This is so amazing to read. I was slowly leaving social media, saw your post about fave books of 2023, read Stolen Focus, and then slammed the door on it. I cannot believe how much my LIFE has changed. I’ve gone through the same experience with reading books. I can’t get over how much depth I was missing, how my brain processes information now, and how much happier my nervous system is. I am having so much fun LEARNING again. I’m also sober (drugs & alcohol), but now I’m back to truly being *emotionally* sober. For anyone questioning leaving, I can’t recommend it enough.
Definitely doing more books than social media this year while recovering from long COVID and enjoying the space. I also have been connecting with friends I know are readers, suggesting them a favorite of mine and reading a favorite of theirs, then we will often text each other during our read and connect afterwards and it's such a beautiful way to bond with humans you love.
Loved getting these bite sized reviews! Can't read them all but one or two are definitely going on my list. Right now it's "Rest As Resistance" which I'm excited for, cuz I really need to let that sink in. My Inner Achiever (who thinks we get self worth by achieving, not just existing) has been so studious and helped me do so much but she needs some love and comfort and time to rest and play.
Oh and so glad Jay got you onto the Pratchett train! A friend did that for me also and I've been delighted by every book; Wee Free Men is the most recent, the story about an aspiring witch, and this witch-going-wizard book sounds like would be the perfect complement for me to read.
You inspired me to quit social media. I'm on day 7 now, and I echo everything you have said. I read before, but now I'm really READING. I feel so immersed in it, so connected! I've had ideas for writing, and I haven't written in years! Everything is slower and more spacious. I'm filling that space with things that are joyful. All the annoying social justice rhetoric that I would consume masochistcally, deriving some sick pleasure in infuriating myself, is gone from life! It sure as hell hasn't shown up here in the real world yet, and that shit was taking hours a day from me! I too have missed keeping abreast of world affairs though, so thank you for sharing that news app recommendation. Somewhat hesitant to invite the world back in and risk of having this new found peace disturbed, but I know I can't handicap myself in that way forever. Ultimately, I do care about my fellow humans, even if they are a disruptive bunch!
I'm really looking forward to your podcast about AMB's book. I'm sooooo tired of the narratives that tell us that humans need to earn our dignity. And I will die on the hill of inherent worth and value and infinite possibility for redeemability of every being.
And thank you for the book recs! I quit social media cold turkey following a particularly powerful plant medicine journey last summer. It truly feels like I gained back agency over my own brain and body. Never going back. I now get to enjoy writers like you here on SS!
Thanks for all the amazing work you do in the world, Clementine. It's really invaluable. I unhooked from my last bit of social media in 2020 and it was the best thing I've done for my mental health, so I know about the satisfaction and relief you describe and am stoked for you.
I'd like to offer a book suggestion to you, but I don't want it to be taken as a backhanded suggestion or a negative commentary on anything you've shared here. I'm suggesting the book because I can tell how deeply, sincerely you care about the fate of the planet and the well-being of our nonhuman kin. I also care about those things but am coming at it from a different angle. I would like to see more people on the Left consider what this book and others like it have to say.
I'm a regenerative farmer who, after many years of working on various farms, am about to finally start my own farm business for the first time on some leased land this Spring. Wish me luck. I'm primarily drawn to this work out of a desire to set the world right, to nourish people and to nourish the land that nourishes them and to push things in a restorative, healing direction. But I feel a deep disconnect from my first hand knowledge and experience of ecology, agriculture, and history and what most folks on the Left are prescribing as solutions to our ecological crisis. I've yet to read a book that more succinctly, passionately, beautifully speaks to that disconnect and my concerns than the one I'm recommending.
It's called The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. It's by Lierre Keith, who was a vegan for twenty something years. Despite how the title sounds, she in no way condones factory farming. She condemns factory farming, she condemns CAFOs, and she tries to get to the deeper roots of what is destroying the planet and driving hundreds of species into extinction. She cares deeply about animals. She just goes deeper about it. She's an author that's super canceled because she is a transphobe and since her publication of this book has become super involved in TERF organizations. Honestly, that part of the story is super heartbreaking for me. I was super disappointed to find this out about her after I read the book years ago. I'm queer, in queer community, and have deep running bonds with a number of trans people. I absolutely do not condone anything she has to say about trans people. And I also totally love everything she has to say in her book, which doesn't mention trans people at all. I know that you know that people are messy and that we can learn from people about some things while also disagreeing with them on other things. Frantz Fanon is a homophobe who taught me a lot about colonialism. I feel the need to say all that because most Lefties won't give this book a chance, which is a shame. Because I can think of no better an impassioned primer on ecology, food, justice, animal dignity, and the crisis that is agriculture than this book. Again, it never talks about her stances on gender.
