Breakthrough Writer

Sample Thesis Statements for Vegetarian Debate

While Lierre Keith fails to champion the so-called Paleo diet and has been revealed as an amateur with discredited sources and methods for her conclusions, the meat-centered diet is superior to the strict vegetarian diet, contrary to major vegetarian arguments. (This student will explain the major vegetarian arguments and refute them one by one.

Vegan Vs. Paleo Debate

Vegan/Paleo Debate featuring Lierre Keith

Another Lierre Keith Takedown

Archeological Evidence Shows Paleo Diet Never Existed

Open Exchange

 

 

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2,654 of 2,829 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing May 30, 2010

By A. Perri

Format:Paperback

I want to be clear about a few things:

1) I am a female.
2) I give the idea of this book 5 stars, but its execution 1.
3) I have been a radical vegan, a rabid meat-eater and everything in between (currently in the in-between)
4) I am working on an archaeological PhD on hunter-gatherer diets, subsistence, hunting and transition to agriculture.

I picked this book up after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". I thought it would be interesting to read a different perspective on the vegetarian debate. I found Safran Foer's book to be much more geared towards the inhumane practices of meat while Keith's book is geared more towards diet/health.

I admit that it took a very long time for me to get through this book, for several reasons. I purchased this book hoping to get something out of it. I am not an upset vegan who wants to hate it and I am not someone who bought it knowing Id love it. I was just neutral. There were two main reasons for my disappointment with the book. One minor, one major. First, I found the second agendas (specifically the radical feminism) distracting and unnecessary. I have nothing against the feminist agenda, but this wasnt the place to put it. Second, I found the book absolutely riddled with bad information, faulty facts and just plain lazy research (if you can call it 'research'). As someone who intensively researches these issues on a daily basis, I found myself underlining items on nearly every page that I knew were just plain untrue or were 'cherry-picked' facts slanted to give a certain perception. This is such a disappointment as a really great case could be made for the author's view if she had only put the real work into researching the book properly. Once you lose the reader's trust that you are providing factual information what do you have? Ill provide examples:

1) pg. 140: The author states that "Carbon-13 is a stable isotope present in two places: grasses and the bodies of animals that eat grasses". She goes on to suggest that since there is no evidence of grass "scratch marks" on the human teeth found, that they must have been eating animals. There are many flaws in this thought process. First, I cant even begin to explain the preservation and degradation issues present in examining three million year old teeth for 'scratch marks'. Second, carbon-13 is an isotope found in ALL terrestrial and marine plants, not just grass. Finding high levels of C3 or C4 (which are what carbon-13 breaks down into) in human teeth only means that that human was eating large amounts of SOME plant, seed, nut, etc. (not JUST grass) or the animal that ate those. It is not as simple as GRASS OR COW.

2) pg. 142: The author states that there are no bacteria in the human stomach. This is simply untrue. In 2005 Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a stomach bacteria that causes gastritis and ulcer disease. There are currently over 130 known stomach bacteria.

3) pg. 146: The author states a "rumor" authored by RB Lee about hunter-gatherers getting 65% of their calories from plants and 35% from meat. She states that this "simply isnt true". First, this rumor-spreader is one of the most well-respected anthropological/archaeological researchers in hunter-gatherer studies who edited what is considered THE tome on hunter-gatherer theory, 'Man the Hunter'. He isnt some random hack. Second, saying those numbers 'simply arent true' is simply not true. Hunter-gatherers did and do inhabit a huge range of environments and likewise their diets cover a wide range. Some do follow the 65/35% number. Some eat much more meat. Some eat much less.

These are only three examples from a span of six pages. This pattern continues throughout the entire book. Fact is the authors 'facts' just arent believable (which, again, is a shame because a factual book on this topic could be powerful). She writes as if the anthropological and archaeological evidence she quotes is written in stone, when in fact many of these topics are constantly under revision or not well understood yet. Most importantly, I just believe that writing a book and promoting it as a factual, scientific account of a subject when it is not is doing a great disservice to your (mostly) unknowing readers. If you are not willing to put in the real research effort, write a book that is touted as a personal account and nothing more. Selling flubbed facts to people who are truly searching for answers, inspiration or (insert what you are looking for here) is just bad journalism.

Ill end this review with some facts and encourage any readers (whether you liked the book, hated the book or havent read the book) to always question whether what you are reading is true and to do some research of your own.

