Starting Your Essay: Some Suggestions
US Obesity Epidemic: More Than 35%
Growing Paleo Fad (cavemen lived to 35)
Backlash Against the Paleo Diet
Summarize Claims and Possible False Promises of the Caveman Diet
Summarize Pros and Cons of the Paleo Diet
Summarize the Warnings Issued Against the Vegan Diet
Briefly Summarize LK's book
Write a personal narrative that shows how food defines us and is linked to shame and belonging (a theme evident in LK's book)
Sample Intro and Thesis
I was six years old and trying to tell myself that everything was okay as I walked with three boys to KR Smith Elementary in San Jose, CA. Normally, a Hostess apple pie or cupcake created anticipation for lunch, but not today because the smell of rotten tuna wafting from my Captain Kangaroo lunch box was so strong my companions kept nagging me to explain what the hell the horrible smell was. Finally, I relented and stopped in a field and to appease their curiosity I opened the lunch box and the rotten tuna sandwich, slimy and mixed with the mayonnaise, had escaped its plastic baggie and had splattered throughout the insides of the tin pail. The boys and I gaped at the impossibly malodorous, black tuna juices, black ink streaks and odious chunks smeared all over the pail's lining like an exploded brain. The rancid tuna had splattered over my apple, my orange, my Hostess pie, and whatever else Mother had put inside for me that day.
"How could you eat that?" one of the boys asked and I shrugged. I assumed I had no choice. It was my lunch after all. So I closed the lunch box and we continued our way to school where I put my lunch box alongside everyone else’s in the designated coat closet.
During class, Mrs. Corey sniffed along with the other students as everyone tried to detect the source of a hellish stench. Crinkling her forehead and flaring her nostrils, she demanded to know if someone had soiled their pants or if someone had brought a dead creature into her classroom. All of the students were squeezing their noses and making mock gagging noises. It was clear Mrs. Corey could not teach until the matter of the rancid fish smell had been solved.
The boys I had walked to school with pointed at my offending lunch box upon which Mrs. Corey walked cautiously toward it, as if approaching a landmine. She slowly opened the box and stared at its contents as if witnessing an abomination from the bowels of hell. Then looking at me, she said, “Did your mom pack this?”
I nodded and Mrs. Corey winced in a way that seemed to castigate my parents, my extended family, and my ancient ancestors. With a sour expression, she then closed the lunch box, gave it to the teacher aid to place outside, and announced to the class that my food was unfit for eating and that she needed volunteers to take one thing out of their lunch and give it to me so that I would have something to eat during lunchtime.
During the lunch break, I was too mortified and ashamed to have an appetite and I remained on my blanket while avoiding the odd stares from my classmates.
This was my first lesson in the power of food to bring shame when that food is deemed rotten or immoral or unhealthy. Indeed, author Lierre Keith has a lot of experience with shame, which she has tried to work out as a vegan ideologue and now as a champion of Paleo carnivore eating. Unfortunately, her emotions have misguided her in many ways, for while Lierre Keith is correct that many aspects of veganism can be unhealthy and harmful to the environment, her overall thesis that vegetarianism is a "myth" and is inferior to a Paleo-style meat-eating diet is too mired in egregious flaws and logical fallacies to be a worthy "meat-eating manifesto." Her first flaw is that she takes the very worst vegan habits and uses these misguided vegans as being representative of veganism as a whole. Another flaw is the book's over simplification in which Keith promotes the Paleo diet as the greatest in achieving health benefits when in fact any diet, either meat-eating or vegetarian, makes people mindful of what they eat, generating less calorie consumption, less processed food consumption, and, inevitably, healthy results. A related flaw is Keith's assumption that any diet can be a One Size Fits All Panacea that can be imposed on the entire human race. Some may flourish on a vegan diet; others may not and the same applies to the Paleo diet. Yet another flaw that makes Keith's book unworthy of manifesto status is the laughable impracticality of her wanting to feed our overpopulated planet in the primitive way of hunters and gatherers. While organic, farm-raised meat might be good for the rich and privileged, it is not realistic to think we can distribute this kind of boutique-style, "all-organic" animal protein world-wide, rendering her half-baked Paleo "vision" naive, starry-eyed and utterly preposterous.
Paleo Research Links: Studies About Its Effects on Human Health
Refutation of Paleo Diet (Forks Over Knives)
More Questioning of the China Study
Common Arguments in Support of the Vegetarian’s Position
1. Meat eating diet is based on backward cultural traditions that some vegetarians equate with slavery. This is controversial. Many are offended by the analogy.
