The Vegetarian Myth

Ever since reading John Robbins' The Food Revolution, I have had a deep interest in the relationship between diet, human health, and the health of the planet. Although never going so far as to disavow meat eating completely, I replaced my cow's milk with soy milk, grilled tofu instead of chicken, and swore off factory-farmed meat for good, content that my diet was now in line with my desire for a long, healthy life and a healthy environment.

The notion that plant-based diets are healthier, more humane, and more sustainable than meat-based diets is bolstered by a wealth of statistics so widely cited as to seem almost undeniable. For instance, the fact that it takes more water to produce one pound of beef than one pound of grain would suggest that eating beef is wasteful in an era of diminishing fresh water supplies. And what's more, couldn't all of the grain going to feed livestock instead be used to feed starving people in the developing world? Not to mention all of those pesky waste products and methane gas emissions from animals backsides that are polluting our waterways and changing our climate. Most of all, as anyone who has read a description—or, god forbid, seen footage—of the inside of a slaughter house can readily attest (see Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals), industrial meat production is far from humane, if not unremittingly cruel.

CAFO's, rainforest destruction, hormones, antibiotics, overgrazing, E. coli 0157:H7, mad cow disease, salmonella, obesity, heart disease, colon cancer, diabetes—the indictments of the Standard American Diet (SAD) are extensive, and hardly contestable. Knowing all of this, I approached Lierre Keith's book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (PM Press, 2009), with trepidation and lots of skepticism, certain there was no way anyone claiming to care about "justice" or "sustainability" could argue in favor of eating meat.

The "vegetarian myth," as Keith terms it, largely consists of different variations of the arguments cited above, which she breaks down into three main vegetarian rationales: moral vegetarianism (killing animals is wrong), political vegetarianism (eating meat is socially unjust and unsustainable), and nutritional vegetarianism (eating meat is unhealthy). Putting aside the fact that Keith's arguments are directed more towards radical vegans than vegetarians, her attempt to provide "a full accounting, an accounting that goes way beyond what's dead on your plate" (p.3) is relevant to people of all dietary persuasions, and vital for anyone concerned about the impact their food has on the world.

Being inclined to agree with the political vegetarians, whose qualms with meat eating are summed up nicely by Jim Motavalli's question, "So you're an environmentalist? Why are you still eating meat?", I was eager to see how Keith attempted to untangle the web connecting industrial meat production to global resource depletion, famine, and environmental destruction. In fact, she attempts no such thing. "My first argument against the political vegetarians isn't an argument at all: it's an agreement," she writes. "Factory farming is a nightmare from every angle: ethically, ecologically, nutritionally." (p. 99)

But then again, so is agriculture, an activity "more like war than anything else." (p.36) The problem with political vegetarians, according to Keith, is that the diet they regard as more earth-friendly is based on annual grains—monocrops of corn, soy, rice, and wheat—that "require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil." (p.100) If everyone were to adopt the conventional vegetarian diet trumpeted by good-natured environmentalists like Motavalli and Robbins, then "everyone in a cold, hot, wet, or dry climate would have to be dependent on the American Midwest, with its devastated prairies and ghostly Limberlost, and its ever shrinking soil, rivers, and aquifers." A truly just and sustainable food system would depend on enhancing biodiversity, not destroying it. It would also be local. She counters Motavalli with her own radical question: "So you're an environmentalist: Why are you still eating outside your bio-region?" (p.102)

The concept of a local food system, or a "foodshed," is central to Keith's argument against the supposed greater sustainability of vegetarianism. Living in the Rocky Mountains of the American West, I am well aware of the miles my food has to travel to reach my plate. The growing season here is abysmally short, and must be supplemented by the drawdown of groundwater supplies, an ecological subsidy that probably won't outlast the current century. When I eat wheat, I am eating the soil of devastated grasslands at least 600 miles away, and if I were still residing in Japan, a country which imports nearly 60% of its food (mostly wheat, corn and soy from the American Midwest), that distance would be absurdly higher. But bison, antelope, elk—the wild foragers native to my bio-region—are able to transform inedible cellulose into edible meat. To truly eat sustainably, and to support increased bio-diversity and the health of my landbase, would I not be better off eating a grass-fed bison steak than tofu grown, harvested, processed, packaged and shipped from thousands of miles away?

According to Keith, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

To the argument that the grain used to feed one cow could instead feed fifty hungry people, Keith reminds us that ruminants, like cows and other grazers, aren't supposed to be eating grain, but grass. And when it is grass, not grain, that cows are eating, the ratios of water use shift dramatically, from 2,500 pounds to 60 pounds of water per pound of meat. And she is quick to add that "an antelope, a buffalo, a bighorn sheep, a zebra, or a camel would be better suited to those biotic communities—and the water per calorie and water per nutrient ratio would further outstrip wheat." (p. 102-103)

Ultimately, while Keith's arguments for both the morality and nutritional viability of eating meat are going to have different significances for different readers, at the core of her book is a plea for a new, radical food philosophy that places importance on local, ecologically diverse systems—"perennial polycultures"—rather than on annual monocrops. "The absolute bottom line is: what methods of food production build topsoil while using only ambient sun and rain? Because nothing else is sustainable." (p.126) The failure of modern food ideologies is that they are adopted by "food-consuming industrial producers in urban areas" who are ignorant about "where our food comes from, what its necessary inputs are, and what toll it's taking on the landbase." (p. 122)

Although vegetarianism presents itself as a ready antidote to the destruction wrought by our diets, so long as it remains based on annual monocrops—and thus on the ecosystems it invades and the oil and water it consumes—it is not enough. Of course, to those who eat industrial meat, I will continue to preach the values of giving it up, especially if they call themselves "environmentalists." But if there is anything to be taken from reading The Vegetarian Myth,it is this plea to know more, to not settle for industrial agriculture—"the foods of displacement and destruction"—over industrial meat, and to eat what can be produced from your own particular foodshed on an annual solar income. As Keith writes, "What grows where you live? Ask it, and you'll see. To answer, you will have to know the place you live." (p.56) This is a formidable challenge to a generation as alienated from our resident ecosystems as we are. But it is also unavoidable. Whether you choose to eat meat or not, it's hard not to agree with Keith that "what grows where you live?" could indeed be one small question that could save the world. (p.57)