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

The Vegetarian Myth is one of the most important books people, masses of them, can read, as we try with all our might, intelligence, skill, hope, dream and memory, to turn the disastrous course the planet is on. Its a wonderful book, full of thoughtful, soulful teachings, and appropriate rage.

Alice Walker

Anyone who has ever read a book on writing has come across the hackneyed piece of advice to cut open a vein and bleed on the page. Lierre Keith has come closer to literally doing that than almost any writer Ive ever read. Not only does her passion for her subject bleed through in almost every sentence, she is a superb lyrical prose stylist. My book is dog eared, underlined and annotated from front to back I cant remember anything Ive read that has contained so many terrific lines.

And if you have or know anyone with a daughter who is contemplating going vegetarian, please make this book available. It could be the most important thing you ever do for the long-term mental and physical health of a young woman.

Dr. Michael Eades, author of Protein Power and The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle

This book saved my life. Not only does The Vegetarian Myth make clear how we should be eating, but also how the dominant food system is killing the planet. This necessary book challenges many of the destructive myths we live by and offers us a way back into our bodies, and back into the fight to save the planet.

Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame and A Language Older Than Words

Everyone interested in healthy eating should be grateful to Lierre Keith. Her book will help many seekers to avoid the lesson she had to learn through bitter experience.

Sally Fallon Morell, President, The Weston A. Price Foundation

What I thought would be a book filled with disgruntled accounts of a has-been vegetarian justifying the excuse to pig out on double cheeseburgers again, was actually a well-researched, statistically sound discussion of agriculture and its effects on land, society, animals, and the relationship between all three. For those who insist on one way versus another, The Vegetarian Myth presents us with enough information to wisely weigh whatever we choose to put on our plates.

Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, FeministReview.org

Lierre Keith has written a compelling tale of her own near self-destruction from a vegan diet and a broadside against its being perpetrated upon or adopted by any other victims. She has converted 20 years of pain and suffering, and permanent damage to her health into a galvanizing passion to demolish the myth that she believes underpins the worldview of most who adopt vegan diet: I want to eat without killing. You cant, she says, and if you try youll die.

Keith has transmuted her anger and seasoned it well with a self-reflective humor that sweeps us along this road to recovery from a scorched earth. As I read her description of her first meat meal in 20 years (a can of tuna eaten reluctantly with a plastic fork), I found myself in tears. Ten years recovering from a quarter century of vegetarian folly myself, I knew the shattering epiphany she experienced with that first bitecoming home to the truth of her body, and of life itself.

Peter Bane, Permaculture Activist

Everyone who eats should read this book. Everyone who eats vegetarian should memorize it. This is the single most important book Ive ever read on diet, agriculture, and ecology. And as a farmer and ex-vegan, thats saying a lot. Aric McBay, author of What We Leave Behind and Peak Oil Survival

The Vegetarian Myth puts together in coherent and passionate form all the arguments about meat and agriculture that have been running around in my head for fifteen years. Its not easy to transmute outrage and pain into something so full of love and wonder, but Lierre Keith has done it beautifully.
Toby Hemenway, author of Gaias Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Also by Lierre Keith:

Conditions of War

Skyler Gabriel

Deep Green Resistance
(with Aric McBay and Derrick Jensen)

Also from Flashpoint Press:

Resistance Against Empire
Interviews by Derrick Jensen

Mischief in the Forest
A graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan

Now This War Has Two Sides
A spoken word CD set by Derrick Jensen

Lives Less Valuable
A novel by Derrick Jensen

Songs of the Dead
A novel by Derrick Jensen

How Shall I Live My Life?
Interviews by Derrick Jensen

The Day Philosophy Died
A Novel by Casey Maddox

To Annemarie Monahan, one of my favourite animals,
and
in memory of Terry Lotz.

Copyright 2009 by Lierre Keith

A Flashpoint Press Sixth Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Flashpoint Press

PO Box 903

Crescent City, CA 95531
www.flashpointpress.com

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org

Library of Congress Control Number:
2009921671

Book design by Aric McBay

Printed in the USA on recycled paper

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This was not an easy book to write . For many of you, it wont be an easy book to read. I know. I was a vegan for almost twenty years. I know the reasons that compelled me to embrace an extreme diet and they are honorable, ennobling even. Reasons like justice, compassion, a desperate and all-encompassing longing to set the world right. To save the planetthe last trees bearing witness to ages, the scraps of wilderness still nurturing fading species, silent in their fur and feathers. To protect the vulnerable, the voiceless. To feed the hungry. At the very least to refrain from participating in the horror of factory farming.

These political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it. I want my lifemy bodyto be a place where the earth is cherished, not devoured; where the sadist is granted no quarter; where the violence stops. And I want eatingthe first nurturanceto be an act that sustains instead of kills.

This book is written to further those passions, that hunger. It is not an attempt to mock the concept of animal rights or to sneer at the people who want a gentler world. Instead, this book is an effort to honor our deepest longings for a just world. And those longings for compassion, for sustainability, for an equitable distribution of resourcesare not served by the philosophy or practice of vegetarianism. We have been led astray. The vegetarian Pied Pipers have the best of intentions. Ill state right now what Ill be repeating later: everything they say about factory farming is true. It is cruel, wasteful, and destructive. Nothing in this book is meant to excuse or promote the practices of industrial food production on any level.