Book Review: The Vegetarian Myth

When Lierre Keith, author of a book called The Vegetarian Myth, got up to speak at the 2010 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, she got three pies in her face, and via the pies she got red hot sauce and cayenne in her eyes. It is generally assumed that the perpetrators of this attack were vegans who objected to the anti-vegetarian stance she takes in the book. Since they were masked and anonymous, I don't know for a fact that they were vegans (and I wonder if the pies themselves were even vegan?) but if so, they weren't doing their own image any favors, as throwing cayenne-laced pie in someone's face only adds fuel to the argument Keith puts forth in her book that a vegan diet causes mental unbalance and rage. And it's just seriously uncool to do something like that to anyone. Especially when it's for expressing a viewpoint.

Not to say that I think The Vegetarian Myth is above criticism. In fact, I think it begs for it. I've been a vegetarian for 20 years, all of my adult life, and I was curious about the case Lierre Keith wanted to make against my choice, so I read her book. She claims to have been vegan for 20 years before she renounced the diet, although she you can find a radio interview online where she states she binged on eggs and dairy during that time "every chance she got." So I don't think she was actually vegan. I admittedly occasionally binge on eggs and dairy too, but a lot less frequently than "every chance I get," and that's why I call myself vegetarian and not vegan.

I'm not a nutrition expert so I'm not going to write a detailed post challenging all the ways Keith claims a vegetarian diet is unnatural and unhealthy. All I can do is apply my own personal experience. When Keith asks her vegetarian readers if they feel sick after they eat, it seems like she means it as a rhetorical question to prove her point. But the truth is I virtually never feel sick after I eat. As the only vegetarian in an office of omnivores I may have been the only one who never called in sick from food poisioning.

Anyway, there's already quite a bit of material online debunking, or at least seriously putting into question, a lot of the information in Keith's book. My favorites of what I've found so far are http://www.compassionatespirit.com/Keith-Blog/2010-12-28.htm and http://www.theveganrd.com/2010/09/review-of-the-vegetarian-myth.html.

So, much of the criticism I have of The Vegetarian Myth has already been covered elsewhere, and I feel no need to be redundant. But there are a just a couple of things I'd like to address that I haven't yet seen anyone else challenge. For one thing, she claims that Asian monks eat soy because it dampens their libido and helps them keep their celibacy vows. Huh? I did a double take at the page at this point, because I've never heard of such a thing before, and frankly I think it sounds a little crazy. She does not include any kind of footnote to point the reader to the source of this claim, which is odd because she has pages and pages of endnotes.

So I went Web searching and I found Web sites that make the same claim, but so far I've found it only on sites whose purpose in life seems to be anti-soy. And again, I can't figure out what they are using as a source for this. It is possible that the claim originates with the Weston Price foundation, which Lierre Keith has an affiliation with, but again, it's unclear to me where and how they got their information. But even if it is true that Asian monks ever consumed soy for this reason, that doesn't necessarily mean the notion is scientifically sound. Tiger members may not actually be particularly useful as aphrodisiacs, either.

Imagine all the implications if soy did indeed have this property. It is a little reminiscent of an Internet meme from a few years back warning that consuming soy would make men gay, but of course that is not the same thing as killing their sex drive. Like, at all. I'd love more information about someone who knows more about this stuff than I do about this monk-soy-celibacy rumor, because I am currently not buying it.

The other argument Keith makes that I feel I can personally refute is that soy consumption causes memory problems. Since she makes a lot of this argument based on anecdotal personal experience (and admits this), I feel I can draw on my own personal experience to make a case against her argument. She says she's known a lot of vegans with big memory problems. I believe her. I've known a lot of humans with big memory problems, and some of them have surely been vegan. As for myself, I do eat a good amount of soy and I seem to have a much better-than-average memory. Not a supergenius photographic memory where I can precisely quote everything I'd read in my entire life, but I do seem to remember a lot more than most of the people around me. It's actually embarassing sometimes. I wish I remembered less, because not everything is that fun to remember.

Keith tells us about a woman who invites her to dinner and then doesn't remember issuing the invitation (or, apparently, who Keith is) until Keith, as instructed, calls her the day before the supposed planned dinner. When she does go to the woman's house, there is no dinner prepared and she is only offered tea and soymilk (the woman only has soymilk on hand, she explains, because she's vegan). And then suddenly after offering the soymilk she remembers why she invited Lierre over. "Is is true soy causes memory problems?" she asks.

Keith uses this anecdote to illustrate that soy likely does, in fact, cause memory problems, but when I read this section of the book I had to wonder if Keith had been the victim of an elaborate prank. I don't know why anyone would do that, but I don't know why anyone would throw cayenne-laced pies in her face, either.

There are many more arguments and holes in arguments in The Vegetarian Myth that I could address, but as I said, most of the points I would make have already been made by others. Nobody would want to read the post if it were that long, anyway. To Keith's credit, she does believe that animals deserve compassion and is against factory farming. I find this refreshing, as a ban on foie gras just came into effect in California, and I've been seeing/hearing a lot of complaints from "foodies" in the vein of "I didn't get to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian" and "humans > ducks." These are the attitudes I find truly obnoxious. In my opinion, every human, vegetarian or not, who takes the idea of treating animals humanely seriously, and not just for our own benefit and pleasure, is a step forward for the human race.