As El Camino complies with accreditation process, we must have two hard copies of your final paper. The accreditation team will be randomly reading 1A essays from ALL instructors because 1A is a "core class."
Therefore, DO NOT EMAIL ME YOUR FINAL ESSAY. I WILL NEED 2, YES 2, COPIES.
If you don't turn in 2 hard copies, I won't be able to give you any credit for the last essay, so please take note of this.
Community Colleges throughout the state of California must provide English 1A Final Research Papers to Accreditation Team (people off campus) who randomly read essays to see if grade reflects consistent standards.
Final Essay Worth 280 Points (28% of Your Semester Grade), Essay 4: The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith:
Write an argumentative thesis in which you agree or disagree with the argument that a vegetarian or vegan diet is a superior diet to the caveman (meat-eating or Paleo) diet on grounds based on, ethics, health and the environment. Your guidelines are as follows:
1. This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research. You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
2. You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
- At least one source must be from an ECC library database. (See tutorial for using ECC library database)
- At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
- At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
- The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
3. This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement. (See Sample Works Cited page)
Also see MLA Works Cited Rules from Santa Monica College
4. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
5. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary. Also show a use of diverse signal phrases for your quotations.
6. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
7. Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
A word about intellectual rigor: Don't approach the essay with a preconceived thesis based on your biases and eating habits.
Rather, begin your essay with a tabula rasa, a blank slate, having no preconceived notions, and let your research and intellectual struggle determine your argumentative position.
Part Two. Reasons We Eat Meat According to Vegans
1. Family traditions. We learn what to eat from our family first and culture second.
2. Faith. Some eat meat because it’s encouraged from their holy book.
3. Some people crave meat. The vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, admits he still salivates upon smelling barbecued meat. Some research indicates that animal protein is superior to plant protein and as such animal protein satisfies the appetite in ways plant protein cannot.
4. We’re able to compartmentalize. This means while we love eating meat, we don’t want to know about how the animals are killed. We go into a state of mind called “willed denial.” Another way of putting it: Our left hand doesn't know what our right hand is doing.
Vegan rock star Paul McCartney said “If there were glass walls on the slaughterhouses, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
5. We become convinced that the science backs up the idea of an omnivore diet, including meat eating, for optimal nutrition. Nina Planck, author of Real Food, and Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, are leading proponents of meat-eating. The human brain needs animal amino acids and fats. However, it should be pointed out these women do not eat factory-killed animals. My doctor supports their view as well.
6. Some people eat meat because when they tried to be vegetarian, they got super hungry and gained a lot of weight. It seems animal protein fills us up for longer periods of time. When we don’t eat meat, we “carb out.”
7. We live in a state of learned denial according to Masson, the author of The Face on Your Plate.
Part Two. Arguments for Being a Vegetarian or a Vegan: Humanitarian, Environmental, Nutritional (most controversial)
One. Argument of sentience. Animals feel pain. We should afford them the same humanitarian concern, to be spared from pain, that we afford ourselves. Part of the sentience argument rests on empathy. Should we empathize with animals’ pain?
Two. Danger of compartmentalizing morality. Can you be kind to humans but cruel to animals? Or is there a link? And if there is no link, are we dealing with disassociative personality disorder? How does that speak to integrity?
Three. The argument of Carnism or speciesism, which says we can abuse animals as we please or as we see fit for our perceived benefit. Carnism or speciesism is, according to many vegans, a moral flaw.
Four. The sadistic argument. A lot of “research” has predictable results and suggest an unconscious cruelty at the very least.
Five. Indoctrination argument. See Chapter 2, page 70 in Singer. See Eating Animals and the use of language.
Six. Farm factory argument. See Jonathan Safran Foer. 99% of meat comes from factories with all their horrors and abuses.
Seven. The Glass Wall or Willed Ignorance Argument. Also called Willed Denial. See Eating Animals and the use of language. The misuse of language.
Eight. The Efficiency Argument, which is in the realm of the environment. A meat-eating diet is more harmful to the environment than a vegetarian one.
Nine. The Nutritional Argument, the most controversial because of conflicting data.
Ten. The Story Argument. How we eat determines the story we tell to ourselves and our children. Our stories define who we are.
Part Three. Impediments to Being a Vegetarian or a Vegan.
One. Your family, on your side and your spouse’s side, are not vegetarians and to reject their meaty meals is in a way to reject your family, its traditions, its intimacies. You may even be scorned, shunned, and looked at as a “weirdo,” a misfit, and a malcontent.
Two. Your spouse eats meat so your not eating it carries implicit condemnation of his or her eating habits. Eating is part of your intimate bond with your spouse. You don’t want there to be a wedge between you two in this regard.
Three. Not eating meat and its place eating rice and beans and such, you find yourself eating more calories a day because a vegetarian diet doesn’t fill you up as much as a much as a meat-eating one. While some lose weight when they convert to vegetarianism, you blow up and become rather pudgy.