Anyhow, here is a link to a free PDF if you're interested. I think it's a fantastic, moving read. I hope you give it a read and I look forward to reading from your list of recommends as well.
My veganism is a nonnegotiable ethical and spiritual stance, and I’m not interested in anyone’s opinions about veganism, because veganism is a deeply personal choice. Politically, I am against factory farming and the horrific conditions under which billions of animals live and die. I want those who eat animals to take up the fight against factory farms because it is far more their fight than mine, since I will never eat animals under any circumstances. I also think that those who believe that there are people who must eat animals for health reasons need to think seriously about what that will look like on a planet with our population size, given the climate and environmental impact of mass animal agriculture. I don’t believe there is any way to produce so much animal based food, enough that 8 billion people could eat animals daily, without extreme environmental impact, as well as the ethical atrocity of the mass suffering of animals. I don’t believe arguments that say we need to eat animals for health because I am healthy and vegan, and I am well read on nutrition and know that a plant based diet is healthy. But if there are people who insist that eating animals is necessary for health it is on them to grapple with the question of how to ethically and sustainably eat animals given the population size. That is an important conversation but not one that concerns me, because I will always be a vegan.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective, and I respect where you’re coming from on many levels. I agree with you that factory farming, which has only been around for seven decades or so, is immoral, cruel, wasteful, and destructive. On the rest, we certainly disagree, and I think we are working with fundamentally different information and premises.
As an aspiring regenerative grass farmer, I am in fact directly grappling with the question of how to ethically and sustainably eat animals, and what I keep coming to is this: for any of our food to be sustainable, whether from plants or animals, it needs to grow topsoil, not destroy it; it needs to secure and restore watersheds, not destroy them; it needs to sequester carbon from the atmosphere more than it emits; and it needs to foster habitat for a diversity of wildlife, not diminish it.
On all these counts, monocrops of annual grains fail. Agriculture is the single most destructive thing humans have done to the planet. Corn, wheat, and soy destroy entire ecosystems, animals included. Forests clear-cut, rivers dammed, wetlands drained, prairies plowed. We need to go deeper than the question of what is dead on our plate - we need to ask about all who died to get that food on our plate. The suffering of animals in CAFOs is visible to vegetarians and vegans, and rightly so. Their suffering, and the system that causes it, must be stopped.
But behind every soy burger, every bagel, every bowl of rice and beans are innumerable animals and birds killed and driven from their homes. 99% of the Great American Prairie is gone, covered in soy, wheat, and corn, choking the Mississippi with run-off chemicals and eroding topsoils and creating vast dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. How many songbirds, mammals great and small, insects, amphibians, reptiles, and fish are suffering and going extinct because of the way civilization produces its food? Whether those crops end up eaten as bread or indirectly as CAFO meat, they are destroying the world.
If we were sane, we would bring that prairie back. If we did, it would within 15 years sequester more Co2 than the US has emitted in its entire history. In order to bring the Great Prairie back though, we would need the giant herds of buffalo or their equivalents to help with that repair, because grasslands co-evolved with giant herds of ruminants over hundreds of millions of years. Without grazers, grasslands die. The prairie needs its grazing animals, and the grazing animals need their predators. It’s all a complete whole that has been thoroughly destroyed by agriculture, both plant-based and CAFO alike. Appropriately selected ruminants rotationally grazed on pasture, on perennial polycultures, when done well, could bring the prairie back while supporting wildlife. Wheat and soy, annual monocultures, will only destroy it.
Perennial polycultures - forests, wetlands, prairies - are the basic algebra of life on earth. They’re how the earth protects itself. With agriculture, humans clear the land of those perennial polycultures, and the animals that need them, and tear open the soil to plant annuals. This exposes the soil to erosion from wind and rain, and unfiltered sunlight and heat kill the soil microbes. In nature, bare soil is an emergency. In ecosystems, annual plants are the first responders, the repair mechanism when fire, flood, or human activity exposes the soil. The annuals hold the soil in place and jump-start mineral cycles so that perennial plants can come in and permanently stitch things back together to the benefit of all. But with agriculture we are ripping the soil open again and again and planting annuals, mining the soil of all nutrients and killing the soil foodweb.
