The author spent 20 years as a vegan. Understandably, veganism became ever nearer and dearer to her identity, but it also ruined her health (depression, hypoglycemia, spine problems, chronic pain, reproductive health issues, etc). Eventually, she came to realize that vegetarianism only apparently resolves the issues that trouble its practitioners: animal welfare, nutrition, and social justice. This book is partially a telling of Keith’s journey. However, the story is filled out generously with evidence to support the conclusions at which the author eventually arrived.

The book has three main sections:

1. Moral vegetarians: This section dispels the common vegetarian idea that abstaining from animal foods allows you to eat without causing any death. Rather, it is an inescapable fact that all life requires death. Plants have to eat, and even to grow grains the soil must be fertilized either with animal by-products or synthetic fertilizers produced using huge amounts of fossil fuels. Monocrop agriculture is also very harmful to natural environments, ruining soil and water which causes the deaths of many animals. As such, your vegetarian diet is only apparently death-free.
2. Political vegetarians: This section discusses various political aspects of the eating of animal foods which vegetarians often criticize. For instance, some vegetarians claim that fewer people would be starving if we fed more grains directly to people, instead of to industrially produced animals, and they point to the huge amount of water that it takes to grow a cow. This is misleading, for a variety of reasons. The animals produced for food are more nutritionally dense than grains. And, they are only fed grains due to a perverse history of agricultural subsidies and incentives that makes it cost efficient. But, when raised naturally on grasses, food animals give back nearly as much to the land as they take from it — in stark contrast to the destructive grain crops. Because grains ruin the land, countries need more and more of it, possibly leading to economic exploitation of, or militaristic action against, other countries. And anyway, most alternative vegetarian foods are produced by brands owned by the largest agricultural conglomerates in the world. Vegetarianism, then, is not really the diet of peace and justice that it is made out to be, and it doesn’t really help you to opt out of the oil-fueled, government-assisted food industry. The realities of food production and distribution are much more complex.
3. Nutritional vegetarians: Keith discusses some ways in which conventional nutritional wisdom has gone wrong. Contrary to the dietary establishment, she argues that a low-fat, high-carb diet is unnatural to humans and unhealthy for us. Special attention is paid to debunking the lipid hypothesis and presenting some of the work of the famous alternative health practictioner Weston A. Price. Keith also discusses the dangers that soy poses to human health, which is of particular interest to current and former vegetarians who often eat soyfoods instead of animal foods.

The whole book is rather depressing, and Keith’s conclusion is pessimistic. She think that the only way to achieve morality, justice and good nutrition is to dismantle the foundational institutions of our current way of life (agriculture, suburbia) and to return to being hunting and gathering locavores.

I really, really enjoyed the book. Of course, it is not comprehensive — what book on those mammoth topics could be? — and I have not verified all of the research myself. But it was invaluable to hear all of these things from someone who understands the pull of vegetarianism and who felt that pull enough herself to learn its pitfalls the very, very hard way. Keith switches effortlessly from educational sections to personal narratives and back again. I’m neither religious nor spiritual, but at times I felt myself responding to her prose in that way you’re supposed to respond in church.

However, no book review would be complete without a few criticisms:

• Animism: Keith argues that humanism is morally bankrupt, leads to exploitation of the earth and its creatures, and must be abandoned in favor of an animist ethic. I think this is crazy. I don’t believe that humans have souls, let alone rocks, and I can’t accept any moral worldview that promotes disregarding important moral differences between beings (consciousness, capacity for reason, etc). It’s easy to see why animist cultures did a better job of respecting the environment — they thought that they could actually wrong it in some way. As such, the environment placed moral demands on them, rather than mere demands of self-interest in producing food. But I don’t think there’s anything about humanism that’s inconsistent with more sustainable practices; Keith’s understanding of humanism seems like a caricature in this regard.
• Masculinity: Keith thinks that the cause of exploitation of the earth, among other forms of exploitation, is a kind of masculinity (not to be confused with biological maleness) that is obsessed with dominance and power. I’m not really sure what this adds to the book, other than making its main points look more radical than they really are. Keith is an anti-pornography kind of feminist, so actually I wouldn’t be surprised if the masculinity stuff figures more prominently into her thinking than the book suggests. I’m not really interested in this form of social criticism and don’t know what legitimacy or value it has.
• Technology: Keith repeatedly worries that the human population has grossly overshot the carrying capacity of the earth, and she is condescending toward those who hold out hopes for technology that will solve the problem. I think this condescension is quite unwarranted, considering that her proposed alternative is radical, grassroots political action. Why think that technology is so much more unlikely to fix things than some people holding democratic meetings in a basement somewhere? It’s this obsession with old ways of life (and old spiritual practices, like animism) that really turns me off to many environmentalists and other social critics.

