Let’s move this conversation forward; or, (another) study: pasture-raised cows produce four times more methane emissions than feedlot cows

A new study confirms higher rates of methane emission from grazed cows over feedlot cows. Abstract and full study available here:

Direct measurements of methane emissions from grazing and feedlot cattle

This study, citing and building on studies which already demonstrate that cattle farming represents a mass contribution to the emission of methane–one of the most consequential greenhouse gasses–examined and measured output from large samples of cattle in undisturbed (non-laboratory/non-constructed) settings.

Its main conclusion: “These measurements clearly document higher CH4 production (about four times) for cattle receiving low-quality, high-fiber diets than for cattle fed high-grain diets.”

To advocates of pasture-raised beef and dairy: Please start discussing this kind of information and please stop spreading the myth that pasture-raised beef is good for the environment. That there are a lot of problems with agriculture-in-general, including plant agriculture and monocultures, is not in dispute. But from the mass destruction caused by grazing, to the mass methane emissions, raising animals on pasture is not simply detrimental; it’s more detrimental than on feedlots, in terms of land/habitat destruction and greenhouse gas emissions.

This article by Mike Tidwell was recently brought to my attention, and impressed me as a very good, simple overview of the environmental impact of carnism, on humans as well as ecosystems and individual animals. Tidwell points out that even many folks’ beloved fall-back, “free range” and “sustainable” chicken and egg farming, produces far more greenhouse gas emissions than its terrible factory-farming sibling– 14 percent more!

This is to say nothing of the myth of “humane” meat that we have discussed elsewhere.

We’ve listened to the “humane” meat-ers. We’ve listened to the Weston A. Price Foundation’s non-scientists and non-nutritionists misconstrue information about teeth, soy, cholesterol, and raw meat. We’ve listened to Lierre Keith straight-up hate on vegans and paint caricatures of health and sustainable agriculture. We’ve listened to Michael Pollan and Joe Salatin’s carefully (and conveniently) constructed happy-meat, return-to-pasture narratives. We’ve listened to people who don’t come from gatherer-hunter cultures say, “let’s hunt, then!” and we’ve tried not to be dicks when we’ve pointed out that, if even a fraction of billions of today’s non-tribal humans started hunting for their meat, ecosystems would almost immediately shatter. We’ve listened to Barabara Kingslover as she drives 3,000 miles in her car to eat another location’s local food. We’ve listened to really excited ex-vegan bloggers talk about how they literally feel the energy of nutrients x, y, and z rushing through their body the minute they eat meat again for the first time (something which isn’t physiologically possible.) We’ve gotten a good share of what anti-vegans–both the subtle and the not-so-subtle ones–have to say. For all our faults and snark, we’ve tried to listen–we actually really have.

And for all of this, there’s one thing they all seem to say some version of, and I agree with it: We need better, more diverse, more creative, less mono-culture based farming methods. Nobody here is saying otherwise.

But it’s time to move the conversation forward: the ethics of, and cognitive dissonance that is necessary for, “humane meat”, grass-fed meat, and pasture farming are highly questionable; and we have to contend with those questions now if we want to deal with the crises of ecology, psychology, and ethics that are literally destroying the earth.

There is, at this point, simply too much available information to ignore regarding the destructiveness of animal farming and the unnecessary suffering of animals. There is too much information to ignore regarding the existence of viable, healthful, plant-based alternatives to meat diets and animal farming. We can’t continue to ignore this information if we want to have conversations about diet that aren’t disingenuous. We can’t refuse to discuss the fallacy, the gaping logical inconsistency, of “humane” captivity and slaughter, and the environmental destruction of animal farming–the latter of which is an issue for both entire species and their individual bodies. We can’t keep falling back on the simplistic vegan straw man of “but monocultures–but soy–but the paleocene–but protein”. These straw-men have been debunked to death. Healthful, animal-friendly plant-based alternatives to this mess of meat agriculture and carnism exist, right now, today. Just because these plant-based alternatives are inconvenient to a Western culture that is steeped in the ideologies and practices of meat, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Our refusal to look at them does not erase their reality.

If you need more information about any of these issues or about striving towards sustainable plant-based lives, we’ve discussed it a lot in this blog. Please refer to other posts such as those here and here, do a quick google or JSTOR search, or refer to our resources page or our sustainable vegan agriculture page. You might also consider checking out The Humane Myth.

“Food Miles and the Relative Climate Impact of Food Choices in the United States”

This study is a must-read for anyone concerned with food politics. It’s one of the only studies done on the issue. Abstract and full text are available here: Food Miles and the Relative Climate Impact of Food Choices in the United States

For those not into the technical language of scientific articles, here are the basic findings:

1) Food miles are not an accurate way to measure a food’s ecological footprint. Transportation of food accounts for only about 15 percent of its ecological footprint.

2)Production, storage, whether a food is animal or plant, non-carbon greenhouse gas emissions, scale, and other factors account for about 83 percent.

3) An accurate picture of a food’s environmental impact needs to include all those aspects and that can be done much more throroughly with a life cycle assessment (LCA). Movements for ecological sustainability would fare much better if they used the LCA instead of the food miles model.

4) It is impossible to do an all-encompassing study on the climate impact of food. This study is based on the “average” US household. Unmeasurable factors might play a role in many situations. Despite, these findings point to critical issues regarding diet and ecology.

5.) For the average household, eating vegan food one day a week achieves more of a reduction in environmental degredation than eating local animal products every day. Or, more precisely: “The results of this analysis show that for the average American household, ‘buying local’ could achieve, at maximum, around a 4−5% reduction in GHG emissions due to large sources of both CO2 and non-CO2 emissions in the production of food. Shifting less than 1 day per week’s (i.e., 1/7 of total calories) consumption of red meat and/or dairy to other protein sources or a vegetable-based diet could have the same climate impact as buying all household food from local providers.”