2. We’re not obligate carnivores like some animals. We can choose to eat in ways that don’t result in cruelty to animals. This is controversial. Many argue that our evolution and optimum health are based on killing and eating meat.
3. Animals are sentient, which means they feel and suffer. It’s our moral duty to minimize suffering in the world. The controversy here is that plants may be conscious. Where do we draw the line? Can’t we kill a rat that is in our baby’s room?
4. Raising plant protein is more efficient than raising animal protein. This is controversial. Some studies show that plowing fields for agriculture result in killing the native wildlife.
5. Raising animal protein creates far more pollution and devastation to the environment than does raising plant protein. I haven’t seen any arguments to refute this.
Part Three. Common Arguments Against the Vegetarian Position
1. Humans have a biological, evolutionary, nutritional dependence on some animal protein and fat according to many, including Nina Plank, author of "Death by Veganism."
2. To help the environment, the issue isn’t meat or plants; it’s what is local. See Amazon review of The Face on Your Plate by Ted Kerasote.
3. Bovine animals are often still alive while jungle cats eat their entrails. Eating and being eaten are part of the necessary cycle of nature, cruelty not withstanding. This is controversial. The jungle cat acts on instinct. We have choices to not be cruel and two wrongs don’t make a right.
4. Agriculture devastates the environment more than hunting, but not factory farming. The problem is that hunting can not feed the world population, only factory farming can.
5. We’re dependent on animal products beyond food: glue, gel capsules, leather clothes, furniture, etc. Where do we draw the line?
Part Four. Another Argument in Favor of Vegetarianism: The Preservation of Our Soul.
1. Brutality against animals coarsens (toughens) our soul and in some ways encourages sadism.
2. Greed affects our ill treatment of animals: To cheapen production costs, we torture and mutilate animals. Vegetarianism isn't the exclusive realm of some liberal fringe, some Southern California "lifestyle elitists." See the essay“Fear Factories” by Matthew Scully. And see George F. Will’s essay “What We Owe What We Eat.”
3. To treat animals as we do for our benefit, we kill our empathy through willed ignorance and this kills the core of our humanity.
Sample Thesis That Counter-argues common arguments in favor of vegetarianism.
While the vegetarian argument is built on noble aspirations and makes a convincing case for reforming the cruelties and abominations that take place on factory farms, the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. First, we must consider we have evolved into omnivores and as such we have a biological/evolutionary need for some animal protein; second, we must consider that there is an abundance of evidence that points to malnutrition and even death that infants suffer who are forced by their parents to eat a vegan diet; third, we must consider there is a strong link between the vegetarian diet and obesity and related metabolic syndrome as a result of relying too much on agricultural, carbohydrate-laden foods.
Sample Thesis That Counter-argues an Anti-Vegetarian Position
While I concede that there are many advantages to a meat-eating diet, these advantages are off-set by several factors, which include the inevitable cruelty that animals suffer as we try to feed a world of billions of people; the environmental devastation that occurs when we reserve the Earth’s land for grazing livestock animals; the environmental damage that occurs from the animal waste that cannot be adequately refined at factory farms; and the myriad of diseases that are spread from farm factory animals.
A Third Example
The brilliant lecturer Jeff McMahon has apprised us of the intractable conflict between the dangers of the vegetarian diet and indiscriminate meat eating as he successfully shows that the only solution to this conflict is to eat organic, sustainable animal protein. Such an eating program is the only viable way to eat because _____________, _________________, _______________, and ___________________.
Thesis 4
Is McMahon "brilliant"? Balderdash. His argument for killing animals in an "organic setting" rests on so many illusions that he has been stripped of any intellectual credibility. His illusions are too numerous to cover in their entirety, but we can begin by focusing on McMahon's most egregious critical thinking lapses, which include the fact that it is impossible to feed the world with the organic process; _________________, ______________, _________________, and _____________________.
Part Two: Common Ground and Differences for Vegetarians and Caveman (Paleo) Dieters Alike:
A processed food diet, especially one consisting of the Evil White Five, white sugar, white flour, white potatoes, white pasta, and white rice, leads to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other health ailments.
The disagreement is over the eating of meat for optimum health.
Caveman Dieters would further agree with vegetarians that factory meat is high in disease and if one is to eat meat it should be organic and prepared in a way that meats the higher standards of cleanliness, presumably, from the organic methods.
Caveman Dieters would also agree that the treatment of animals in mass factory slaughterhouses is unethical and morally reprehensible. They would argue, however, that organic, quick killing is humane and a natural part of the Food Chain.