The author cites 207 references in this book.
62 of those references are websites (~30%)
18 are newspapers and magazines (~7%)
32 are journals (~15%)
95 are other books (~46%)

First of all, think about that. 30% of the references in this book come from website information. Five of those 62 website references were Wikipedia. Wikipedia! One was Google Answers. I wont let my freshmen students use Wikipedia as a reference in their papers, why would it be acceptable for a book? Like websites, newspaper and magazine information needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Of the 32 journals less than half come from well known, peer-reviewed sources. The remaining 46% are books, which can truly say anything the author cares to print (as this one does) and only show that the author is getting her information from another source (and another opinion) aside from the primary one. The point of this is to make clear that this is a book that is sold as (and which many positive reviews hype as) providing scientific, factual, intellectual knowledge on the vegetarian/diet/health debate. In reality less than 8% of the book is coming from peer-reviewed, fact-checked sources which can provide unbiased, neutral information.

If anything I hope this review encourages people to get away from the bias on either side, find factual scientific sources instead of second-third-fourth hand knowledge, check information for yourself instead of blindly believing an author, and to question published material and push for it to actually be factual if it presented as such.

Sample Thesis

While there are sound nutritional principles peppered throughout Lierre Keith's book, especially regarding the eating of whole and local foods, her Vegetarian Myth fails miserably as a champion or manifesto for Paleo-inspired meat-eating because it is sodden with lazy, discredited research, it reveals amateur, inaccurate, and over-simplified "scientific" conclusions, it meanders into irrelevant radical feminism, it offers a laughable forager model to feed a planet of 3 billion, and most of all shows profound ignorance in what is, archeologically speaking, the "Paleo diet." 

 

 

 

All Vegetarian Debate Lessons On One Post

Introducing Debate from Vegetarian Myth's Point of View

Lecture One

Lecture Two

Lecture Three

Lecture Four

Introducing Vegetarian Debate from The Vegetarian Myth’s Point of View

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. 

And Say What, Michael Pollan?

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

Weston A. Price Foundation

Nina Planck Interview

Death by Veganism Updates

Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution

Evolving to Eat Mush

Paleo Diet

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Evolution by Fire

Home Economics and Evolution

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. 

Lesson #4 for the Vegetarian Debate: Reviewing Both Sides of the Argument: Second Revision

 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

Improves Health

Nerd Fitness: Pros and Cons

Skeptical Look from US News

Men's Journal

China Study Vs. Paleo Diet

Is Caveman Paleo Diet a Fad?

Paleo Vs. Vegan Diet

Refutation of Paleo Diet (Forks Over Knives)

China Study Supports Veganism 

Questioning the China Study

More Questioning of the China Study

 

Sample Thesis

 

While there are sound nutritional principles peppered throughout Lierre Keith's book, especially regarding the eating of whole and local foods, her Vegetarian Myth fails miserably as a champion or manifesto for Paleo-inspired meat-eating because it is sodden with lazy, discredited research, it reveals amateur, inaccurate, and over-simplified "scientific" conclusions, it meanders into irrelevant radical feminism, it offers a laughable forager eating model to feed a planet of 3 billion, and most of all it shows profound ignorance in what is, archeologically speaking, the "Paleo diet." 

Using Sources and Peer Review Guidelines

Using Research and Evidence

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

Weston A. Price Foundation

Nina Planck Interview

Death by Veganism Updates

Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution

Evolving to Eat Mush

Paleo Diet

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Evolution by Fire

Home Economics and Evolution

How Our Vegan Diet Made Us Ill

In Defense of Meat

In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2

In Defense of Meat and Fire

An Animal's Place

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. 

 

Lierre Keith Lecturing on Her Vegetarian Myth: 5 Parts

A Blog Against Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth

 

 

Here's a blog against Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth. 

And here's a blog that claims there are fallacies that support vegetarianism. 

And Say What, Michael Pollan?

Common logical fallacies to avoid. 

Vegetarian Debate Lesson #1: Fourth Revision

 

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

Praise of Lierre Keith's Book

Positive Review (More of a Summary)

Thorough, Positive Review

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. 

 

Related articles

Is Being A Vegetarian For You?

Please Explain: Veganism and Vegetarianism

Where do you get your protein from?? You're a Vegan!!!

Becoming A Vegetarian | the Reasoning

Vegetarian vs. Vegan

Vegetarianism: Why? and Is It Right For Me?