I look forward to more work being done on this, and more conversation being had.

Problematizing ecology, local, and grass-fed… again

I originally posted this as a comment, then thought, well, this is a lot of writing just to be a comment. So here goes:

Eighty percent of corn and soy crops are used for livestock feed, not for vegan food. The problems of grain, soy, and monocultures are simply not ones that can be pinned on the vegan movement. To paraphrase Gary Francione, the problem of designer foods is not inherent to veganism any more than the problem of designer clothes is inherent to wearing clothes. There are plenty of designer foods that meat-eaters eat, and there are plenty of vegans who eat mainly local and organic, plenty of vegans who don’t eat soy or tons of corn and wheat, etc. To claim that all vegans eat all grain and soy, or that a vegan diet only consists of grain and soy, is a disingenuous straw-man argument.

Veganic/stock free permaculture is a thriving practice all over the world. It seems many locavores are willfully ignorant of this fact, and I’m not entirely clear why. Veganic permaculture is by far the most sustainable farming practice. There are many books and internet resources on this if you need more information.

Grass fed livestock don’t partake in the problem of corn and soy feed. But pasture/grass fed animals require more than twice the land of factory farmed animals. Grazing is one of the worst environmental problems that exists. Overgrazing has trampled and compacted land and been the largest contributor to desertification. Two-thirds of the American West, for instance, is grazing land. Clearing land for pasture is the major reason for destruction of forests and biodiversity including the atrocity of rainforest destruction. This is simply not a problem with even the least sustainable plant diets. Even the most industrialized plant diets use exponentially less land per yield than meat diets, especially grazed meat diets. Grazing is one of the most ecologically absurd situations humans have ever created. One researcher, Vacliv Smil, who has done very careful math has estimated that by 2050, if we are to feed the world on a meat diet, we will need 67 percent more land on the earth. Again, there is no comparable number for even the least sustainable plant agriculture, as plant protein is much higher yield per energy input than meat, and is consumed directly instead of being turned into an animal first.

Cows emit massive amounts of methane, one of the worst greenhouse gasses, and it is well documented that this is a major cause of global warming, surpassing all forms of transportation combined.  Grass fed and free-range livestock emit many times more methane than industrial livestock, in fact, because they live much longer. Again, this problem is simply not comparable to the problems of plant agriculture. Plants are not farting and stomping us to extinction.

Raising livestock, even grass-fed, is also by far the world’s number one cause of water usage and water pollution. Again, not comparable to the water usage of plant agriculture.

Furthermore, the issue of transportation of food over long distances is often cited by locavores, but the truth is much more complicated. The simple equation of food miles does not account for whether or not irrigation is used, whether or not food is grown in hothouses, whether or not food is in season, how food is stored, how food is cooked, how much food was shipped where and how, whether or not it is animal or plant food, etc. In short, transportation is about ten percent of a food’s energy cost. To quote James McWilliams, who has many problematic ideas but is right-on when it comes to food miles, “To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market.” Furthermore, simplistic food mile equations do not account for people who live in regions where food is not available, which opens up a sizeable, incredibly complicated can of worms in terms of human rights and food access. The local ethic, despite its benefits, simply does not take responsibility for the problem of food access in a globalized world where food is an inherently global issue. I am not saying I have a perfect answer to this problem, but I am saying that food access in a globalized world is complicated, and it deserves to be dealt with in a complicated way, especially if people who have social and economic privilege are claiming to be concerned with human rights.

But I digress. I don’t at all mean to tear local agriculture a new asshole. There are many reasons to eat local, especially in places where, unlike the Arizona desert where local food–including all meat–is all sustained by irrigation, local makes sense. I support eating local for several reasons, and I eat local as much as I can (and I’m a vegan… gasp). The point, rather, is that just because something is local does not mean it is the most environmentally friendly option. A life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a much more honest and comprehensive way than food miles to figure which food is the most sustainable.

If you are going to eat animal food, grass-fed meat from permaculture farms is the most sustainable way to do it. But veganic permaculture is exponentially more sustainable due to the minimized effects it has on land, water, and greenhouse gas emissions. Many of the less sustainable techniques of plant agriculture are more sustainable than the most sustainable forms of animal agriculture.

And this does not begin to get into the issue of the rights and interests of individual animals. I happen to believe that an egalitarian and ecologically friendly world is not possible when our personal and mass psychology is imbued with the idea that it is okay to unnecessarily use most of the world’s sentient creatures as mere instruments to our own ends. But that aside, I do understand the issue of animal rights lives in complicated philosophical, emotional, and spiritual territory. However, the issue of whether or not eating meat is good for the environment, especially in the long run, is quite simple: it isn’t. And there are viable, thriving alternatives. We might not like them because they challenge our deep-rooted food habits and assumptions, but within this generation there will be 10 billion people in the world, and save hitherto unknown technological interventions, there won’t even be any more land for meat-heavy diets.

Reality checks: grass-fed beef

Reality checks: grass-fed beef. Lots of this is sprinkled throughout our blog, but here we’ve tried to consolidate it into one post.

1. There is no such thing as “humane” animal agriculture. The dichotomy between “humane” and “inhumane” animal farming is uncritical and false. There is terribly inhumane animal agriculture, as we all know, on factory farms. Then there is a range of less terribly inhumane, but still inhumane, animal agriculture taking place on organic, “free range”, “grass-fed”, local, and permaculture farms. “Free range” doesn’t mean anything; it is a marketing word that has no established standard, and no inspection agency monitors “free range” farms. “Free range” farms often connote farms on which thousands of animals are packed into factories or other structures, never allowed outside–it’s just that there are no cages or bars. Most free-range, organic, and local farms, even the least inhumane of them, send their animals to factory slaughterhouses for their death, as per animal slaughter legal regulations. Similarly, “grass-fed”, ”organic”, “permaculture”, and “local” imply nothing about how an animal is treated and do not account for animal interests beyond what humans want. Even at their least inhumane, such as farms on which animals live much of their lives outside, some or all of the following are always taking place: animals are bred to be docile and held captive; they are impregnated against their will over and over for life so that they stay pregnant for milk and eggs; they are forced to give birth and have their bodily products and their babies taken from them; they are hooked up to machines and “rape racks”; they are violently slaughtered, often by humans who they came to trust and depend on; they are capitalist commodities; they are conceived of only in relation to their use for humans and reduced to the status of objects and instruments.

