“The Vegetarian Myth” by Lierre Keith

I met Lierre Keith for a few days back in the 1990s and again around the year 2000 as we had gotten involved in ( successfully ) fighting some ugly discrimination issues in Massachusetts. About a year ago, I heard about a new anti-vegan book by someone with the same unique name as hers. I hadn’t had contact with her in years, but I hoped, as I typed her name into Google that it wasn’t her. It was.

A lot has been written on the internet about her book and I’ve added my own opinion in a few of those places. Until now, I have been hesitant to write anything about it on my blog. That changed a few days ago when an acquaintance directed me to a youtube video with an audio excerpt of one of her radio interviews .

The upshot is, that there was a quote from her where she admitted that she binged on eggs and milk every chance she got. You can find the full interview on 94.1 kpfa.org under “Terra Verde – October 29, 2010”. The quote mentioned happens a little bit after 5:30.

All of that drama, that came from all directions, over her book, and Lierre Keith never was a vegan.

For all Keith knows about the true origin of her health problems, she could have contracted one of the many diseases produced by factory farmed animal products while she was a “vegan” binging on eggs and dairy.

If you are curious about her book “The Vegetarian Myth” I recommend reading the two reviews linked to below.

Lierre Keith does not have formal credentials or experience in the diverse topics she writes about in “The Vegetarian Myth”. The authors of the reviews linked to below do, and the gist of their reviews is that she has gotten even the basic facts of those subjects wrong, let alone her much more stronger claims.

Judge for yourself …

Review
Amazon: A. Perrion May 30, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/2bhvh5n

Review
Virginia Messina R.D.: Review of “The Vegetarian Myth”

College Bookstores

A friend of mine went to price her textbooks for the semester the other day. The campus bookstore wanted almost $400. Instead, she got online and went to Amazon. She got her text books for $130.

I got a bit of vicarious pleasure out of that.

I kept a few of my textbooks. I also saved some money by checking some books out of the library for Philosophy classes. The latter trick didn’t last too long as the professors had a fetish for making xeroxed compilation booklets via Kinkos. It saved the students a little bit of money, but it also kind of sucked. No resale value and you didn’t even have a nice Philosophy book for your bookshelf at the end of the semester. You only had a wad of photocopy paper bound together with a squiggly plastic strip.

I have many memories of spending as much money on textbooks as my friend almost did. I would be happy at the end of the semester to sell the books back for enough cash to buy a nice dinner and a good book to read over the break.

In general, I resent books being so overpriced. The printing press changed the world by making the transmission of ideas cheap. That is the whole point of books. I feel a bit better by remembering a thought a boss’s boss once told me. “You aren’t paying for the paper, you are paying for the information”. Meh, maybe. What about the author who has been dead for a century, but a paperback copy of his book costs the same as a meal at a restaurant?

College textbooks are the ultimate racket. I remember new editions of textbooks being required for a class when a mountain of existing copies of that book already existed cheaply. The content of the books would be nearly, if not 100% identical. The content would be on different page numbers and with slightly different headings so a new syllabus wouldn’t work with an old textbook.

I have no doubt college textbooks will become even worse of a racket with the dawn of eReaders on the horizon. Students will continue to pay $400 a semester, but they will not be buying a book they can keep, sell, loan or read again. They will be renting the information, which will expire and disappear from their eReader at the end of the semester. If that student wants to look up that information someday, s/he will have to pay for the privilege. Then those poor students will hear people like me picking up one of my old paper books, flipping through the book and taunting them by saying such things as “Look, no charge! I read it 3 times in a row! No charge! Big Brother doesn’t even know I looked at the book again!”

For now, in the interim between the past and that even worse future I am happy thinking that the smarter students like my friend can use the internet, at least partially, to outflank the college textbook racket to save serious drachmas.

Drinking Nestle

Above is the documentary called Tapped, which someone uploaded in 5 parts to YouTube. I made a play list out of the parts so you watch the documentary non-stop and without having to hunt for the parts.

Basically, bottled water being more expensive than gasoline is not a joke to everyone. Bottled water companies have been quietly buying up American fresh water supplies and leaving Americans without. The worst of these companies is Nestle, which owns these brands of bottled water :

  1. Arrowhead
  2. Calistoga
  3. Deer Park
  4. Ice Mountain
  5. Ozarka
  6. Poland Spring
  7. Zephyrhills

A second highlight of the documentary is how the plastic used for water bottles and even water coolers is far more toxic than the public has been led to believe.