Lesson #4 for the Vegetarian Debate: Reviewing Both Sides of the Argument

 

 

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

Weston A. Price Foundation

Nina Planck Interview

Death by Veganism Updates

Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution

Evolving to Eat Mush

Paleo Diet

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Evolution by Fire

Home Economics and Evolution

How Our Vegan Diet Made Us Ill

In Defense of Meat

In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2

In Defense of Meat and Fire

An Animal's Place

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. 

 

Lesson #3 for the Vegetarian Debate: Moral Relativism and Denial (third revision)

Vegan Vs. Paleo Debate

Vegan/Paleo Debate featuring Lierre Keith

Another Lierre Keith Takedown

Archeological Evidence Shows Paleo Diet Never Existed

Open Exchange

 

 

Most Helpful Customer Reviews (from Amazon)

2,654 of 2,829 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing May 30, 2010

By A. Perri

Format:Paperback

I want to be clear about a few things:

1) I am a female.
2) I give the idea of this book 5 stars, but its execution 1.
3) I have been a radical vegan, a rabid meat-eater and everything in between (currently in the in-between)
4) I am working on an archaeological PhD on hunter-gatherer diets, subsistence, hunting and transition to agriculture.

I picked this book up after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". I thought it would be interesting to read a different perspective on the vegetarian debate. I found Safran Foer's book to be much more geared towards the inhumane practices of meat while Keith's book is geared more towards diet/health.

I admit that it took a very long time for me to get through this book, for several reasons. I purchased this book hoping to get something out of it. I am not an upset vegan who wants to hate it and I am not someone who bought it knowing Id love it. I was just neutral. There were two main reasons for my disappointment with the book. One minor, one major. First, I found the second agendas (specifically the radical feminism) distracting and unnecessary. I have nothing against the feminist agenda, but this wasnt the place to put it. Second, I found the book absolutely riddled with bad information, faulty facts and just plain lazy research (if you can call it 'research'). As someone who intensively researches these issues on a daily basis, I found myself underlining items on nearly every page that I knew were just plain untrue or were 'cherry-picked' facts slanted to give a certain perception. This is such a disappointment as a really great case could be made for the author's view if she had only put the real work into researching the book properly. Once you lose the reader's trust that you are providing factual information what do you have? Ill provide examples:

1) pg. 140: The author states that "Carbon-13 is a stable isotope present in two places: grasses and the bodies of animals that eat grasses". She goes on to suggest that since there is no evidence of grass "scratch marks" on the human teeth found, that they must have been eating animals. There are many flaws in this thought process. First, I cant even begin to explain the preservation and degradation issues present in examining three million year old teeth for 'scratch marks'. Second, carbon-13 is an isotope found in ALL terrestrial and marine plants, not just grass. Finding high levels of C3 or C4 (which are what carbon-13 breaks down into) in human teeth only means that that human was eating large amounts of SOME plant, seed, nut, etc. (not JUST grass) or the animal that ate those. It is not as simple as GRASS OR COW.

2) pg. 142: The author states that there are no bacteria in the human stomach. This is simply untrue. In 2005 Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a stomach bacteria that causes gastritis and ulcer disease. There are currently over 130 known stomach bacteria.

3) pg. 146: The author states a "rumor" authored by RB Lee about hunter-gatherers getting 65% of their calories from plants and 35% from meat. She states that this "simply isnt true". First, this rumor-spreader is one of the most well-respected anthropological/archaeological researchers in hunter-gatherer studies who edited what is considered THE tome on hunter-gatherer theory, 'Man the Hunter'. He isnt some random hack. Second, saying those numbers 'simply arent true' is simply not true. Hunter-gatherers did and do inhabit a huge range of environments and likewise their diets cover a wide range. Some do follow the 65/35% number. Some eat much more meat. Some eat much less.

These are only three examples from a span of six pages. This pattern continues throughout the entire book. Fact is the authors 'facts' just arent believable (which, again, is a shame because a factual book on this topic could be powerful). She writes as if the anthropological and archaeological evidence she quotes is written in stone, when in fact many of these topics are constantly under revision or not well understood yet. Most importantly, I just believe that writing a book and promoting it as a factual, scientific account of a subject when it is not is doing a great disservice to your (mostly) unknowing readers. If you are not willing to put in the real research effort, write a book that is touted as a personal account and nothing more. Selling flubbed facts to people who are truly searching for answers, inspiration or (insert what you are looking for here) is just bad journalism.

Ill end this review with some facts and encourage any readers (whether you liked the book, hated the book or havent read the book) to always question whether what you are reading is true and to do some research of your own.