2. Animal agriculture does not magically stop being the major cause of global warming, surpassing all forms of transportation combined in its emission of greenhouse gasses, when done locally. Global warming is not simply a problem of factory farms. It is a problem of local and organic animal agriculture, animal permaculture, and all other animal farming. The number of animals needed to feed humans by any farming method is literally tens of billions per year. In fact, pasture-raised animals have a higher carbon footprint per pound than factory farmed ones. They emit two to four times as much methane, one of the deadliest of greenhouse gases, than feedlot animals. This fact severely complicates arguments about eating local animal food vs. non-local vegan food, yet is generally ignored by local-vores. 

3. Animal agriculture does not magically stop being a major cause of unnecessary water and resource use when done locally. Those billions of animals need to drink water, and, depending on the exact type of farming, use a range of fossil fuels and electricity to be merely kept alive. The average meat-based diet requires fifteen times more water than a plant-based diet. Again, there’s nothing about local, organic, and/or grazed animals that significantly changes this fact.  

4. There is no necessary connection between renewal of topsoil and animal grazing; there never has been. Non-animal methods of topsoil renewal include, and are far from limited to, composting, green manure, humanure, crop rotation, ley farming, organic plant material covers, cultivation of legumes, and on and on. Livestock are not necessary for sustainable farming. Veganic farming and permaculture is a widely established and thriving practice. 

5. “Sustainable” animal agriculture uses up to twice the amount of land than factory farming. “Sustainable” animal agriculture destroys land and ecosystems. Creation of the massive amounts of land for grazing animals requires mass deforestation and destruction of species, resulting in unspeakable damage to ecosystems. Grazing animals, especially cows, trample land and, contrary to the claims of many local-vores, are responsible for much destruction of topsoil. In some places in the American Midwest, for instance, land previously used for grazing has been rendered useless.

Animals Australia writes: “In Australia, 58% of the land is used for agriculture and principally for grazing animals and the production of crops used in animal feed. Worldwide, livestock now use 30% of the earth’s entire land surface. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), ‘the number of people fed in a year per hectare ranges from 22 for potatoes and 19 for rice down to 1 and 2 people respectively for beef and lamb’. To create grazing land, trees and vegetation must be cleared, and habitats must be destroyed. Livestock trample or eat any remaining native vegetation. According to many experts on desertification, the Sahara Desert—a once lush and fertile region—was caused by slashing and burning, primarily for animal grazing—the same method used throughout the world today, and now being used in the Amazon.”

John Robbins writes: “Even with U.S. beef cattle today spending the last half of their lives in feedlots, seventy percent of the land area of the American West is currently used for grazing livestock. More than two-thirds of the entire land area of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho is used for rangeland. Just about the only land that isn’t grazed is in places that for one reason or another can’t be used by livestock—inaccessible areas, dense forests and brushlands, the driest deserts, sand dunes, extremely rocky areas, cliffs and mountaintops, cities and towns, roads and parking lots, airports, and golf courses. In the American West, virtually every place that can be grazed, is grazed. The results aren’t pretty. As one environmental author put it, ‘Cattle grazing in the West has polluted more water, eroded more topsoil, killed more fish, displaced more wildlife, and destroyed more vegetation than any other land use.’ Western rangelands have been devastated under the impact of the current system, in which cattle typically spend only six months or so on the range, and the rest of their lives in feedlots. To bring cows to market weight on rangeland alone would require each animal to spend not six months foraging, but several years, greatly multiplying the damage to western ecosystems. The USDA’s Animal Damage Control (ADC) program was established in 1931 for a single purpose—to eradicate, suppress, and control wildlife considered to be detrimental to the western livestock industry.“

7. No matter what kind of meat-eating it is, it destroys more animal and plants than veganism. The majority of corn, soy, and grainstuffs produced in the world go towards feeding animals for meat diets, not vegetarians and vegans. Even when corn, soy, and grain are taken out of the equation, pasture farming is responsible for a level of destruction of ecosystems that is simply not comparable to the problems of plant agriculture. All meat and dairy require mass amounts of land and plants in order to exist.

8. Even the most sustainable animal agriculture would literally require mass human die offs. There is simply not enough land to feed all people on this model of food production. “Sustainable” animal agriculture can accommodate only a privileged minority of humans. Lierre Keith’s analysis, and similar ones, do not account for dietary racism, classism, and sexism. They do not account for food access in urban areas. When we begin to calculate the numbers regarding how much land would be needed to feed cities on even the most sustainable animal diet, the numbers become completely absurd. A convenient Derrick Jensen-flavored paleofantasy about undoing cities and reversing civilization is interesting, but completely useless when trying to navigate, in the complicated real world, how exactly to solve problems of food production in light of capitalism, racism, imperialism, sexism, classism, and war. Our pretty fantasies of a keeping a “sustainable” animal farm in our yard, or supporting all of the local “humane” farmers, are impossible to bring to fruition once we start considering how many people live in the world, who does and doesn’t have access to resources, and why. Of course, sustainable vegan agriculture does not solve these problems of overpopulation and mass social disparities, and as long as food production and the economy are pervaded by capitalism, we are in serious trouble. But compared to animal agriculture, veganic agriculture massively reduces waste of resources and ecological destruction, and creates inherently less expensive foods (made falsely expensive by government subsidies of animal agriculture and big corporations).