However, caveman dieters, such as followers of Weston A. Price, would argue that animal protein results in optimum nutrition while a vegetarian, especially vegan, diet results in malnourishment.
Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, is a former vegan who argues the health risks of a vegan diet and for the superior nutrition from an organic-based animal protein diet.
Vegans who were once her friend and ally look at her as a betrayer, a Judas, and she has had death threats and other hostility come her way since leaving the Vegan Tribe.
Part Three. Study Questions, Part One
One. What were Keith’s motivations to become a vegan and how did her good intentions blind her? She wanted eating to sustain, not kill. She warred against patriarchy, dominance, oppression, sexism, imperialism, industrialization, sadism.
Keith makes it clear she does not want to mock animal rights.
But she says the Vegetarian Pied Piper led her and her vegetarian brothers and sisters off the cliff with good, honest intentions.
She makes it clear that her meat eating argument is not a defense of industrialized meat business.
She is against factory farming, which feeds grain to animals and animals are not supposed to eat grain.
Two. Keith claims that vegetarians, like others, are ignorant of our food origins. Explain.
She argues that agriculture, the source of the vegetarian diet, is destructive.
To explore the Vegetarian Myth, we must, she argues, explore the devastation of agriculture.
There is as much death, perhaps more, in a serving of fruit salad or soybeans, than a steak. Why? Because the killing of topsoil to harvest fruits and soy kills natural living things, including animals.
The hunter-gatherers, pre-agriculture peoples, were healthy while post-agricultural peoples fell to all sorts of disease brought on my agriculture.
Agriculture creates binge foods like cereals. We binge on carbs. We don’t binge on meats. Grains give us a “happy chemical hit.”
Agriculture creates monocrops, which destroy topsoil, wetlands, riparian systems resulting in landslides and extinction of wetland animals.
Rice, wheat, corn are so “thirsty” they drain us of water and can “drink whole rivers,” not good in an age of drought.
Agriculture cannot be sustained on two-thirds of the earth’s land.
Three. To awaken people out of the Vegetarian Myth, Keith summons the Mayan term kas-limaal, the pursuit of adult knowledge, which is our interdependence and inevitable sacrifice: some die that others live. We need the grazers, the bovine creatures, to eat the grass and level earth so earth doesn’t become a desert but we need carnivores to control the bovine creatures.
“We need to be eaten as much as we need to eat.”
For Keith, her first bite of meat after twenty years of being a vegan, was her awakening to the kas-limaal or adult knowledge.
In Japan there is a saying, Itadakimasu, meaning “We receive lives from others” or “We humbly receive this food, which comes from other life.” It acknowledges the life-death cycle.
Four. What absurdities does Keith point out in the vegan community?
Carnivores don’t need to be carnivores. Make your dog a veggie and he will die, or your cat.
Separate carnivores from bovine creatures. Really? How?
Vegans deny the nature of animals, that they kill and eat and that their actions are amoral. Vegans try to impose, erroneously, morality on the act of survival and the cycle of nature.
“I realized then that people so deeply ignorant of the nature of life, with its mineral cycle and carbon trade, its balance points around an ancient circle of producers . . . weren’t going to be able to guide me. . .
They remained ignorant and in their cute, anthropomorphic world of cuddly animals and could never have adult knowledge.
Vegans rely on over simplistic sound bites: “Meat is murder.”
“I won’t eat anything that has a mother or a face.”
Let’s not kill anything by becoming breatharians.
Five. What does Keith say to support the claim that humans are designed for meat? Like lions and hyenas, we don’t have a ruminant’s digestive system to gain nutrients from grass. “We have no mechanism to digest cellulose.”
She’s very blunt in saying that a vegan diet will damage you. And this must be at the heart of your research paper. Is this a true claim?
Keith suffered from spine damage, hypoglycemia, exhaustion, dry skin, gastroparesis, depression, anxiety.
She wasn’t getting serotonin from the amino acid tryptophan, which comes from animal protein.
She wasn’t getting saturated fat, which helps in assimilation of nutrients.
Six. What’s the myth of the apple? That it’s a natural sweet fruit. But it wasn’t originally. It was domesticated. They’re grafted, not sprouted.
“Natural” food doesn’t exist in nature, as some vegans would tell you.
An apple is not vegetarian. It grows with soil fertilized by animal blood, bone meal.
In other words, plants eat animals. This is part of kas-limaal.