Four. There is the whole soy issue with some warning of its dangers, which are analyzed in detail; however, you also know that these findings are disputed. Nevertheless, not knowing who to believe, you are concerned about the dangers of soy.
Five. There are those who write that from an evolutionary standpoint, you need to eat some meat, including Nina Planck, Lierre Keith, and the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Six. You suffer from meat lust. Your most indelible food memories are the salivations that occurred during childhood barbecues. To this day, the smell of barbecued meats intoxicates you to levels of euphoria that you cannot deny.
Seven. You realize that milk and eggs result in animal cruelty so that vegetarianism, a relatively easy “lifestyle choice,” doesn’t fully absolve you of your guilt. You must be a vegan, and this entails an effort and a circumspection that you find too rigorous.
Eight. You and your spouse want children and read literature about the need for some animal protein to maximize fertility.
Nine. You hate to acknowledge this, but like Lierre Keith, you feel better when you eat some animal protein.
Ten. In the end, you find you’re agnostic on the meat issue, but eat meat only twice a month or so because you want to minimize your support of an industry that is cruel to animals. This flexitarian stance makes you feel better and minimizes the guilt that might compel you to become a full vegetarian. One thing you're not agnostic about: Factory farming is unacceptable. If you don’t believe me, watch the documentary Food, Inc.
Part Four. Jeffrey Masson's and Peter Singer’s Arguments Against Eating Meat and Experimenting on Animals
1. What is the initial challenge in advocating equal rights for animals? Being looked upon as a joke, a radical, and a freak. Other movements started this way but are now held as mainstream ideas. He uses the example of women’s rights.
2. Since animals and humans are not the same, what is the basis for equal treatment of animals? They are sentient beings, meaning they suffer, they feel pain, anxiety, trauma. Our empathy revolts at allowing cruelty to be inflicted upon feeling beings. As Alice Walker has said: “I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like…you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.”
3. What does it mean when we say that animals, like humans, have interests? Rights are given to those who have interests, which includes the capacity for suffering and the capacity for joy. We don’t fret the fate of a rock that we kick because the rock has no interests. In contrast, an animal is not “unconscious automata.” All the signs of pain in humans are evident in animals: writhing, screaming, facial contortions, increased pulse rate, elevated levels of stress hormones, etc.
4. What is a speciesist? The overwhelming majority of humans are speciesists, that is they respect and acknowledge the interests of humans over other animals. Most humans are ready to cause pain to animals for their own benefit. We talk about the sanctity of human life but not animal life, for example. This benefit might include eating animals as food, hunting them for sport, experimenting on them for medical research, fighting them for entertainment, killing them for furniture, car seats, clothing, etc.
5. If speciesism is morally abhorrent, then can one be good in other areas? Or does the speciesism contaminate the entire being?
Part Five. Three Resources That Refute and Defend Vegetarianism
How to Make a Case Against Vegetarianism
How to Make a Case For Vegetarianism
Common Arguments Against Vegetarianism And How to Answer Them
Part 6: Sample Refutation Thesis Statements
An example that refutes vegan diet:
While vegans are sincere souls with deeply humanitarian concerns about the abuses animals face in factory farms, their plea for us to follow a vegan diet fails to be persuasive because it is too rigid and extreme to be realistic, it is nutritionally unsound, perhaps even dangerous, it assumes, erroneously, that the average person has the resources to eat a varied, healthy vegan diet, which is exceedingly costly, and fails to grasp the important lessons of human evolution, which are built on the killing and cooking of animals.
A more explicit refutation
The vegan argument fails on many counts, not the least of which are the vegan's dogmatic and rigid ideology, the vegan's moral inconsistencies, the vegan's ignorance of the needs of everyday people, and the vegan's ignorance of the relationship between animal protein and human evolution.
A refutation that supports vegans
While we have, as the above thesis claims, evolved to eat meat and while the vegan diet is too rigid and expensive for many, we must do all we can to embrace the vegan's humanitarian plea because the vegan diet is essential for our next stage of evolution, which is to eat in a way that saves us from the horrors of factory farming. These horrors include the disease that is spread throughout factory farms, the abject cruelty that animals suffer, the manner in which our abuse toward animals harms us morally and spiritually. Finally, let me conclude my thesis by saying that there are enough nutritional breakthroughs to make a vegan diet affordable and healthy for all.
A more explicit refutation of critics of veganism.
Those who dismiss vegan arguments do so at their own peril. They do so at the risk of denouncing their moral integrity; their moral call to treat animals with respect; their susceptibility to animal-born disease, and their foregoing the advantages of a vegan diet.
Research Links
Critique of The Vegetarian Myth
Less Personal Attack on Vegetarian Myth
Harsh Critique of Lierre Keith
Positive Review (More of a Summary)
Paleo-Driven Group with Positive Review
McMahon's Position Or How He Would Write an Argumentative Thesis That Addresses Keith's Book
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.
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