9. Even where grass-fed beef has benefits over factory farming, they are hugely trumped by the benefits of reducing or eliminating animal foods from your diet.

Some resources:

Humane Myth: Encouraging Truth, Transparency, and Integrity in Animal Advocacy

Five Myths About Grass Fed Beef

Beware of the Myth of Grass-Fed Beef: Cows Raised At Pasture Are Not Immune to E. Coli bacteria

Animal Aid’s Slaughterhouse Investigation Debunks “Humane Meat” Myth

Discovery News: Grass-fed beef has bigger carbon footprint

Interesting article: The Locavore Myth, James McWilliams

The Locavore Myth

James E. McWilliams,
Forbes Magazine August 03, 2009

Why buying from nearby farmers won’t save the planet.

Buy local, shrink the distance food travels, save the planet. The locavore movement has captured a lot of fans. To their credit, they are highlighting the problems with industrialized food. But a lot of them are making a big mistake. By focusing on transportation, they overlook other energy-hogging factors in food production. Take lamb. A 2006 academic study (funded by the New Zealand government) discovered that it made more environmental sense for a Londoner to buy lamb shipped from New Zealand than to buy lamb raised in the U.K. This finding is counterintuitive–if you’re only counting food miles. But New Zealand lamb is raised on pastures with a small carbon footprint, whereas most English lamb is produced under intensive factory-like conditions with a big carbon footprint. This disparity overwhelms domestic lamb’s advantage in transportation energy.  New Zealand lamb is not exceptional. Take a close look at water usage, fertilizer types, processing methods and packaging techniques and you discover that factors other than shipping far outweigh the energy it takes to transport food. One analysis, by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, showed that transportation accounts for only 11% of food’s carbon footprint. A fourth of the energy required to produce food is expended in the consumer’s kitchen. Still more energy is consumed per meal in a restaurant, since restaurants throw away most of their leftovers. Locavores argue that buying local food supports an area’s farmers and, in turn, strengthens the community. Fair enough. Left unacknowledged, however, is the fact that it also hurts farmers in other parts of the world. The U.K. buys most of its green beans from Kenya. While it’s true that the beans almost always arrive in airplanes–the form of transportation that consumes the most energy–it’s also true that a campaign to shame English consumers with small airplane stickers affixed to flown-in produce threatens the livelihood of 1.5 million sub-Saharan farmers.

Another chink in the locavores’ armor involves the way food miles are calculated. To choose a locally grown apple over an apple trucked in from across the country might seem easy. But this decision ignores economies of scale. To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market. The critical measure here is not food miles but apples per gallon. The one big problem with thinking beyond food miles is that it’s hard to get the information you need. Ethically concerned consumers know very little about processing practices, water availability, packaging waste and fertilizer application. This is an opportunity for watchdog groups. They should make life-cycle carbon counts available to shoppers. Until our food system becomes more transparent, there is one thing you can do to shrink the carbon footprint of your dinner: Take the meat off your plate. No matter how you slice it, it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef. That difference translates into big differences in inputs. It requires 2,400 liters of water to make a burger and only 13 liters to grow a tomato. A majority of the water in the American West goes toward the production of pigs, chickens and cattle. The average American eats 273 pounds of meat a year. Give up red meat once a week and you’ll save as much energy as if the only food miles in your diet were the distance to the nearest truck farmer.

If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer’s market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.

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*Has anyone read his book, Just Food? Thoughts? I’m going to look into it. -cz

Another thoughtful review from Compassionate Spirit

The review is called “Mythology and Vegetarianism” and it’s from the Compassionate Spirit blog.

An excerpt:

This book echoes a lot of the ideas throughout at least the internet portion of the “Transition” movement (preparing for a low-carbon future). People are bad-mouthing veganism and talking about backyard chickens, goats, and all manner of other livestock. (Fewer people have actually tried this, and I think that these options are going to be less attractive once it becomes apparent what is really involved.) There is talk about “holistic resource management,” meaning livestock management, which will actually increase the number of cattle on the land.

 

An emphasis on livestock agriculture in the energy descent is just a really unsustainable idea, and I’m not talking about just or even mostly Lierre Keith. This whole area just hasn’t been thought out. People are just putting out plausible-sounding arguments because it allows them to continue their meat-centered diets and still claim to be radical environmentalists.

 

Livestock grazing is as old as the hills and is the single most destructive form of human activity on earth. (See Akers, A Vegetarian Sourcebook, 1983). Much of the biologically “productive” area on the planet has been degraded or destroyed by livestock agriculture. Look at much of the Sahara Desert, look much of the “desert” in the American southwest — this is a result of overgrazing. Vague and unsupported statements to the effect that “well managed pasture builds soil” or that “we need perennial polycultures” are not going to convince me.

 

This whole discussion appears to be a way to continue the nutritional status quo (everyone gets to eat meat, and lots of it) under a facade of environmentalism. So while the most interesting feature of Lierre Keith’s new book to me is its radical demand for population reduction, I suspect that its appeal in the energy descent community will mostly be the appeal of continuing our meat consumption behind a “green” facade.

The “C” Word

(No, I’m sorry, it’s not “canteloupe.”)

A lot of what we’ve written on our blog so far is about details. Before we did anything else, we wanted to make it clear that Keith’s method of research is profoundly dishonest; that she is willing to distort, fabricate and manipulate as it lends false credence to her polemic against veganism. Suffice it to say, she has obliged us to do a careful, line by line reading of The Vegetarian Myth; there is simply too much wrong with this book to do anything else!

But, for the moment, I would like to take a step back from the details and talk about a particular pachyderm hanging out in that corner over there. He’s wearing a monocle and spats and makes you trade hours of your life for Illuminati tickets. Yes, let’s talk about capitalism, baby. People might misunderstand…but that’s a part of life.