Two-thirds of the world’s land is covered in grasslands, most of them seasonally dry grasslands. Those grasslands need giant herds of mammals grazing them - otherwise they desertify and release carbon. The vegetarians say we should plow that soil, thus destroying it, and feed humans annual grains, taking all that land from the other creatures that need it so we can feed as many humans as we can possibly create. Ironically, this is the ultimate expression of human supremacy and anthropocentrism.
I’ve worked for many years on small organic vegetable farms. Most vegetable production, organic or not, is deeply unsustainable, because it involves tilling and is often done in climates without adequate year-round rainfall, requiring irrigation, which salinates soil over time. Much of the fresh produce in the US comes from the California Central Valley, which used to be grassland. Now it is a wasteland. The soil there is tilled again and again and mined of nutrients, rivers are dammed, ecosystems destroyed to give us our lettuce, our kale, our beets. Vegetables can be grown in less destructive ways - on small scales, in permanent raised beds, with no tilling, surrounded by supporting perennial polycultures. Think market garden scale. That’s the scale I want my farm to grow vegetables at. But then the issue is this: vegetables, like all annuals, mine the soil for nutrients more than they return them. So how to maintain the fertility of the soil? Your food needs to eat too. What will you feed your food? There are two solutions - animal based fertility (manure, bone meal, blood meal) or fossil fuel and mining based fertility. Compost alone will not do it. If you want the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, you need things that come from animals, because plants have always eaten us, however indirectly. Soil life, the basis of all life, is carnivorous. There are no vegan ecosystems, and a vegan agriculture results over time in a wasteland.
A mixed yield regenerative farm, based on perennial polycultures with appropriately incorporated animals, can provide the fertility necessary to support a small no-till vegetable market garden. Such a system can grow topsoil, sequester carbon, and support pollinators and songbirds and other wildlife. But broad acreage of vegetables cannot support wildlife biodiversity and cannot be supported without inputs from somewhere off-site. In such a system, you still lose soil by plowing it, and with no-till the best you can do is sustain fertility levels with those inputs from off-site, which again must either come from animals or fossil fuels. And you can’t grow topsoil in this way. And we as a species desperately need to be growing topsoil for future generations.
You say it is on meat eaters to demonstrate how we can feed 8 billion sustainably on animal products. But here is the horrible truth - there is no way to feed 8 billion people sustainably, period. This is not an ought statement. It is an is statement. We are beholden to the same laws of ecology as any other species. The only reason we have the population levels we do now is because we have taken so much land from other animals, and because of synthetic nitrogen created from fossil fuels, the mining of phosphorus, and the drawdown of other finite resources. We are chewing the planet to the bone to feed ourselves, plant-based or not. And it can’t go on forever. Again, I am not advocating for anything here. I am stating plain facts. We on the Left need to reconcile ourselves with this predicament, because the fascists are coming up with their own solutions and we need to stop them. We could feed the hungry, fight for justice and reproductive freedoms, fight for human rights while transitioning from annual monocultures to perennial polyculture based solutions. We could soften the landing as best we can. But we are in for a crash course with the consequences of living in expansionist cultures on a finite planet.
That’s my perspective. We may disagree, but I hope you know that I offer up this disagreement with respect for you. I love Fucking Cancelled and the work you do in general and respect you as a thinker and a political person. I know talking about diet can get really personal. I'm not trying to comment on your personal choice to be a vegan. That is a personal decision and I respect your decision. I'm interested in the broader discussions we on the Left are having about justice, saving the planet, and fighting the good fight against the Capitalist class that is embedded in our conversations about food. It's in that spirit I recommended the book. In the spirit of inquiry, spirited discussion, and trying to grapple with the troubles of our times.
First of all, to be clear, I don’t like getting into long discussions in my comment section. I don’t have the time for it and I don’t find it a productive way to engage in discourse.
This conversation started as a response to my plea that we recognize the sentience of animals and stop inflicting horrible levels of torture upon them. On that, we seem to agree.
I am not a farmer or a food systems person and can’t get into a debate about what farming systems should look like. I am not a vegan who believes it is always immoral to kill animals for food, as I have said in my work many times. We are animals and I accept that some animals eat other animals. I never will because it has been made extremely clear to me that it would be wrong for me to do so and I do not want to in my most fundamental being. This is a spiritual stance. But, I am in favour of people who eat animals thinking about how to do that in more ethical and sustainable ways.
