McMahon's Suggestion:
For your final essay, focus on Lierre Kieth's methods of research and conclusions so that your focus is not too general and you don't get overwhelmed.
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 lunch time.
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
Part One. Sadism and Brutality: Faulty Comparison?
Thesis That Defends Vegetarianism by Refuting the Comparison Meat-Eaters Make Between Humans and Animals
Some argue that we must kill animals for food because killing animals is part of nature. Animals kill animals. And that’s what we do. Tim, a reader from my blog, argues that vegans base their ideals on a false utopia. He writes:
I agree that man should be humane in all things, including the manner in which he kills his food. But let me add one little remark that the anti meat-eaters seldom appreciate.
Have you ever gone camping? What do the woods sound like at - say - 2 or 3 AM? To exaggerate a little, they sound like a slaughterhouse. Animals kill and eat other animals. They don't fuss over HOW the killing is done or how MUCH killing is done; they just do it. And it can be pretty horrible. Nature is savage; period.
So, don't forget, vegans, that nature itself is not a serene pacifistic green little utopia, whereas man is an abominable meat-lusting monster. Nature is often brutal and ugly.
In agreement with Tim, is another reader, Angelo. He writes:
I had a crayfish a few years ago---and he would eat "feeder" goldfish thrown in the tank. The "feeders" are sold for a dime each. The crayfish would ambush the goldfish, grab the fish and puncture its gill. Then, with the goldfish struggling, the crayfish would scrape the goldfish's scales off, before beginning to eat. The fish was still alive as the crayfish would chomp down on the tail, body parts, etc. Admittedly on a smaller scale--- that's still worse than electrocuting a cow.
But another reader, Shorty, believes comparing nature’s brutality with the brutality animals are subjected to in the slaughterhouses is a false one. He writes:
Nature is indeed savage, but animals seldom kill but for hunger. The animals that get eaten in the wild don't know what it's like to be confined in a pen, wallowing in their own waste - only to die fat and tender. Livestock warehousing, and mass killing will never be vindicated. It will always be a symbol of greed, arrogance, and a barometer of the human condition. Eating meat is OK if you hunt for it in an ethical manner. Otherwise, vegetarianism is the holy grail for me.
Animals are obligate carnivores; humans are not entirely; animals eat out of necessity; too many humans eat out of gluttony; animals eat to survive; people kill animals for profit; animals don’t slaughter animals on the mass scale that humans do. Therefore, the comparison between nature’s brutality and man’s brutality is a faulty one and as such it constitutes a logical fallacy.
Another Faulty Comparison: Animals Don’t Cause Waste and Pollution the Way Humans Do
1. Pig waste ruins lakes and rivers.
2. Cattle feedlots contaminate water over 1,900 times the state’s maximum standard for E. coli in surface waters (Masson).
3. Raising pigs and cattle (animals don’t raise animals to eat) creates 80 million metric tons of waste nitrogen annually (Masson).
4. Animal waste is 130 times greater than human waste annually in America (Masson).
5. Animal waste results in E. coli, Salmonella, and other diarrheal diseases (Masson).
6. Rain forests are being destroyed to grow soy, but the majority of the soy is used to feed livestock (Masson).
7. According to the Smithsonian Institution, every minute land the size of seven football fields is currently being bulldozed to create room for farmed animals and the crops need to feed them (Masson).
8. Livestock accounts for 18% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide, more than the entire transportation sector of the whole world, including cars, ships, airplanes, and trains (Masson).
Another Faulty Comparison: Humans Subject Animals to Horrors on a Mass Scale That Can’t be Compared to Predator and Prey
1. Humans separate calves from their mothers at birth so mother can give milk for human consumption
2. Cows are transported in boxcars where they panic.
3. Chickens like to sunbathe but are doomed to a life of cramped darkness.
4. Ducks crave water but are doomed to a life of arid dryness.
5. Hens have their beaks cut off with a hot blade and live their lives in pain from the nerve damage.
6. Birds raised in pens and kicked so they scatter and are shot at close-range (like Dick Cheney did when he shot someone) requires no skill and suggests a certain amount of sadism. There’s even a business where you can use computer graphics to kill your prey.