Description vs. Manifestation

“Capitalism” is something of a lazy word to throw around. Like any theory it doesn’t really exist outside of the papers (or blogs) upon which we write its name. Capitalism, like communism, fascism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. is a vision and an ideal. None of these theories exist in the real world, but would-be governors attempt to prise them from the minds of theorists and overlay them upon civilian populations. Naturally, there are always problems in translation. The unconscionable brutality of Stalinism barely resembles Marx’s hopeful tirade on an inevitable era of social equality, peace and cooperation.

So What Is Capitalism?

Theorists have come up ways to refine their definitions of abstractions like “capitalism” or “communism” by applying funny adjectives to them such as “late stage,” “techno” or “state monopoly.” Sometimes these terms are useful but I think it’s easiest if I just get to the point and tell you exactly what I mean. When I speak of capitalism, I am describing a vast set of economic relationships whose functionality is predicated on their ability to expand. The method of the capitalist system is to extract utility (use value) from resources (anything and everything) in order to maximize profit (monetary gain). This results in the accumulation of capital (money or resources) which is reinvested in order to extract utility from more resources. The drive to maximize profits corollates with an ever-increasing rate of resource extraction. This is expansion.

This cycle is never-ending. When it stops or slows down we end up with depressions, recessions and various other colorful euphemisms for “systemic failure.” The logical engine of capitalism drives toward the location of more resources and it always extract as much use value from them as possible. The ways in which this is problematic do not often occur to people until they think of ways in which workers can be seen as resources, rainforests can be seen as resources, non-human animals can be seen as resources, and so on.

So what does this have to do with Lierre Keith, paleolithic diets and veganism?

This fundamental mode of exploitation, which I argue is central to capitalism, is antithetical to the vegan ethic. Throughout The Vegetarian Myth Lierre Keith makes the assertion that what vegans cite as exploitation is merely the way the world works and that we should accept it. This opens some interesting ethical doors.

When Is(n’t) It Exploitation?

If we are comfortable with Keith’s proposition that killing non-human animals for food is not exploitative, then what would qualify? Certainly not the condition of the working class under capitalism, which could be easily understood as a kinder, gentler form of species-on-species predation. After all, employing an undocumented labor force that at times begins to resemble slavery is downright magnanimous compared to cutting to the chase and eating their bodies. However much green spin is put onto animal husbandry, it entails rape, castration and murder one hundred percent of the time. As malignantly oppressive as the modern institutions of wage slavery are, they have at least been ameliorated through labor and civil rights struggles to the point that workers have some degree of control over their own bodies (although we can see this being eroded through the criminalization of undocumented workers). To what natural law is Keith appealing that she thinks that we ought not do this?

If domestication and murder qualify as “holy” (23-24) then what on Earth doesn’t? The truth is, Keith has packed some abominably exploitative and speciesist assumptions into a Trojan Horse made to resemble ecofeminism and deep ecology. Wishy-washy spirituality notwithstanding, her project is to legitimize the use of nonhuman animal bodies as resources to be exploited. She attempts to obscure this by assuring the reader of that we are simply “eaten as well as eaters…tak[ing] our place at the table” (23). Keith would have us believe that we are not domesticators, but equal participants in domestication. Through some very convoluted rhetorical gymnastics and an anecdote about getting snow down her shirt on the way to feed her chickens, she arrives at the conclusion that domesticated animals are getting a better deal than the humans that eat their flesh. She makes the incredible claim that we are co-evolving with the nonhumans we domesticate in the exact same fashion that any other predator does with their prey. Nowhere does she make mention of the fact that humans wield ultimate biopower over their domesticated charges, binding them to rape racks and managing their (d)evolution so as to rear strains that are unable to stand. After all, they’re not supposed to.

Speciesism and Die-Offs

Once again we are left with this question: if Keith has no problem with managing the biological evolution of animals in such a way as to suit her whims, then why not manage the social evolution of people for the same reasons? The reason, of course, is that Keith is a speciesist who treats “Others” in a way she would never treat humans. Or maybe she would treat them that way. When one considers that Keith’s diet would require a mass die-off (she uses the colorful euphemism, “energy descent” [259]) to be sustainable, one wonders exactly what it is she’s proposing. The last time anything like the food-system she envisions existed, there were 90 million people spread throughout the Americas, many of whom did depend on “the ten-thousand year rupturing gash of agriculture” (271) to survive. With 300 million in the United States alone, where are we going to find the land to make this fantasy into reality? How do we attain this primitivist Eden when, to feed those suicidally noble New England cows Keith won’t shut up about, it would take 390,000,000 square miles of land? Oh, and that’s when you’re looking at a diet supplemented with grains. Suddenly, soylent green’s starting to look kind of viable.

I didn’t find an answer to these questions in The Vegetarian Myth. They weren’t asked. I found a lot of starry-eyed paens to animals that are totally okay with being raped and murdered as long as you pray over them first. I found a lot of fetishistic portrayals of non-industrial indigenous cultures whose lifeways Keith wants to appropriate. I found absolutely incessant invocation of a long-lost green utopia that Keith rhetorically hides from, tantalizes with and re-discovers for the reader. I found a lot of dumped quotes from Derrick Jensen, because he published her book. I found a disturbing amount of passages where Lierre Keith actually tries to write from the perspective of a voice inside the reader’s head. This book is actually a triumph of programming in the way it tries to seize on the reader’s perceived insecurities, works to break her down through a steady rhythm of emotional needling and then, when she’s at her lowest point, present Weston Price and Derrick Jensen cloaked in the language of woo-woo spirituality. This book is, as a good friend quipped, “fucking bonkers.” In my next post, we’ll get deep in to just how fucking bonkers it gets.

Carolyn’s thoughts post-book

There’s still a lot more coming, and apparently we can’t get our butts together enough to be linear! Keep coming back!!!

