Part One. Final Essay Worth 280 Points (28% of Your Semester Grade), Essay 4: The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith:
Essay Assignment 4
Write an argumentative thesis in which you agree or disagree with the argument that a vegetarian or vegan diet is, as Lierre Keith argues, a diet rooted in childish ignorance and that a close study of where are food comes from shows that a vegetarian diet is not a superior diet to the caveman (meat-eating) diet on grounds based on, ethics, health and the environment. Your guidelines are as follows:
One. 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.
Two. You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
Three. At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
Four. At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
Five. At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
Six. 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.
Seven. This paper will be approximately 1,500 words 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.
Eight. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
Nine. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
Ten. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Eleven. Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
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 that support a vegetarian or vegan diet for animal rights. Since I rotate the books, your book might beAnimal Liberation by Peter Singer, The Face On Your Plate by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer or Dominion by Matthew Scully.
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 herbook 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
Part Three. Journal Entry
How has your reading about animal rights and vegetarianism influenced or affected your eating habits? And how has your reading affected which direction you're going to take your essay? Explain.
Part Four. Remember to Refute Your Opponents' Views
Here again is the link to Common Arguments Against Vegetarianism.
Here again the link to Common Arguments That Support Vegetarianism.
How PETA Answers Or Refutes Its Critics
Part Five. Causes of Speciesism
1. Old Testament in the Bible (186) Man allegedly has dominion over the animals and as such he can do with them as he pleases. This injunction is abused in many ways as animals are treated like commodities to be exploited.
2. Ancient Greek attitudes toward slavery, for both man and animal, encouraged exploitation.
3. For Christ (in the New Testament), to eschew the killing of animals was a sign of stupid superstition according to Augustine.
4. The humanism of the Renaissance did not fare well for animals since they were still lower on The Great Chain of Being.
5. The famous and influential philosopher Descartes looked at animals as unfeeling and fair game for cruel experiments.
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