While not an expert on the topic, I do know that grains and soy are fed to farmed animals in huge amounts and then those animals are killed and fed to people. So it stands to reason that severely decreasing animal foods would be a much better use of resources. Farming animals on farmed plants is more resource intensive than simply farming plants. All the issues with plant farming are still there with animal farming plus more. Under capitalism.
I think soil regeneration sounds very important and the idea that plants eats animals is very compelling. I don’t think this necessitates killing animals for food. There’s a logical gap there. We also produce manure, and we also die. Our bodies and bodily products could also go back to the earth. I wonder if that has been considered in all of this.
Again, I’m not an expert and this is not my field. I’d love to read more but a book called ‘the vegetarian myth’ is not appealing to me, and the insistence that a vegan diet is unhealthy does not hold up. I’ve read many research based nutrition studies and plant based is extremely healthy when done well.
I also don’t appreciate the many assumptions about my stance implied in these comments. The idea that vegans don’t ‘go deep’ on these topics. My vegan ethics are actually very deeply considered and complex and contain a deep recognition and reverence for predators in the ecosystem. I will write more about this at some point. But I don’t like unpacking everything in a comments section.
We must be able to defend the sentience of farmed animals and their right not to be tortured without answering all the complexities of how we will farm food in a sustainable way. All farming performed under the logic of capitalism will be bad for the earth but the impacts of animal agriculture on climate are staggering. And the necessity of defending sentient beings from torture is imperative regardless of anything else.
Thanks for the image of plants eating animals. I will take that with me. All the best.
After a quick google I can see that the topic of vegan regenerative farming and permaculture already exists with lots of people thinking about and practicing soil regeneration without exploiting or even killing animals. I’ll definitely be reading more about it.
Thanks for taking the time to write back in such detail. I appreciate this exchange and want to respond and dialogue further, but I also wanna respect that you don't like to get into long discussions in your comments sections. So for now, I'd just like to apologize for coming across as assumptive about where you're coming from - I didn't mean to imply that you yourself haven't "gone deep." I can tell you have, and that you're coming from a very deeply considered place with your personal ethics on this issue. In general you come across as a very principled, thoughtful person. What I meant to communicate is that I think a lot of the general discourse on these issues suffers from a disconnect from the complexities that I personally see as someone who's been super involved in agriculture and food production for most of my adult life. I totally understand why you don't want to read a book with a title like that. I think it's a poorly chosen title, especially since upon reading even the first page I can instantly tell that the author cares very deeply about the lives of nonhumans and aches for what we are doing to them and is motivated by a lot of the same ethics that motivate vegans and vegetarians. I'm pretty sure that, as in most cases, the editors/publishers chose the title. But oh well. I'm sorry for blowing up your comments section with essays. Brevity has never been my strong suit. All the best to you too. :)
Thanks, I appreciate that. Veganism is to me what religion is to other people — it is my deepest spiritual commitment and very much in alignment with my belief in seeing the singularity of each being. I think a lot of vegans feel this way and I think people who eat animals who want to engage vegans on this topic should remember that. There’s two levels: a political one and a spiritual one. And the political one is in many ways animated by the spiritual one but is distinct. I’m allll for rewilding (I’m team half earth honestly) and regenerative farming / permaculture is an extremely necessary and important topic that I think can work in tandem with veganism. That’s all for now! But I’m definitely open to more books recs in the future on farming etc.
This is so amazing to read. I was slowly leaving social media, saw your post about fave books of 2023, read Stolen Focus, and then slammed the door on it. I cannot believe how much my LIFE has changed. I’ve gone through the same experience with reading books. I can’t get over how much depth I was missing, how my brain processes information now, and how much happier my nervous system is. I am having so much fun LEARNING again. I’m also sober (drugs & alcohol), but now I’m back to truly being *emotionally* sober. For anyone questioning leaving, I can’t recommend it enough.
Definitely doing more books than social media this year while recovering from long COVID and enjoying the space. I also have been connecting with friends I know are readers, suggesting them a favorite of mine and reading a favorite of theirs, then we will often text each other during our read and connect afterwards and it's such a beautiful way to bond with humans you love.
