Day 80 – Is The Vegan Diet A Cult?

“Don’t be obsessed by the mirror. It only reflects what you want to see.”

~ Franca Sozzani

189 lbs.

In this 100 day starvation project I’ve pointed out a few things that bear repeating. There is no magic bullet. Diet isn’t something that can be reduced to a catch phrase or simple answer, it’s a complex thing. And extremes of anything are usually the wrong answer.

Moderation is the key. An extreme desire to control caloric intake can lead to anorexia. An extreme disregard for it can lead to obesity.

But what about extreme “lifestyle” diets like veganism?

Let me first say that, in general, we don’t eat enough fruits and veggies and that ideas like weekend vegetarianism resonate with me as a sensible compromise to encourage more variety in our diet. If you’re vegetarian, or vegan, that’s your choice. What sets me on edge though are the crusaders who act like they’re more “moral” than others because they choose to be vegan – when in fact many of those moral arguments are bunk.

Meat is murder, they claim, and the killing and eating of other creatures is a result of hubris and a violent desire to dominate. Some go so far as to say there are no natural predators in nature; that we have “forced” certain animals into that role. More on that later.

Lierre Keith is an author and feminist. Her website is full of links to Andrea Dwarkin’s site, Mediawatch, Stop Porn Culture, andOne Angry Girl, among others. Lierre used to be one of the people making those arguments. Maybe not the “forced predator” one but certainly the popular “meat is murder” slogan. She was a fundamentalist vegan for two decades, motivated by a desire for kindness and justice for all creatures.

“I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information,” she claims. “What [now] separates me from vegetarians isn’t ethics or commitment.  It’s information.”

She, like other hard-core vegans, parroted the talking points about how large scale growing and consumption of annual grains and plants is an altruistic, cruelty-free, sustainable activity. Not anymore.

“This misunderstanding is born of ignorance,” Lierre writes. “An ignorance that runs the length and breadth of the vegetarian myth, through the nature of agriculture and ending in the nature of life. We are urban industrialists, and we don’t know the origins of our food. This includes vegetarians, despite their claims to the truth.”

“It included me, too, for twenty years. Anyone who ate meat was in denial; only I had faced the facts. Certainly, most people who consume factory-farmed meat have never asked what died and how it died. But frankly, neither have most vegetarians.

“The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.”

After she reached this conclusion, Lierre realized there were a lot of parallels between being immersed in ultra-radical vegan culture and being in a cult.Ignore or shout down any evidence that contradicts the mantras, focus on the slogans, and anyone who disagrees with you isn’t worthy of debate; they’re the enemy.

Not all vegans are that hard core, naturally. I know a few who debate it more or less rationally and don’t judge me for my desire to eat meat.And I don’t judge them for choosing to be herbavores – though if they were eaten by a carnivore it would seem rather fitting.

But they do still bring up the moral argument that eating plants is sustainable and cruelty-free, whereas eating animals is murder. Where is the line between killing and… um… not killing… when you’re taking something that had been alive and you cook and devour it? Is it limited to things with sensory organs we recognize, like eyes? Is it limited to things that move fast enough for us to see them moving, instead of slowly turning leaves toward the sun? Does whether eating something count as exploitation or helping the planet come down to whether that something has legs? If so, let’s spitroast Aimee Mullins.

Back to that “there are no real predators” argument:

One of the key tipping points for Lierre was a conversation she witnessed among her fellow vegans that made her realize just how far-gone the extremists were. One chap proposed that vegans should not just prevent people from eating animals, but prevent other animals from eating them too. He proposed a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, dividing predators and prey. “Killing is wrong and no animals should ever have to die,” he reasoned, “so the big cats and wild canines would go on one side, while the wildebeests and zebras would live on the other.”

Wouldn’t the carnivores starve to death? Not in his world. He was one of the vegans who believes carnivores don’t need to be carnivores. That’s just meat industry propaganda. “He’d seen his dog eat grass: therefore, dogs could live on grass” Lierre recalls.”No one objected. In fact, others chimed in. My cat eats grass, too, one woman added, all enthusiasm. So does mine! someone else [said]. Everyone agreed that fencing was the solution to animal death.”

Lierre points out that the site for this liberatory project was Africa. “No one mentioned the North American prairie, where carnivores and ruminants alike have been extirpated for the  annual grains that vegetarians embrace.” And I guess any sea animal eaten by another sea animal deserved it for living in a three dimensional space not easily divided by fences.

Fed up, Lierre wrote the book The Vegetarian Myth which is not a rant against her former “cult”, but an analysis of the arguments used and arguments ignored by vegans. As an example, I’ve quoted liberally from her work below. I plan to do a full review of this book soon, so keep an eye out – whether to learn more about Lierre’s book or to tell me why you think she is wrong.

“Carnivores cannot survive on cellulose. They may on occasion eat grass, but they use it medicinally, usually as a purgative to clear their digestive tracts of parasites. Ruminants, on the other hand, have evolved to eat grass. They have a rumen (hence, ruminant), the first in a series of multiple stomachs that acts as a fermentative vat. What’s actually happening inside a cow or a zebra is that bacteria eat the grass, and the animals eat the bacteria.

“Lions and hyenas and humans don’t have a ruminant’s digestive system. Literally from our teeth to our rectums we are designed for meat. We have no mechanism to digest cellulose.

“So on the carnivore side of the fence, starvation will take every animal. Some will last longer than others, and those some will end their days as cannibals. The scavengers will have a Fat Tuesday party, but when the bones are picked clean, they’ll starve as well. The graveyard won’t end there. Without grazers to eat the grass, the land will eventually turn to desert.

“Why? Because without grazers to literally level the playing field, the perennial plants mature, and shade out the basal growth point at the plant’s base. In a brittle environment like the Serengeti, decay is mostly physical (weathering) and chemical (oxidative), not bacterial and biological as in a moist environment. In fact, the ruminants take over most of the biological functions of soil by digesting the cellulose and returning the nutrients, once again available, in the form of urine and feces.

“But without ruminants, the plant matter will pile up, reducing growth, and begin killing the plants. The bare earth is now exposed to wind, sun, and rain, the minerals leech away, and the soil structure is destroyed. In our attempt to save animals, we’ve killed everything.

“On the ruminant side of the fence, the wildebeests and friends will reproduce as effectively as ever. But without the check of predators, there will quickly be more grazers than grass. The animals will outstrip their food source, eat the plants down to the ground, and then starve to death, leaving behind a seriously degraded landscape.

“The lesson here is obvious, though it is profound enough to inspire a religion: we need to be eaten as much as we need to eat. The grazers need their daily cellulose, but the grass also needs the animals. It needs the manure, with its nitrogen, minerals, and bacteria; it needs the mechanical check of grazing activity; and it needs the resources stored in animal bodies and freed up by degraders when animals die.

“The grass and the grazers need each other as much as predators and prey. These are not one-way relationships, not arrangements of dominance and subordination. We aren’t exploiting each other by eating. We are only taking turns.”