Lierre Keith speaks to me this week about the dangers of the vegetarian and vegan diets. Many have been led astray by the vegan movement that these diets will prevent disease and save the planet. Lierre eloquently exposes these myths. The results of this diet are quite the opposite.
Transcript
Click here to view the full transcript for #16 The Vegetarian Myth with Lierre Keith.
Her book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.”
The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. But, is it true?
Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray—not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.
The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil—the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.
Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.
Lierre’s New Book
Deep Green Resistance starts where the environmental movement leaves off: industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can’t fix it, and shopping—no matter how green—won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play. Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
About Lierre
Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. She lives in northern California.
Lierre is the author of the novels Conditions of War and Skyler Gabriel. She is coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (Seven Stories Press, 2011) and she’s the editor of The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution (Seven Stories Press, 2012). She’s also been arrested six times.
Works
- Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet (edited by L.K. and Derrick Jensen), PM Press, 2012.
- Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, Seven Stories Press, 2011.
- The Vegetarian Myth, PM Press, 2009.
- Skyler Gabriel, Fighting Words Pr, 1995.
- Conditions of War, Fighting Words Pr, 1993.