Loved getting these bite sized reviews! Can't read them all but one or two are definitely going on my list. Right now it's "Rest As Resistance" which I'm excited for, cuz I really need to let that sink in. My Inner Achiever (who thinks we get self worth by achieving, not just existing) has been so studious and helped me do so much but she needs some love and comfort and time to rest and play.
Oh and so glad Jay got you onto the Pratchett train! A friend did that for me also and I've been delighted by every book; Wee Free Men is the most recent, the story about an aspiring witch, and this witch-going-wizard book sounds like would be the perfect complement for me to read.
You inspired me to quit social media. I'm on day 7 now, and I echo everything you have said. I read before, but now I'm really READING. I feel so immersed in it, so connected! I've had ideas for writing, and I haven't written in years! Everything is slower and more spacious. I'm filling that space with things that are joyful. All the annoying social justice rhetoric that I would consume masochistcally, deriving some sick pleasure in infuriating myself, is gone from life! It sure as hell hasn't shown up here in the real world yet, and that shit was taking hours a day from me! I too have missed keeping abreast of world affairs though, so thank you for sharing that news app recommendation. Somewhat hesitant to invite the world back in and risk of having this new found peace disturbed, but I know I can't handicap myself in that way forever. Ultimately, I do care about my fellow humans, even if they are a disruptive bunch!
I'm really looking forward to your podcast about AMB's book. I'm sooooo tired of the narratives that tell us that humans need to earn our dignity. And I will die on the hill of inherent worth and value and infinite possibility for redeemability of every being.
And thank you for the book recs! I quit social media cold turkey following a particularly powerful plant medicine journey last summer. It truly feels like I gained back agency over my own brain and body. Never going back. I now get to enjoy writers like you here on SS!
I love reading recommendations! I put a few on my to-read list, thanks. And I'm happy you enjoyed To Paradise! :)
Thanks for all the amazing work you do in the world, Clementine. It's really invaluable. I unhooked from my last bit of social media in 2020 and it was the best thing I've done for my mental health, so I know about the satisfaction and relief you describe and am stoked for you.
I'd like to offer a book suggestion to you, but I don't want it to be taken as a backhanded suggestion or a negative commentary on anything you've shared here. I'm suggesting the book because I can tell how deeply, sincerely you care about the fate of the planet and the well-being of our nonhuman kin. I also care about those things but am coming at it from a different angle. I would like to see more people on the Left consider what this book and others like it have to say.
I'm a regenerative farmer who, after many years of working on various farms, am about to finally start my own farm business for the first time on some leased land this Spring. Wish me luck. I'm primarily drawn to this work out of a desire to set the world right, to nourish people and to nourish the land that nourishes them and to push things in a restorative, healing direction. But I feel a deep disconnect from my first hand knowledge and experience of ecology, agriculture, and history and what most folks on the Left are prescribing as solutions to our ecological crisis. I've yet to read a book that more succinctly, passionately, beautifully speaks to that disconnect and my concerns than the one I'm recommending.
It's called The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. It's by Lierre Keith, who was a vegan for twenty something years. Despite how the title sounds, she in no way condones factory farming. She condemns factory farming, she condemns CAFOs, and she tries to get to the deeper roots of what is destroying the planet and driving hundreds of species into extinction. She cares deeply about animals. She just goes deeper about it. She's an author that's super canceled because she is a transphobe and since her publication of this book has become super involved in TERF organizations. Honestly, that part of the story is super heartbreaking for me. I was super disappointed to find this out about her after I read the book years ago. I'm queer, in queer community, and have deep running bonds with a number of trans people. I absolutely do not condone anything she has to say about trans people. And I also totally love everything she has to say in her book, which doesn't mention trans people at all. I know that you know that people are messy and that we can learn from people about some things while also disagreeing with them on other things. Frantz Fanon is a homophobe who taught me a lot about colonialism. I feel the need to say all that because most Lefties won't give this book a chance, which is a shame. Because I can think of no better an impassioned primer on ecology, food, justice, animal dignity, and the crisis that is agriculture than this book. Again, it never talks about her stances on gender.