7. Cows are forced to feed on corn, which is cheaper than grass but can’t be digested properly so the cows suffer indigestion and a bacteria count that leads to food-born disease.
8. One million calves are used for veal every year. They are removed from their mothers and holed up in a small crate, about two-feet wide, with no straw or bedding. They cannot stretch. Mortality rate is 20%. That is their life before being slaughtered.
9. Pigs tails are cut off with no anesthesia so they don’t bite each other’s tails off during confinement.
10. Confined, often the pigs go crazy, biting the bars or their own tails, or shaking their heads constantly.
11. Confined, pigs have elevated levels of cortisol (stress hormone).
12. Too often, pigs, cows, chickens, and other livestock are still alive on the conveyer belt as pieces of their body are taken apart. They die slowly, piece by piece, and in essence are tortured. The slaughterhouses won’t let you see what is happening.
Part Two. The Abuse of Language
1. Organic is associated with elitist, rich, out-of-touch. Organic may be that in part, but that’s an over simplification.
2. Veal is French for calf but we don’t want to admit to eating calf.
3. Pork is French for pig but we say we eat “pork,” not “pig.”
4. Words like “meat,” “bacon,” and “burger” hide the association with the animal origin.
5. Downer, an animal that collapses from ill health or is crippled. By law, this animal is not supposed to be slaughtered, but these downers are slaughtered all the time.
6. Factory farm is euphemism for slaughterhouse
7. Fresh food: According to USDA “fresh” chicken can be frozen and for any length of time. What?
8. Processing: euphemism for slaughter and butchery
9. Radical, anyone who doesn’t agree with you or challenges your beliefs or challenges your capacity for denial.
10. Sportsman, a euphemism for someone who sadistically hunts and tortures animals.
Part Three. Example of a Thesis That Refutes Factory Farming by a Meat-Eating Omnivore
Let's be clear. I am a failed vegetarian, a man for whom the vegetarian diet left me weak and so hungry that I overate carbs until I gained lots of weight to the point that I was saddled by corpulence. So let's put this on the table: I eat animal protein. Having confessed my carnivorous ways, let me say here that I am morally revolted by factory farming and that I am prepared to refute with all my heart and soul the major arguments that factory farm apologists use to defend the abominations that ensue in 99% of the slaughterhouses.
The central weakness of the farm factory apologists is their specious claim that we are entitled to brutalize animals since brutality is the norm in nature. Comparing farm factory slaughter with animal-on-animal slaughter is an egregious comparison wrought with many fallacies. First, animals kill for hunger while farm factories kill for profit. Second, the scale of brutality in the farm factory far surpasses that which occurs in nature. Third, the amount of waste farm factories impose on the environment cannot be compared to the almost nonexistent waste that occurs in the animal world. Fourth, farm factory butcheries spread disease like E.coli on a mass scale whereas in Nature such spread of contagion does not occur. Revealing this faulty comparison for the outlandish fraud that it is, what are meat eaters like me to do? Surely, the answer lies in trying to eat meat that comes from non-farm factory sources, such as meat labeled "organic" and "sustainable."
Part Four. Refuting 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 that support a vegetarian or vegan diet for animal rights.
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.
Part Two. 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
In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2
Nutritional Arguments:
1. Replacing animal protein with soy can be dangerous and soy doesn't digest in terms of elevated estrogen as well as animal protein.
2. You can't get B12 without animal protein. Supplements are inferior to real food.
3. You get inferior amino acids from plant protein even when you mix them to create "complete proteins" like combining rice and beans or peanut butter and wheat.
4. You get more concentrated nutrition with cooked meat than raw plants.
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