All in all, though, a more than worthwhile read. I would especially recommend it to anyone who has spent time as a vegetarian, and to anyone who has a currently or formerly vegetarian family member or friend.

I put quite a bit of effort into the interview and am pleased with how it turned out. You can find it here.

I welcome your comments (make them over there). This whole thing has really been a journey, and I’m not there yet.

And to anyone who finds themselves here from following a link at Let Them Eat Meat — welcome. I am going to be blogging more or less regularly beginning soon and would love to have you join the discussion of miscellaneous things ethical.

What’s going on here? Does this emotion track something morally significant? That is, is it in fact worse to waste food than other kinds of things? Or is it just that the value of food is highly salient while you let it go bad and then chuck it into the trash?

Comment from abeala

I have some disjointed things to say in response.

First of all, yes, it can definitely be difficult to have a significant other who does not eat the same way as you. Around the time I started testing the veg waters, my now-husband and I became engaged. He was very supportive, but had no intentions of going veg himself. Honestly, I was at least a little disappointed that he was not responding to the moral arguments that had moved me.  Depending on the couple, the dynamics of this kind of situation can go a thousand different ways. So that is at least one respect in which being veg can disrupt even healthy social relationships.

There is a problem with the arguments for veg*ism that is relevant but which neither of us has brought up yet, and that is the collective action problem. As the argument goes, no animal food producer is literally sensitive to the change in demand caused by one person ceasing to buy their products. So, the producers continue to raise the same amount of animals as they were raising even before you were veg. Although veg people like to talk this way, it is not true that you are saving any animals by being veg, strictly speaking.

At this point, a person can bite the bullet, and agree it is a collective action problem, but then she would need to quit talking as if she herself were saving any animals by being veg. Or, a person can argue that being vegetarian/vegan/flexitarian is a symbolic gesture more than one intended to affect change in the animal industry. In that case, it is probably less blameworthy than we had previously assumed to fail to adopt any of those eating patterns, because symbolic gestures are supererogatory or at least not as morally pressing as preventing suffering that is within your control. Preventing the suffering is –not– really within your control, at least not unless you are a famous vegan activist.

I don’t think we need to say that human flourishing *requires* supporting an industry that tortures sentient beings. If people could make meat in a laboratory, or if there were enough social stigma surrounding meat consumption, then that would be false. People who flourish are those who make wise judgments regarding what they can do with the life circumstances they’ve been handed, including the states of affairs they inhabit and their pre-existing qualities of character. Some people, because of their temperament and their social circles, are probably well-suited for being vegan, and do well that way. But many others will come to the all-things-considered judgment that veganism is bad for them, and I think we [people who care about animals, but not at all costs] should take that seriously instead of just saying “oh, you don’t care enough,” or “oh, you didn’t try hard/long enough.”

Some actions are bad enough that a wise person would not engage in them even at great social cost (participating in the Holocaust, perhaps). I don’t think animal food eating falls into this class of actions. There is still something bad and regrettable about using animals for these purposes in the current manners, and a morally sensitive person will realize this. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he will successfully become vegan and stay that way happily for life. Assuming that a person rejects consequentialism/utilitarianism for whatever reason, then at least some of her judgments will be made not strictly on the basis of whose welfare outweighs whose. An individualistic reading of virtue ethics can issue the result not that we merely assign our own interests greater weight in the utility calculus, but that we see things from a different point of view entirely, in which wise moral decisions cannot be made according to any rules or procedure.

There are some options for translating moral concern for animals into action other than by becoming vegan. I try to purchase most of our animal foods from Whole Foods, which to my knowledge has the best animal welfare standards of any grocery store (although of course they are not as high as many people would like). These products cost more, but I like to put my money where my mouth is. In fact, I wonder whether purchasing these products actually sends a stronger message to the food industry than abstaining from animal foods altogether. It’s also a good idea to cut back on meat consumption, for health reasons in addition to animal welfare reasons. As I recall even PETA has said, two flexitarians is as good as one vegan, from the perspective of overall animal suffering. Finally, I encourage you to adopt homeless companion animals instead of buying them in pet shops or from breeders. You can make a big difference in those animals’ lives, at least.