Seven. What flaw is veganism and the AR movement based on? That we can eat without killing. This is the groundwork of the “vegetarian myth.” Every living thing kills in order to survive. She points out that chickens eat everything, including baby chicks.
Ironically, it’s only when we accept death as part of the eating cycle that we truly respect other creatures. A culture of denial, denying the necessity of death for life, cannot respect the living.
She writes, “Nature provides many things, but a clear-cut moral code for human concourse is not one of them.”
LK is not defending mass slaughterhouses and the inhumane treatment of animals that exists in factory farming; she herself eats her own slaughtered animals from farms, not a practical way to eat meat for the masses, to be sure.
Eight. What is the arbitrariness of the Sentience Argument? Vegans argue we shouldn’t kill sentient beings, creatures who can feel pain. But where do we stop? Rats, snails, cockroaches? What about plants? How do we prove what can feel?
I personally feel less remorse from eating a fish than eating a cow or a dog. My sentiments are arbitrary perhaps?
Nine. Where does LK agree with vegans? “Factory farming is a nightmare, from every angle: ethically, ecologically, nutritionally.” The animals are tortured.
She also agrees with vegans that grain-feeding cattle is a waste of resources; however, she believes in grass-feeding.
Ten. What is the vegetarian myth?
It’s a collection of myths.
One, that we can have life without death.
Two, that we can have “vegetarian” crops without death (fossil manure).
Three, that plants show no sentience.
Four, that the eating cycle is moral when in fact it is amoral.
Five, that monocrops that yield vegetarian foods like soy are good for the planet when in fact they devastate wetland and other animals.
Six, that a vegan diet is healthy when in fact it kills most people.
Seven, that humans are not meant for meat eating.
Eight, that grains are healthy and natural when in fact they are processed and man-made and addictive, harsh on the intestines, and cause diabetes. Read Wheat Belly by William Davis.
Nine. She dismantles the Lipid Hypothesis, that heart disease is from eating animal fats and we should eat a low-fat diet. See Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.
The healthiest diets in the world are the Japanese and Mediterranean diets neither of which are vegetarian.
Ten. That “whole grain” is healthy. It’s really pulverized, processed grain.
Eleven. That soy is a healthier substitute for protein than animal sources.
These claims, their validity or lack thereof, should be addressed in your essay.
Eleven. What specific damage results from eating grain?
Grain is starch and sugars, which overload the intestines. These sugars arrive undigested in the colon, creating a “bacterial picnic.” This results in inflammation and impairs proper digestion and absorption. She further explains the role of lectins and celiac disease.
Twelve. What are the dangers of soy? (LK used Kaayla Davis’s The Whole Soy Story as a major source)
Bloating
Gas
Goitrogon, change of thyroid, thyroid disease
Hormonal disruption
Women’s menstrual cycle disruption
Endometrioses
Low sperm count
Accelerated aging
Loss of memory
Baby hormone development damaged
Birth defects
Soy is an industrial waste product with an 80 million dollar ad campaign behind it.
In Okinawa, the people eat fermented soy that is not processed by Dupont and it is not as dangerous.
Here's a blog against Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth.
And here's a blog that claims there are fallacies that support vegetarianism.
Common logical fallacies to avoid.
A Thesis and Essay Outline in Opposition to the Vegetarian Diet
While I concede that there is way too much mindless cruelty in the factory farming of animals, we must not obfuscate the truth, namely, that the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. The omnivore diet, which includes meat eating, is defensible from an evolutionary, biological, and nutritional point of view.
Essay’s First Page
Summarize the book’s major arguments
Essay’s Second Page
If after reading the book, you are not convinced that you should “convert” to vegetarianism or veganism, you may want to defend an omnivore diet. To write a defense of the omnivore diet (which includes meat eating), one would have to concede that the current system of factory farming needs reform and that the system is changed. Also one would concede that people eat too much meat but that the solution is not the elimination of meat eating but the reduction of it. One will cut down from the national average of meat consumption (200 pounds) to approximately one-third of that (70 pounds). One would concede that that 70 pounds of meat would be as organic and sustainable as much as possible even at the higher costs. This section would take about a page.
Essay’s Final Four Pages In Which You Support Your Thesis Mapping Statements
You would have to argue that the vegan diet is not optimum nutrition and may even be dangerous, especially for pregnant woman and newborns. You might look to Nina Planck in her New York Times article or her book Real Food. Or you might look to Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth or her book excerpt from her website.
Other Sources That Challenge the Vegan/Vegetarian Diet
Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
How Our Vegan Diet Made Us Ill
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