For now, I, Carolyn Z, offer my thoughts after a few weeks off to contemplate this book:

1. The mere existence of thriving, healthy vegans and widely successful vegan permaculture undermines all of Lierre Keith’s major theses in The Vegetarian Myth. The rest of my conclusions/afterthoughts are secondary to this.

2. When all’s said and done, this book is a veritable infomercial for “paleo” and anti-carb diets. It leaves no room for questions about dietary racism and classism; the problems of urban food accessibility and peak oil; the problems of overpopulation (she mentions it briefly at the end but offers no useful analysis and doesn’t problematize her theories in relation to it, which would upset everything she’s said); and tons of other problems that complicate what is ultimately a utopian vision, impossible to implement at the large-scale without a massive reduction in the human population– and that’s a whole other can of worms involving first world privilege, capitalism, racism, mass exploitation, and on and on.

3. This book isn’t about vegetarians. The title is disengenuous. The Vegetarian Myth is about vegans. It is unclear why Lierre Keith chose to focus her self-righteous passion on vegans, since we are about 0.5 percent of the US population, and the vast majority of people in the US are meat-eaters who subsist on cornstuffs and other products that Lierre Keith despises. Furthermore, upwards of 80 percent of the corn produced in the United States is used to feed cows for animal agriculture.

4. This book is not even really about vegans; it’s about Lierre Keith’s hatred of vegans. Excuse me for the following, but I’m a psychology nerd and I’ve held off ’til now: The Vegetarian Myth reads as a tortured letter that Keith has projected from her subconscious, as if she can only deal with her flaws (self-righteousness, ignorance, childishness, etc.– everything she charges vegans with) when she sees them in others. It seems Lierre Keith is deeply confused about her life and her own stance towards politics, and seems pathologically anxious/obsessive about her relationship to food-in-general, in a manner that goes far beyond politics. I would consider that much of her projected, seemingly debilitating anxiety about food might point to the fact that she has an eating disorder herself (something else she obsessively projects onto vegans), but I don’t think this is the right forum to get into that loaded discussion. Suffice to say, if it is true, then I implore Lierre Keith to get help for that serious issue, and not misguide the energy of it into valid, crucial food politics. Keith seems to have a really hard time with nuance, with not perceiving the world in reactive extremes– this, literally, developmentally, is what scared children do when they feel traumatized or unprotected. None of this makes her bad– at all. It just makes her human. I don’t hate Lierre Keith; I’ve never met her (though we do live in the same town. Say hi, Lierre, if you see me–I promise not to poo on you. I’m tall and white with a semi-conscious propensity for dressing like Oliver Twist, and I have really bad depth perception and am always walking into things– sometimes I’m hard to miss in that sense.) I just want her to admit that she’s human and that she has disseminated faulty information about issues that literally have to do with life and death. In short, a grounded, integrated person with a realistic relationship to their inevitably flawed human-ness and the difficult realities of a flailing, complicated planet, would not need to write in the manner Lierre Keith does. In fact, it seems they would try to be as accessible and non-judgmental as possible so as not to alienate and insult their intended audience.

5. A critical conversation about the destruction that’s been cause by human civilization and agriculture is necessary. A convenient, paleofantasy-based nostalgia for a perfect time that never truly existed is not. Not only does this paleofantasy reek of biological determinism, which should always be questioned, but it takes us away from present reality, which includes carnism and human privilege. There are significant reasons to believe that these things are a) hugely responsible for much destruction of the planet and b) one more violent, instrumentalist ideology analogous to sexism, racism, etc. Even if you disagree with theories about speciesism and carnism, totally leaving them out makes for a dishonest analysis.

6. Don’t listen to me. Read this book if you want. But no matter what your diet, take this book with a grain of salt. There is, objectively, a lot of misinformation in it. Do your own research. Get some perspective by considering this and other critiques, and by looking into the many complicated vegan analyses that Lierre Keith pays no attention to. We all know not to believe everything we see on TV… the same goes for books.

Vegetarian Myth corrections from Vegans for Sustainable Agriculture

Vegans for Sustainable Agriculture are doing great work and have put out this useful pdf. You can download it here and pass it out if you want. Thanks, Vegans for Sustainable Agriculture!

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith Corrections to Some of the Many Errors and Misconceptions

The Claim: Lierre claims that grazed animal farming/polyculture can feed nine people per ten acres. (P. 101)

In Reality: Lierre lists the food produced on a 10 acre perennial polyculture. Her numbers are based on Michael Pollan’s exposition of Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and are arrived at by dividing the numbers for Salatin’s 100 acres of grass by 10. But Pollan explains at great length (P. 222-225) that the 100 acres of grass is really 550 acres because the adjacent 450 acres of forest are essential to the health of the farm. Accordingly, ten acres of land actually feed about two people rather than her estimate of nine. Lierre says that if you live in New England you should eat what grows there. However, with this level of productivity, you couldn’t feed all of New England on all the land in New England.

The Claim: “I built my whole identity on the idea that my life did not require death…Did the lives of nematodes and fungi matter? Why not? Because they were too small for me to see?” (P. 18, discussed throughout the book)

In Reality: This is a straw man argument. These views are not held by most vegans. The goal of veganism is to eliminate direct, unnecessary suffering at the hands of humans — not to magically end all death. Why shouldn’t the cow with its undeniable ability to suffer take precedence over plants and organisms with limited or non-existent nervous systems such as the nematodes Keith frets about in this book?

The Claim: Lierre claims that sustainable farming is not possible without domesticated livestock. “I would need domesticated animals—their labor and the products of their bodies—to farm sustainably. I needed their manure and their unspeakable bones, their inconceivable blood.” (P. 58)

In Reality: How then does she explain the success of vegan organic agriculture in the UK and US, where no animal inputs are used? How does she explain that the most successful organic CSA in the country actually uses no animal products on their fields (Honey Brook Farm in New Jersey)?