Anyhow, here is a link to a free PDF if you're interested. I think it's a fantastic, moving read. I hope you give it a read and I look forward to reading from your list of recommends as well.
https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Food/The_Vegetarian_Myth.pdf
My veganism is a nonnegotiable ethical and spiritual stance, and I’m not interested in anyone’s opinions about veganism, because veganism is a deeply personal choice. Politically, I am against factory farming and the horrific conditions under which billions of animals live and die. I want those who eat animals to take up the fight against factory farms because it is far more their fight than mine, since I will never eat animals under any circumstances. I also think that those who believe that there are people who must eat animals for health reasons need to think seriously about what that will look like on a planet with our population size, given the climate and environmental impact of mass animal agriculture. I don’t believe there is any way to produce so much animal based food, enough that 8 billion people could eat animals daily, without extreme environmental impact, as well as the ethical atrocity of the mass suffering of animals. I don’t believe arguments that say we need to eat animals for health because I am healthy and vegan, and I am well read on nutrition and know that a plant based diet is healthy. But if there are people who insist that eating animals is necessary for health it is on them to grapple with the question of how to ethically and sustainably eat animals given the population size. That is an important conversation but not one that concerns me, because I will always be a vegan.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective, and I respect where you’re coming from on many levels. I agree with you that factory farming, which has only been around for seven decades or so, is immoral, cruel, wasteful, and destructive. On the rest, we certainly disagree, and I think we are working with fundamentally different information and premises.
As an aspiring regenerative grass farmer, I am in fact directly grappling with the question of how to ethically and sustainably eat animals, and what I keep coming to is this: for any of our food to be sustainable, whether from plants or animals, it needs to grow topsoil, not destroy it; it needs to secure and restore watersheds, not destroy them; it needs to sequester carbon from the atmosphere more than it emits; and it needs to foster habitat for a diversity of wildlife, not diminish it.
On all these counts, monocrops of annual grains fail. Agriculture is the single most destructive thing humans have done to the planet. Corn, wheat, and soy destroy entire ecosystems, animals included. Forests clear-cut, rivers dammed, wetlands drained, prairies plowed. We need to go deeper than the question of what is dead on our plate - we need to ask about all who died to get that food on our plate. The suffering of animals in CAFOs is visible to vegetarians and vegans, and rightly so. Their suffering, and the system that causes it, must be stopped.
But behind every soy burger, every bagel, every bowl of rice and beans are innumerable animals and birds killed and driven from their homes. 99% of the Great American Prairie is gone, covered in soy, wheat, and corn, choking the Mississippi with run-off chemicals and eroding topsoils and creating vast dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. How many songbirds, mammals great and small, insects, amphibians, reptiles, and fish are suffering and going extinct because of the way civilization produces its food? Whether those crops end up eaten as bread or indirectly as CAFO meat, they are destroying the world.
If we were sane, we would bring that prairie back. If we did, it would within 15 years sequester more Co2 than the US has emitted in its entire history. In order to bring the Great Prairie back though, we would need the giant herds of buffalo or their equivalents to help with that repair, because grasslands co-evolved with giant herds of ruminants over hundreds of millions of years. Without grazers, grasslands die. The prairie needs its grazing animals, and the grazing animals need their predators. It’s all a complete whole that has been thoroughly destroyed by agriculture, both plant-based and CAFO alike. Appropriately selected ruminants rotationally grazed on pasture, on perennial polycultures, when done well, could bring the prairie back while supporting wildlife. Wheat and soy, annual monocultures, will only destroy it.
Perennial polycultures - forests, wetlands, prairies - are the basic algebra of life on earth. They’re how the earth protects itself. With agriculture, humans clear the land of those perennial polycultures, and the animals that need them, and tear open the soil to plant annuals. This exposes the soil to erosion from wind and rain, and unfiltered sunlight and heat kill the soil microbes. In nature, bare soil is an emergency. In ecosystems, annual plants are the first responders, the repair mechanism when fire, flood, or human activity exposes the soil. The annuals hold the soil in place and jump-start mineral cycles so that perennial plants can come in and permanently stitch things back together to the benefit of all. But with agriculture we are ripping the soil open again and again and planting annuals, mining the soil of all nutrients and killing the soil foodweb.
Two-thirds of the world’s land is covered in grasslands, most of them seasonally dry grasslands. Those grasslands need giant herds of mammals grazing them - otherwise they desertify and release carbon. The vegetarians say we should plow that soil, thus destroying it, and feed humans annual grains, taking all that land from the other creatures that need it so we can feed as many humans as we can possibly create. Ironically, this is the ultimate expression of human supremacy and anthropocentrism.