The author cites 207 references in this book.
62 of those references are websites (~30%)
18 are newspapers and magazines (~7%)
32 are journals (~15%)
95 are other books (~46%)

First of all, think about that. 30% of the references in this book come from website information. Five of those 62 website references were Wikipedia. Wikipedia! One was Google Answers. I wont let my freshmen students use Wikipedia as a reference in their papers, why would it be acceptable for a book? Like websites, newspaper and magazine information needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Of the 32 journals less than half come from well known, peer-reviewed sources. The remaining 46% are books, which can truly say anything the author cares to print (as this one does) and only show that the author is getting her information from another source (and another opinion) aside from the primary one. The point of this is to make clear that this is a book that is sold as (and which many positive reviews hype as) providing scientific, factual, intellectual knowledge on the vegetarian/diet/health debate. In reality less than 8% of the book is coming from peer-reviewed, fact-checked sources which can provide unbiased, neutral information.

If anything I hope this review encourages people to get away from the bias on either side, find factual scientific sources instead of second-third-fourth hand knowledge, check information for yourself instead of blindly believing an author, and to question published material and push for it to actually be factual if it presented as such.

 

Sample Thesis

 

While there are sound nutritional principles peppered throughout Lierre Keith's book, especially regarding the eating of whole and local foods, her Vegetarian Myth fails miserably as a champion or manifesto for Paleo-inspired meat-eating because it is sodden with lazy, discredited research, it reveals amateur, inaccurate, and over-simplified "scientific" conclusions, it meanders into irrelevant radical feminism, it offers a laughable forager eating model to feed a planet of 3 billion, and most of all it shows profound ignorance in what is, archeologically speaking, the "Paleo diet." 

Using Sources and Peer Review Guidelines

Using Research and Evidence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Grammar and Spell Check: Find the Errors in the Following Paragraph

 

Jeffrey Masson would have us embrace his vegan ideology, however, such an ideology; which entails eliminating all animal products, requires a commitment that few of us our willing to muster. Although, I applaud Masson's compassion for animals; I must repute his strict vegan ideals, indeed, a strict diet is actually harmful for our health. Especially children and the elderly, moreover, the sickly are at a particular risk when implementing a vegan diet. Because the vegan diet lacks essential amino acids for maintaining the human immune system. We must not; however, dismiss everything that Masson writes, after all, he is correct about the environmental pollution rendered from factory farming, therefore we should not mock Masson instead we should look carefully at the legitimate aspects of his reasoning.

 

 

 

 

Refutation Thesis Example That Refutes the Meat-Eating Diet

 

McMahon’s thesis

While I concede that the vegetarian diet can be refuted on biological, evolutionary, and nutritional grounds, I cannot accept the reckless barbarism and cruelty that many meat-eating arguments try to ignore or sweep under the carpet. That we may need to eat meat doesn’t excuse our torture and brutality against animals. We must fight to reform the meat industry. That the vegetarian, and especially the vegan diet, may be lacking in vital nutrients does not excuse our woeful treatment of animals. That we are dependent on animal products in so many ways does not excuse the cruelty we inflict upon them. Any legitimate arguments against the vegetarian or vegan lifestyle in terms of nutrition do nothing to dissuade me from believing that our current slaughterhouse system is a moral abomination in four ways: The current slaughterhouse factories for chickens, cows, pigs, and other livestock are built on moral relativism, mindless denial (willed ignorance), dishonest language, and outright sadism. 

  

Example of a Thesis That Refutes Vegetarian Diet with mapping components (the reasons you use to support your argument)

 

 

 

While we must struggle to minimize animal abuse, we must not be persuaded to become vegetarians, or even worse vegans, for diets excluding animal proteins violates our evolution and optimum nutrition. 

First Research Point: Most vegan diets are embraced by adolescents who suffer eating disorders.

Second Research Point: Entire families who "go vegan" become ill. 

Third Research Point: A vegetarian diet is contrary to human evolution. 

Fourth Research Point: Cooking meat gave humans an evolutionary advantage according to Catching Fire. 

 

Research Point 5: Some sects of vegetarianism, especially veganism, are like shrill religious cults in which even vegetarians who don't embrace the vegan orthodoxy are demonized. 

  Part Two. Pro-Vegetarian Argument: Moral Relativism as a Logical and Moral Fallacy in the Way We Treat Animals

 

 

1.   Moral relativism means we change the rules whenever we deem a rule change suits our purposes. For example, we’re kind to our dog, we feel sympathy when our dog or other pet suffers, we would not cook our pet, but then we brutalize and cook other animals. There’s no consistency here. We choose to have empathy for one animal and not another. Pigs are smarter than dogs, but we subject pigs to a life crammed in a pen where they gnaw the cage, cry, weep, and then cry like babies as they’re slaughtered, skinned, dunked in boiling water while they’re still alive, etc.

