Comment / By Kathy / March 18, 2010, 11:20 a.m.

Lierre’s book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (Paperback), is not anti-vegan as in against vegans. She writes asking vegans to pay attention to the requests of their bodies before it is too late and their health suffers damage that can not be repaired.
How many vegetarians do you know who are always cold, have dry hair and skin, mood swings, lack of energy, cravings for sugars? When vegans and vegetarians feel this way they work hard to adjust their diet but never do they assume that the premise of the diet is not a complete and usable truth. Lierre, after twenty years of being a vegan now suffers from a degenerating spine condition.
The anger is generated when people identify with being a vegan or vegetarian. Her book then feels like a personal attack. It is not. It is a plea to re-think and re-examine what we are told is true, that people can live without any animal products.

Comment / By Ste Lo / March 18, 2010, 1:05 p.m.

I haven’t read her book and can’t justify what happened to her. I can testify that the vegetarians i know are not, “always cold, have dry hair and skin, mood swings, lack of energy, cravings for sugars”. These are the same unconstructive attacks i heard over 20 years ago when i was in high school. For arguments sake we could say the opposite is true. Most Americans eat meat, a large percentage of Americans are over weight and out of shape, so eating meat makes you obese and out of shape. Of course not all vegans and vegetarians are healthy, but is that saying that all meat eaters are? Over the years science has proven a vegetarian diet can be more healthy than a meat eating diet. This seems to me to be one persons experience with her own bad dietary practices, not a real argument against vegetarianism or killing animals for food.

Comment / By Mr. Nice / March 18, 2010, 2:01 p.m.

This broad can’t even fact check her own books. No wonder she ate herself into sickness. Instead of researching her own diet, she prolly just took the advice of other feel-good people who don’t research anything either. Sure, there is a myth that all vegetarian diet is necessarily good, but the world don’t need someone who still doesn’t get the concept of research to dispel that myth.

Opposition author who plays to meat eaters stereotypes, that’s all she is. Pie to the mfing face. Good, she deserves every peppery morsel. Splat.

Next time you publish a book repping Arcata, go to a library with that manuscript and see if you aren’t just bullshitting us. Thanks.

Comment / By Kevin Hoover / March 18, 2010, 2:44 p.m.

It sounds like she has identified a receptive market and written a book to service it.

Comment / By Mr. Nice / March 18, 2010, 3:10 p.m.

100% agree Kevin.

I just am a little unamused that she labels herself an eco-feminist when unlike other eco-feminist publishers, she cites a bunch of untrue statistics and “facts” to back up her subjective opinions. It is counterproductive to the movement to make things up.

I suppose truth is boring. Fiction branded as non-fiction does sell. That woman who writes about how bad thoughts cause cancer sure sells a lot of books.

But yea, she’ll continued to get both paid and pied if she keeps this up.

Comment / By Kathy / March 18, 2010, 3:51 p.m.

Mr.Nice, are you pretending to know about a book you did not read? :)

Comment / By beel / March 18, 2010, 4 p.m.

Hey Mr Nice- i have not read the book, but am curious about your dismissal of it and support of her being pied. what are the “facts” you question? one customer review at Amazon with over 100 favorable responses praised her for her research; “The author interweaves her deepening political and environmental understanding…she digs deep into several technical subjects: ecology (with a particular emphasis on species extinction and habitat destruction for croplands), evolutionary biology, nutrition, anthropology, geology. I find her sources and her use of them pretty solid except for the last one.”

Comment / By Mr. Nice / March 18, 2010, 4:21 p.m.

There is a PDF that clobbers more facts than I care to.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/03/15/18641159.php

It doesn’t touch on some of the nonsense environmental statistics she brought up, but pointing those out would be overkill.

Comment / By Mr. Nice / March 18, 2010, 4:23 p.m.

My biggest “beef” is she reps Arcata. Makes the town look like trippy hippies with no sensibility. So now we got Pot City USA on top of that. Great, eh?

There are plenty of real eco-feminists to read. No need to identify with a faker just because she went from locavore to flesh eater due to some self-induced chemical imbalance.