Moral of the story: Being a flexitarian because you think animals’ suffering doesn’t matter, or because vegetarian food weirds you out, is probably not morally commendable. But we can’t infer a person’s quality of character from what she puts on her plate. Reasons to be, or not to be, veg*n are more complicated than most people interested in such matters seem to realize.

You might have guessed from the topic of this post that I was going to write about why the vegan diet is not nutritionally adequate. That actually isn’t the main reason why I think being vegan can be bad for you, although I do have my doubts about its nutritional optimality. It seems that the only people who are totally confident that a vegan diet can work for everyone (or almost everyone) are practicing vegans with vested interests in other people being vegan too, for moral or environmental reasons usually. But eating vegan is surely better than the “Standard American Diet” that most people are already eating, so even it is isn’t the optimal diet, you probably will still come out ahead health-wise.

Actually, I am concerned that being vegan can be bad for you for social reasons, in three ways.

First, it can keep you from enjoying social situations as much as you should. Weddings, banquets, lunches with coworkers, pizza parties… they all start to look less fun and more stressful. You have to carry emergency snacks in case you ending up eating somewhere like a southern “home cooking”-type restaurant where everything is covered in butter and/or bacon fat, and you end up eating meals of side salads with vinaigrette and white rice while everyone else indulges. But, this problem is generally surmountable if you plan ahead, as more and more restaurants and events offer veg-friendly fare these days.

Second, being vegan can affect how other people treat you. Your friends and family might give you a hard time for interrogating a waiter about a dish’s ingredients. They might ask you if you have an eating disorder (while it’s true that eating disorders often masquerade as legitimate diets, there are many vegetarians and vegans who do not in fact have one). They might make hurtful and/or excessively many jokes about your diet. But, again, this problem is generally surmountable, assuming that your friends and family are minimally reasonable people and you do your best to deal with them in a calm and rational way.

Third and, I think, most importantly, being vegan can easily cause you to view others in a negative light to the extent that it harms your valuable relationships with them. Vegan propaganda information tends to use very violent imagery of the treatment of food-producing animals in order to motivate people to become vegan. This kind of information, to the extent that it is motivating for a person, tends to stick with her. As a result, it is easy to begin to see your non-vegan friends and family members as morally worse than they really are, and to dwell on this fact. Vegan groups sometimes emphasize the goal of bringing about a totally vegan society. This can make a vegan feel like she is part of a small, privileged group that “sees the light,” so to speak, and that everyone else is morally depraved (perhaps an analogous situation is early abolitionists in a slave owning society). But, the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of people have no desire for animals to suffer. They are just ignorant to the facts of food animal production, or think that their dietary needs outweigh the suffering inflicted on the animals. Viewing one’s friends and family as akin to Nazis, slave owners, or torturers with their victims on their plates at dinner needlessly drives a wedge between you and them. Being vegan might make a person feel morally pure, but achieving such a status within a world of unconcerned omnivores becomes alienating.

Of course, I speak only from personal experience. I don’t have excellent reason to believe that my experience has been either typical or atypical for a vegan apostate. But, personally, I found the vegan lifestyle, with its emphasis on purity from animal products, emotionally and socially taxing in a way that was incompatible with my maximal well-being in the long term. Combined with some lingering nutritional doubts, I arrived at the all things considered judgment to move back towards a vegetarian/“flexitarian” diet. Now, I firmly believe that it is possible to eat in good conscience without the vegan label and baggage. To wrap up this series on my adventures in vegetarianism, next time I’ll write a little about what I eat these days, and why.

If you spend any time at all in the veg*n (vegetarian and/or vegan) areas of the internet (websites, blogs, message boards), you learn the ideological territory pretty quickly. For people who recognize and take seriously the ethical problems surrounding food animal production, there are four basic possible positions to take.

First, there are two vegetarian positions (I use “vegetarian” to refer to lacto– and/or ovo-vegetarians, who do not eat animal flesh but do eat dairy and/or eggs).

A: You can be a vegetarian because you think that animals have rights against being killed.

B: You can be a vegetarian because you wish to decrease the amount of animal suffering involved in producing meat.

Second, there are two vegan positions (Vegans eat no animal foods of any kind. Strictly speaking, vegans are a subset of vegetarians, but usually “vegetarian” is used to mean non-vegan vegetarians).