2.   Moral relativism leads to abuse of power. If a man demands fidelity from his wife but changes the rules for himself so than he commit infidelities, then he is abusing his power. Likewise, if we say decency demands laws against abusing and neglecting pets, to abuse livestock for our eating is an abuse of power. Failure to be consistent compromises our integrity as human beings.

3.   Moral absolutism establishes a clear difference between fair, rightful power vs. abusive power. Treating animals like unfeeling commodities to make the “bottom-line” or maximize profits is a clear abuse of power. To make more money, chickens and turkeys are fattened with drugs so they can’t walk or reproduce and kept inside dark cages where they cannot move for their brief lives.

4.   Our moral code for many of us teaches moderation over excess. But the way we treat animals, so terrified of their torture than most of us DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM BEFORE THEY SHOW UP ON OUR PLATE, that we can only eat animals through willed ignorance. A clean, quick kill might be acceptable, but the well-chronicled abuses in the slaughterhouses are excessive and therefore contradict any absolute moral code.

 

Part Three. Mindless Denial as Logical and Moral Fallacy That Supports the Mindless Killing of Animals

1.   If we have to live in darkness to continue with our life as it is, something is wrong. Say a man knows in his heart that his wife is cheating on him but he forces himself to “not know” so he can stay married and not confront her, for he’s afraid that a confrontation would cause her leave him. Or parents may know their son is taking drugs but they will ignorance because to know the truth is too painful for them. To live in darkness is fueled by moral cowardice. The hunter who quickly kills his animal and prepares his own meat does not live in darkness. He knows what his meat eating entails. But the average consumer buys packaged meat and does not want to know what happens in the slaughterhouse. This is willed ignorance and it is the result of moral cowardice and laziness.

2.   Children can’t will ignorance like adults can, according to Jeffrey Masson, author of The Face on Your Plate. When a family eats chicken, and someone says “Pass me a leg,” or “Pass me a thigh,” children recognize they’re eating an animal and often become disgusted.

3.   Bill Buford says people don’t want to think of “meat” as an animal, a beast that was terrified before death, struggled during its butchering, was skinned, bled out, and chopped up. They want to see “meat” as an abstraction.

4.   Tamara Murphy, a famous chef, delivered eleven freshly killed piglets to her restaurant. She adopted the piglets at birth and made sure not name them so she wouldn’t get too attached before she took the piglets to the slaughterhouse. The piglets trusted her and greeted her with joy when she visited them so that when she took them to the slaughterhouse, she felt she had betrayed them. Her denial won out, however, for she wrote an article for her blog titled “Celebration of the Life of a Pig.” What do we learn from this? Never underestimate the power of denial.

5.   Many of us have deep love, care, and sympathy for companion animals and wild life, but we cut off that sympathy for farm animals. How? Some, like Jeffrey Masson, argue this cutting off of sympathy requires denial.

6.   In the documentary Food, Inc.we see a crippled cow, called a “downer,” being bull-dozed by a tractor into a slaughterhouse and it moans and cries. Some of us could not eat that cow’s slaughtered flesh. Some of us could go into denial and enjoy its meat.

7.   Familiarity, being used to something all of our lives, seems “normal” so we can deny its brutality. Think of someone who grew up with dog fighting or cock fighting. These brutal, barbarian “sports” would seem “normal.”

8.    Denial is often used because we’re too lazy and apathetic to disturb the status quo, which means “the way things are.” We say to ourselves, “Why should I inconvenience myself? I want my life to roll along just the way it is.”

9.   Many meat eaters become hostile and defensive when asked to discuss slaughterhouses. Defensiveness is a sign of guilt from a person who is in denial and who lacks a “clean conscience.”

10.     Denial is a form of disassociation. Many children cannot associate or link their McNuggets with the “cute” little chick they see on TV.

11.      The denial of animal suffering rests upon keeping the slaughterhouses remote, distant, and hidden. No meat company allows filming of what goes on. It has to be kept secret. Any video footage we get is done undercover. This is strong evidence that there is something bad that has to be hidden.

 

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 _____________________.

 

 

Class Activity:

Write a thesis that refutes the vegetarian diet or one that includes eating meat. Then write a list of 4 or 5 reasons for supporting your thesis.