The Claim: “Understand: agriculture was the beginning of global warming. Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization, an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer. No one has told you this before, but that is what your food—those oh so eco-peaceful grains and beans—has done.” (P. 250)

The Reality: Much of Lierre’s book is borrowed from Richard Manning, a well-respected environmentalist and author. Manning understands that human dependence on grain monoculture is not a result of the small percentage of concerned people who decide to be vegetarian, but is rather a historical mistake of which we all share the burden of repairing. Despite Lierre’s insistence, vegans do not need to eat grains nor any sort of annual crop. Why did she target vegans when compared to average corn-fed Americans, vegans consume much less grain? On the topic of climate change, Lierre fails to address that regardless of type of feed or forage, ruminant animals emit an abundance of methane. She, along with other grass-fed proponents, point out that growing pasture sequesters carbon in the subsoil and claim that farms like Polyface are carbon-neutral. However, she ignores the fact that soil only retains a limited quantity of carbon—once pasture is healthy, it is carbon stable. Any pasture-based livestock production contributes, pound-for-pound of meat, to climate change as much (if not more) than conventional livestock production—an indictment that you, Lierre, need to answer.

The Claim: “We’ve been doing what we’ve been endlessly badgered to do since the 1960s. We’ve eaten, according to the USDA, less fat, less meat, fewer eggs. Our dietary fat has fallen 10 percent, hypertension has dropped 40 percent and the number of us with chronically high cholesterol has declined 28 percent.” (P. 203)

In Reality: Americans eat more meat now than in the 1960s according to the USDA (http://tinyurl.com/USDAstats1). While the average percentage of calories from dietary fat consumption has decreased, dietary fat intake increased from 135 g to 178 g from 1960 to 2006 (http://tinyurl.com/USDAstats2).

The Claim: “We owe our bodies what we owe the world; we must inhabit both and, in the act of inhabiting, nourish both. This food must also be an apology for what my kind has done, and part of the repair. It must protect this land, and extract from me the promise of more. My food is those things, all of them. It’s based on the forests and grasses that nestle this planet in soil and air.” (P. 271)

In Reality: Lierre’s own blog posts demonstrate that she can’t stick to her own ideals. She has posted entries where she raves about the perfection of grain-fed pork and happily offers a bucket of mass-produced, processed chocolate laden with factory-farmed dairy to trick-or-treaters last Halloween. If this is what she’ll post on her own blog, what other unsustainable foods is she eating? (http://tinyurl.com/lierre1, http://tinyurl.com/lierre2)

The Claim: “…there are no good plant sources of tryptophan. On top of that, all the tryptophan in the world won’t do you any good without saturated fat.” And later Keith blames the lack of tryptophan in vegetarian diets for depression, insomnia, panic, anger, bulimia and chemical dependency. (P. 10)

In Reality: A cup of roasted soybeans contains nearly three times the adult RDA of tryptophan and a cup of pretty much any other bean will get you between 50-60% of the RDA. Two tablespoons of coconut oil more than meet the adult saturated fat RDA. Nuts, dark chocolate and avocado are all rich in saturated fat.

The Claim: “Sixty grams of soy protein—that’s one cup of soy milk—contains 45 mg of isoflavones.” (P. 215)

In Reality: The soy milks available in supermarkets have about 6 to 11 grams of soy protein per cup. According to Lierre’s often-cited Weston A. Price Foundation, a cup of soy milk contains only 20 mg of isoflavones.

The Claim: “I am of this world, carbon and breath like my parents, my siblings, the creatures great and small, single-celled or green, that create the miracle the rest of us consume. They gave me this body and the air it needs, the food it eats. All they ask is that I take my place, a predator, dependent and beholden, until I am prey.” (p. 271)

In Reality: The animals humans consume are quite literally prey, but unless Keith intends to be eaten by a wild animal, her claim of being “prey” is a specious one based on her decomposition. She considers this a repayment to the biosphere for its kindness in feeding her, but that same repayment is unacceptable from edible animals.

The Claim: Lierre claims that “Researchers from Cornell showed that E. Coli 0157:H7 could be stopped by a very simple action: feeding cows hay for the last five days of their lives.” (P. 99)

In Reality: In the study Lierre refers to, the researchers showed that overall E. Coli levels (i.e. including strains other than 0157:H7) in three cows were decreased by feeding the cows hay for five days. They conjectured that 0157:H7 levels would be similar. However, subsequent research suggests that grass-fed beef does not have lower levels of 0157:H7 (http://www.slate.com/id/2242290/pagenum/all/).

The Claim: “The pursuit of a just, sustainable, and local economy will eventually lead us to the grim conclusion that there are simply too many of us. The world population is supposed to reach 8.9 billion by 2050. Meanwhile the oceans will be fished empty by 2050, the aquifers and water tables will be well out of reach, and the last trace of topsoil rendered dust. We are already living on fossil fuel and this—right now—is the historical moment when oil will peak. It will never be this cheap or accessible again. What then?” (P. 120)

Counterpoint: Keith has no answer to “What then?” The only answer one can deduce from the book is that she advocates nothing short of the elimination of agriculture and civilization and a drastic reduction of population to some level that she considers sustainable. Simultaneously, she believes that civilization’s doom (and consequently, an enormous loss of human life) will soon be upon us, so maybe it makes sense that her ideas are not solutions. The only thing worth taking from The Vegetarian Myth is the idea that the simple act of going vegan automatically solves all problems with our food production. That said, it is still the easiest and most substantial immediate action a person can take on the path to a sustainable lifestyle. True, some vegans and organizations do exaggerate the ecological benefits of eating highly processed, conventionally-grown vegan food; however, a balanced plant-based diet of mixed perennial and annual fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes is far more sustainable than any diet based on ruminant, energy-hungry, greenhouse-gas emitting livestock.

Chapter 2: What about plants?

What about plants?

