My friend thought that Keith had "some great insights", and, having read Keith's book, she was "looking forward to the next discussion with some miserable vegan/vegetarian permaculturist".
The Vegetarian Myth sounded like an interesting book to me, because I'm more than passingly interested in both agriculture and vegetarianism. In fact, I have a degree in agricultural science, and I was (until a few years ago) vegetarian for more than ten years.
(I returned to eating meat after witnessing a shockingly wasteful kangaroo cull on a grazing property in rural New South Wales, Australia. The cull left dozens of perfectly edible kangaroos to rot on the ground - a horrible irony which is apparently lost on almost all Australian graziers and meat eaters. But that's another story).
I had absolutely no idea what Lierre Keith's agenda was, but when my friend cheerfully lumped all vegans and vegetarians together as miserable, I had a moment of puzzlement that, in retrospect, should have been a red flag.
It turns out that Lierre Keith consistently uses patronizing and derogatory language to describe vegetarians and vegans. In her words they are, for example: ignorant, zoned out, pleading, defensive, disgusting, smug and self-satisfied, not to mention skeletal and emaciated.
Oh ... and did I mention that Keith thinks vegetarians are ignorant? I did? Well let me mention it again, because Keith herself mentions the ignorance of vegetarians more than a dozen times in The Vegetarian Myth (I happen to know this for a fact because I'm pedantic, and I did a word search using Google books).
Considering Lierre Keith's constant harping about the ignorance of vegetarians, I was bowled over by The Vegetarian Myth's stupendous factual inaccuracy. I'm not just complaining because I dislike The Vegetarian Myth (although I do dislike it, heartily). Rather, I'm stating categorically that much of what Lierre Keith claims in her book is simply untrue. And a lot of the rest is hopelessly biased (for instance, she unquestioningly presents emotive and inaccurate information about veganism, even when that information is sponsored by the Cattleman's Beef Association - an organisation with a clear
In fact, so much of The Vegetarian Myth is flat-out wrong that I couldn't possibly cover the book's major flaws in one blog post - hence this entire blog, which is dedicated to busting Lierre Keith's myths.
A few of my friends have already expressed a concern that I'm wasting too much precious time and energy on mythbusting The Vegetarian Myth. Thanks for your concern, everyone, but don't worry! The truth is important to me, and I'm more than happy to spend some of my free time defending it.