C: You can be vegan because you think that animals have rights against being used for human purposes.

D: You can be vegan because you wish to decrease the amount of animal suffering involved in producing all animal foods.

(Disclaimer: I am simplifying a little here. Some people become veg*n for health or religious reasons, for example)

There are convincing arguments available for persuading type A vegetarians to change into type C vegans, and type B vegetarians into type D vegans.

On the rights-based (A & C) front, it seems ludicrous to think that whatever it is about animals which gives them rights against being killed does not also give them rights against being caused to suffer. If it is wrong to kill a cow, for instance, because cows are fairly intelligent and sensitive creatures, then it is hard to see why that same intelligence and sensitivity does not prohibit forcibly and repeatedly impregnating female cows and then separating them from their newborn calves in order to produce milk. So there is some pressure to think either that animals have a more inclusive bundle of rights or no rights at all. If you are vegetarian already because you believe animals have some rights, then on this fork you are forced to the former conclusion: that animals have more rights than you previously judged. They have rights not to be treated in ways to which they would not consent, or for human ends, or whatever. And, this more inclusive set of rights prohibits not only the consumption of animal flesh but of all animal products. Which is just to say that if you’re vegetarian because you think animals have rights, you have generally the right thought process but the wrong conclusion, and the proper conclusion to draw is actually to become vegan.

However, I never really thought that animals had rights, against being killed or anything else. By summer of 2008, I had become a type B vegetarian, or a “welfarist” vegetarian.  I was newly sensitive to the amount of suffering that is routinely inflicted upon food animals, and I disapproved of it. However, the move from welfarist vegetarianism to welfarist (type D) veganism is an even quicker one than the rights-based argument above. Basically, all you have to do is observe that the empirical facts of animal food production are such that there is at least as much suffering involved in the dairy and egg industries as there is in the meat industry. I don’t need to rehearse the particulars of this claim (just see PETA videos if you want the dirty details), but it is obviously true (if not necessarily true, at least true in the case of current animal production methods). That means that, from a welfarist perspective, dairy & eggs are at least as morally bad as meat, and you should stop eating and buying all of it.

So, after a month or two, I decided that it was not rationally defensible to be merely vegetarian on welfarist grounds, and I became vegan. I spent about 9 months eating vegan, and it was not too difficult for me. But, ultimately, I switched back to a semi-vegetarian or “flexitarian” diet. I’ll explain the reasons for that switch in the next installment of this series of posts.

Comments from veggies and non-veggies welcome :-)

Flash back to fall 2007. It was my first semester in graduate school. I was living alone and trying to be self-sufficient on a tiny budget. This meant eating all but one or two meals per week at home. And also, I didn’t know how to cook at all.

This was kind of a perfect storm, because meat is both expensive and tricky to prepare, and it resulted in a huge decrease in the amount of meat I was eating. At this point, though, I was hardly aware of my trend towards vegetarianism. In fact, I distinctly remember telling a friend sometime during that semester that I “didn’t get why people would choose to be vegetarian.”

However, by the spring of 2008, I had realized that I was becoming very nearly vegetarian, and I started eating meat only once per week and never at home. I planned to continue in that manner, except all of the sudden meat became absolutely revolting and I lost nearly all of my desire to eat it even rarely. I remember barely being able to keep some of it down.

Part of what caused me to become so disgusted by meat was that I had just adopted my first dog. In addition to being very cute and friendly, he had separation anxiety, as is pretty common amongst shelter & rescue dogs. I watched him experience full-blown panic attacks whenever I picked up my keys to leave the house. I already knew and believed the facts about factory farming conditions, but the suffering of animals was made vividly salient to me through my dog. So, I decided to be vegetarian for real by early summer 2008.

What interests me most about how this went down is that it’s a great counterexample to a commonsense understanding of moral psychology. Often, in both philosophy and just in general, we assume that people always deliberate, make value judgments and then act, and that value judgments and actions can usually or always be explained by some prior deliberation. But actually, often it’s the other way around. Your value judgments and deliberative processes can themselves be altered by ways in which you already act. This is to avoid cognitive dissonance, if I understand it correctly: the human mind generally tries to keep thoughts in coherence with actions, and that can entail adjusting either one to fit the other. In my case, this meant that I became much more receptive to philosophical arguments for vegetarianism apparently because I had already been eating that way.

In the near future, I’ll write on the next phase of my adventures in plant-based eating: the vegan period!