In chapter 2, Keith begins to write about an ongoing theme: vegetarians’ supposedly biased attitude towards vegetable life: “…if we’re extra eco-righteous, we throw the seeds on the compost heap, where time, heat and bacteria kill them. One goal of any good compost scheme, after all, is to kill any lingering seeds. None of this is what the tree had in mind. The tree isn’t offering sweetness out of the goodness of its heartwood. It’s striking a bargain, and even though we’ve shaken hands and collected, we aren’t carrying through on our side of the deal. There’s a glaring anthropocentrism in this argument, which is strange coming from people espousing a specific politic of animal liberation…Why are we humans allowed to take without giving? Isn’t that called exploitation? Or at the very least, stealing? Fruit isn’t, as claimed, ‘the only freely given food.’ The point of that fruit is not humans.”

She leaves this out: The point of animals is not humans, either. That animals have been held in captivity as farming instruments/food production is not what those animals had in mind. If farmed animals had not been constructed by centuries of genetic selection, and subtle and violent domination to make them docile, they would most likely never chose to be on those farm. If the gates, cages, crates, or whatever else were not there, do we honestly think those animals would stay? That they would asked to be bred generation after generation as instruments in captivity? Any reasonable person knows that the answer to this is a huge “no”.

She writes: “If killing is the problem, the life of one grass-fed cow will feed me for an entire year. But a single vegan meal of plant babies—rice grains, almonds, soybeans—ground up or boiled alive, will involve hundreds of deaths. Why don’t they matter?” The comparison between the death of sentient beings, and the death of plant, grain, and legume matter, is a disingenous one. Vegans do not have a simplistic idea of this, as Keith won’t stop asserting; on the contrary, vegans admit to and try to wrestle with how complicated the reality of sentience is, instead of throwing the issue out the window or genralizing sentience into absurdity, just because they can’t find a perfect solution. Plants and animals have wildly different interests, different mechanisms of life, and differently functioning bodies. There is, effectively, despite a couple of pop-science books about the issue, no scientific proof that plants feel pain or have awareness similar to that of sentient beings–especially intelligent mammals, who have complex nervous systems, emotional brains (limbic systems), and complicated pain mechanisms. Keith uses one of these pop-science books, The Language of Lost Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner–who, like Keith, is certainly interesting but is not a biologist, scientist, or any other kind of academic or researcher with the credentials to make claims on science–as her resource for almost her entire discussion on the possibility of any kind of “plant sentience” that might resemble animal sentience. Citations 115-141 in this section are all Bruhner’s book, with three exceptions that have to do with secondary points.

This sentience is the objective difference that complicates the question of animal and plant death. In certain situations, not all deaths are equal, in that they do not embody the same processes, results, or implications. Consider this comparison (and remember that comparisons are not the same as equations): To get an abortion, to destroy a fetus, is not the same as killing an autonomous, born human. Most radicals– and Keith is a radical feminist– understand this critical differences between the death of a fetus—a parasitic organism that lives, but is dependent on its autonomous, born, adult host, and at most stages is probably incapable of feeling pain— and the death of an autonomous, fully developed human. Nobody is excited about abortion, but pro-choice people understand its complicated and necessary nature, and inevitability of having to chose between types of “death”. (I put this in quotes only because some pro-choice people consider abortions a necessary death, and others don’t consider abortion a type of death.)

The point is, humans inevitably choose between types of destruction– we certainly do not disagree with Keith on this point, and we’re glad she talks about it. But in terms of food, this is not the same as having a flippant disregard for plants. As a vegan, I’m attempting to find the solution that offers the least unnecessary human destruction. There is physically felt torture and pain involved in carnism, and this need not be inevitable, we need not add it to the endless pile of unnecessary destruction we’ve already caused. “What about plant life?” is one of the classic fallacious arguments against a vegan diet, one which distracts from the issue of the individual sentient animal by trying to equate the conditions of different life forms. To assert or imply that we “overlook” the deaths of plants because we focus on the supposedly more important deaths of animals, is a bit like saying that all genders won’t have true equality until male-bodied people can get abortions. It’s an irrelevant framing of the issue, a distraction from and unwillingness to deal with the issue’s complicated realities.

At the end of the day, the “what about plants” issue can be overridden by the fact that, no matter what you feed your farmed animals, no matter what your method of farming– even if it’s animal-based permaculture– these animals we force into agriculture are involved in the “hundreds of deaths” of plant beings, too. Even the most sustainable farms use large amounts of energy and water keeping and feeding farmed animals, where they could be growing sustainable plant-based crops and using non-animal methods to keep topsoil healthy instead. In fact, “humane” and “grass-fed” farms often use more than double the amount of land than “industrial” ones. The general erasure of this fact is one of the major myths about grass-fed farming. And there’s no way around the fact that raising cattle is the leading cause of global warming, surpassing all combined forms of transportation in its production of methane and other greenhouse gasses. At no point in this chapter does Keith give attention to the rabid destructiveness of animal agriculture– no matter what the type, large or small farms, grass or grain. Because animals need to eat if we are to eat them, then there is no way around the fact that a carnist diet—any type of carnist diet— destroys more plant and animal life than a vegan one. When we eat animals, we are eating/killing plant and animal life at the same time. This does not seem like the most useful or skillful way to minimize human impact on the planet, given the workability and possibilities of sustainable, local vegetarian agriculture. Keith does not want to see the fact that vegetarian permaculture is even possible. Her only “proof” of this is a personal anecdote about visiting one unnamed psuedo-vegetarian farm community that she insultingly, and without evidence, claims was filled with “anorexic” vegans who she has diagnosed with all of her own supposedly vegan-caused health problems.  See our “Busting myths-Vegan permaculture” page for actual information about vegan permaculture.

Another way to put it: Industrial vegetable farming is awful and unsustainable in lots of ways. Industrial meat farming is worse. Permaculture might be part of our solution. Vegan permaculture is more sustainable than animal permaculture. For every animal-based farming practice, there seems to be a more sustainable plant-based one.