corporations. This is not healthy on any level. "Those longings," she writes, "for compassion, for sustainability, for an equitable distribution of resources, are not served by the philosophy or practice of vegetarianism. We have been led astray....The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won't save us." Remember a couple of things while you read these statements: Keith wanted with all her heart for a vegan diet to be the right thing, and she has copious evidence to back up everything she says. "What separates me from vegetarians," she writes, "isn't ethics or commitment. It's information."
"We don't know what agriculture is because no one's ever told us and we can't see it for ourselves. We can't see it because the destruction has been so total we don't know what the world should look like.... Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole."
But the disaster here is not merely ecological. "Beyond the destructive nature of an agricultural diet, any attempt to remove ourselves emotionally, physically, spiritually from the life processes of the planet will result in a culture based on ignorance, denial, and given our human capacity for destruction, dominance." This is, in other words, a spiritual fight as much as a physical one. It is our very souls we are gambling along with the fate of the world. "Ultimately, the overlapping subsets of globalization, capitalism, industrialization, and patriarchy have got to be confronted, and dismantled. Nothing less will create a just and sustainable world."
And, finally, there is simply this: "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....Despite the deepest longings of your hearts, vegetarians, you are wrong."
I was a vegetarian for 20 years and just recently returned to the world of the omnivore. This was not a casual choice, but a very conscious one. Over I was a vegetarian for 20 years and just recently returned to the world of the omnivore. This was not a casual choice, but a very conscious one. Over many years of study and thought, I became convinced that the diet I was pursuing was not nearly as healthful as I had thought, either for me or for the planet. There are assumptions in the vegetarian and vegan worlds that are not as self-evident as they are portrayed. In particular, the growing of vegetables and fruits has an enormous impact on the environment that is simply dismissed, while the environmental impact of animal agriculture is over-emphasized and often erroneously portrayed. To my way of thinking, this is simply one more form of confirmation bias. Vegetarians and vegans enjoy the experience of feeling pure much more than they wish to investigate whether or not this is a justified emotion.
At the same time, it is simply beyond dispute that factory animal farming is a disaster on every level. It is cruel, inhumane, polluting, dehumanizing to workers, and produces product that is simply not very appetizing if one knows how it was raised and the conditions under which the animals were killed. Foer spends the majority of this book inveighing against the factory farm, and I cannot fault him in the least for this emphasis. Aside from a purely compassionate argument, and not even including the environmental impact, the fact is that economically this way of raising meat is a disaster, because our desire for cheap meat has led to regulations which pass on many of the costs of mitigating the disaster of this kind of animal agriculture to the larger society. As consumers, we think we are only paying $1.49 per pound, but the real cost in controlling contamination and subsidizing the industry adds a great deal more to that total.
However, Foer has a deeper objection, that the raising of ANY animal for the purpose of consumption is inherently wrong and inherently cruel. I respect this moral stance and used to share it. But I have come to believe that having meat in our diets is not only a part of our biology but that our emphasis on other foods, grains in particular, has led to a diet so destructive and unhealthy for human beings that it became difficult for me to reconcile the outcomes of my vegetarianism.
I will grant that this book is 11 years old, and given the facts that have emerged in our society in those intervening years, Foer might well have written a somewhat different book today. Still, it must be noted that many of the negative effects of the consumption of meat on the human body he posits turn out to have no basis in fact. In particular, the idea that the consumption of meat leads to more heart disease, cancer, and obesity has been convincingly debunked. The claim that saturated fats or the consumption of cholesterol in foods are harmful is no longer thought to be true.
The other rather broad claim he makes here is that other agriculture is inherently better for the environment than sustainably grown food animals. There is very little to support this assumption. Vast swaths of previously forested land have been cleared for grain, fruit, and nut production, and irrigation of these crops consumes vast amounts of water. The soil is being rapidly depleted by large-scale agriculture and without animals providing fertilizer, artificial sources must be increasingly used to support this vast industry. And just like factory animal farms, we as taxpayers are bearing a great deal of the burden of this unsustainable way of producing food.
So, what is the solution? Of course, I don't have a definitive answer. Discussions around food are fraught, weighted as they are with cultural, economic, moral, ethical, intellectual, physical, and psychological significance. The one conclusion I have reached is that anyone who believes they have an irrefutable answer to this question is deluding themselves. There are many books on this topic out there, and many reach entirely opposite conclusions, though all are well sourced. Much of the needed research simply hasn't been done and, like it or not, we are running out of time to figure out some of the consequences of our choices, in particular as they impact world hunger and climate change. The books The Omnivore's Dilemma by Micheal Pollan and Sacred Cow by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf, for instance, both lay out compelling arguments for the consumption of meat as part of a comprehensive way of both growing and consuming food.
I have to agree with Foer that the idea that purchasing sustainably and humanely raised meat is feasible for the majority of people is unrealistic at this point. But I find his argument that we should therefore reject such meat because our continued consumption of "good" meat encourages the broader consumption of "bad" meat to be specious and poorly reasoned. Just as with organic foods 30 years ago, the increased demand for sustainably-grown meat can only serve to stimulate the industry to reform its practices and make the supply available, which will then lower prices and put it in range of the average consumer, as indeed happened with organic foods.
In brief, I think that if one has moral, ethical, and/or cultural reasons to eschew meat, there is no reason not to take that step. I respect everyone's need to reach their own conclusions and make decisions accordingly. But, as a wise man once said, a person is welcome to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Making a moral or humanitarian argument against the consumption of meat is a personal and reasonable discussion to have. But twisting the facts to make an economic or ecological argument requires a clearer and more objective vision than Foer can muster here.
I wish to say here that I have a deep admiration for Jonathan Safran Foer as an author. It is my opinion that Everything Is Illuminated and Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close are brilliant novels, filled with both excellent writing and deep feeling. I would highly recommend either one or both (though I have been told, most memorably by my own father, that these books are not to everyone's taste). ...more
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