Comment / By ste lo / March 18, 2010, 4:35 p.m.

It is no surprise that developing agriculture lands can be destructive to the ecosystem. Frances Moore Lappe noted (over 40 years ago) in her book, “Diet for a small Planet” that a meat eating diet are far more destructive to the environment then a plant based diet. It seems we have someone whose health suffered from her own dietary choices and now has sour grapes, along with the unfortunate peppered pie.

Comment / By Lodgepole / March 18, 2010, 5:37 p.m.

Apparently, to the local sheep, assaulting a lady is ok as long as you use a pie.

Nothing she wrote could justify assaulting her.

Comment / By Kathy / March 18, 2010, 6:45 p.m.

Without animals what will nourish the soil?

Comment / By ste lo / March 18, 2010, 7:49 p.m.

Seriously Kathy? Are you saying that without industrial grazing that our soils would be impacted? Sounds like something straight from the Cattleman’s Association. Cowboy up!

Comment / By Saille / March 18, 2010, 7:57 p.m.

Seriously SteLo…where did you get industrial from animals nourishing the soil? There is such a thing as low impact farming that involves animals…It’s called a farm. My grandparents had one. It worked quite well and kept everyone healthy and happy.
I really think from reading these comments that most people really miss the whole point of this conversation…which is how are we going to feed our population if it keeps growing? The response is that we need to stop reproducing, and look to feeding ourselves more responsibly. In my opinion this means reconnecting ourselves with our food supply. Not everyone can or should go veggie.

Comment / By AJ / March 18, 2010, 7:58 p.m.

What’s worse?

One: Activists hand national publicity to a virtually unknown author who stridently claims a veggie diet isn’t just dangerous when mismanaged, but is dangerous all of the time.

Or…

Two: Activists launch a pie attack on the first day of a two-day book festival when the second day is actually Pi Day.

This publicity stunt benefits the author and makes the activists look mathematically challenged.

Comment / By AJ / March 18, 2010, 7:59 p.m.

Sigh.

Those two items were sequentially numbered, but the automated comment system believes it knows better and renumbered them on its own.

Comment / By Hank Sims / March 18, 2010, 8:24 p.m.

(AJ: Fixed, after a fashion. It’s a bug. For some reason you’re the only person who has ever triggered it.)

Comment / By ste lo / March 18, 2010, 8:36 p.m.

Saille, Yes animals can nourish the soil, but the idea of mom and pop farms supplying cattle for most consumers is naive. The cattle industry likes to promote the idea that your Big Mac came from the family farm, but the reality is often not so romantic. I believe most people can be veg or at least reduce meat consumption, but that does not mean that i endorse the idea of physically attacking someone i disagree with.

Comment / By Joel Mielke / March 21, 2010, 5:13 p.m.

I didn’t know that vegans were such assholes, but the name “vegan” has always bothered me. They’re just vegetarians.

Comment / By dewayne montagne / March 22, 2010, 11:56 a.m.

Actually vegans have a much stricter diet including not eating diary or honey.

Comment / By Mr. Nice / March 23, 2010, 2:51 p.m.

The term vegan was coined in 1944 by Elsie Shrigley and Donald Watson to differentiate from the term vegetarian as defined by the UK Vegetarian Society which did not clarify the consumption of liquid meat and adornment with carcass as being non-vegetarian practices.

Hope that bothers you less.

Comment / By Joel Mielke / March 25, 2010, 8:18 a.m.

“Actually vegans have a much stricter diet including not eating diary or honey.”

So when have dairy products and honey become vegetables? Like I said, they’re just vegetarians.

Comment / By dewayne montagne / March 25, 2010, 12:12 p.m.

Yes Joel. Vegans are vegetarians, but have a much stricter diet. There is a distinction. By your logic Democrats are Communists since they are both liberal.

Comment / By Joel Mielke / March 27, 2010, 10 a.m.

Communists are not, and never have been liberals.

Comment / By noel milky / March 29, 2010, 9:35 a.m.

stick to cartoons!!!