I’ve worked for many years on small organic vegetable farms. Most vegetable production, organic or not, is deeply unsustainable, because it involves tilling and is often done in climates without adequate year-round rainfall, requiring irrigation, which salinates soil over time. Much of the fresh produce in the US comes from the California Central Valley, which used to be grassland. Now it is a wasteland. The soil there is tilled again and again and mined of nutrients, rivers are dammed, ecosystems destroyed to give us our lettuce, our kale, our beets. Vegetables can be grown in less destructive ways - on small scales, in permanent raised beds, with no tilling, surrounded by supporting perennial polycultures. Think market garden scale. That’s the scale I want my farm to grow vegetables at. But then the issue is this: vegetables, like all annuals, mine the soil for nutrients more than they return them. So how to maintain the fertility of the soil? Your food needs to eat too. What will you feed your food? There are two solutions - animal based fertility (manure, bone meal, blood meal) or fossil fuel and mining based fertility. Compost alone will not do it. If you want the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, you need things that come from animals, because plants have always eaten us, however indirectly. Soil life, the basis of all life, is carnivorous. There are no vegan ecosystems, and a vegan agriculture results over time in a wasteland.
A mixed yield regenerative farm, based on perennial polycultures with appropriately incorporated animals, can provide the fertility necessary to support a small no-till vegetable market garden. Such a system can grow topsoil, sequester carbon, and support pollinators and songbirds and other wildlife. But broad acreage of vegetables cannot support wildlife biodiversity and cannot be supported without inputs from somewhere off-site. In such a system, you still lose soil by plowing it, and with no-till the best you can do is sustain fertility levels with those inputs from off-site, which again must either come from animals or fossil fuels. And you can’t grow topsoil in this way. And we as a species desperately need to be growing topsoil for future generations.
You say it is on meat eaters to demonstrate how we can feed 8 billion sustainably on animal products. But here is the horrible truth - there is no way to feed 8 billion people sustainably, period. This is not an ought statement. It is an is statement. We are beholden to the same laws of ecology as any other species. The only reason we have the population levels we do now is because we have taken so much land from other animals, and because of synthetic nitrogen created from fossil fuels, the mining of phosphorus, and the drawdown of other finite resources. We are chewing the planet to the bone to feed ourselves, plant-based or not. And it can’t go on forever. Again, I am not advocating for anything here. I am stating plain facts. We on the Left need to reconcile ourselves with this predicament, because the fascists are coming up with their own solutions and we need to stop them. We could feed the hungry, fight for justice and reproductive freedoms, fight for human rights while transitioning from annual monocultures to perennial polyculture based solutions. We could soften the landing as best we can. But we are in for a crash course with the consequences of living in expansionist cultures on a finite planet.
That’s my perspective. We may disagree, but I hope you know that I offer up this disagreement with respect for you. I love Fucking Cancelled and the work you do in general and respect you as a thinker and a political person. I know talking about diet can get really personal. I'm not trying to comment on your personal choice to be a vegan. That is a personal decision and I respect your decision. I'm interested in the broader discussions we on the Left are having about justice, saving the planet, and fighting the good fight against the Capitalist class that is embedded in our conversations about food. It's in that spirit I recommended the book. In the spirit of inquiry, spirited discussion, and trying to grapple with the troubles of our times.
First of all, to be clear, I don’t like getting into long discussions in my comment section. I don’t have the time for it and I don’t find it a productive way to engage in discourse.
This conversation started as a response to my plea that we recognize the sentience of animals and stop inflicting horrible levels of torture upon them. On that, we seem to agree.
I am not a farmer or a food systems person and can’t get into a debate about what farming systems should look like. I am not a vegan who believes it is always immoral to kill animals for food, as I have said in my work many times. We are animals and I accept that some animals eat other animals. I never will because it has been made extremely clear to me that it would be wrong for me to do so and I do not want to in my most fundamental being. This is a spiritual stance. But, I am in favour of people who eat animals thinking about how to do that in more ethical and sustainable ways.
While not an expert on the topic, I do know that grains and soy are fed to farmed animals in huge amounts and then those animals are killed and fed to people. So it stands to reason that severely decreasing animal foods would be a much better use of resources. Farming animals on farmed plants is more resource intensive than simply farming plants. All the issues with plant farming are still there with animal farming plus more. Under capitalism.
I think soil regeneration sounds very important and the idea that plants eats animals is very compelling. I don’t think this necessitates killing animals for food. There’s a logical gap there. We also produce manure, and we also die. Our bodies and bodily products could also go back to the earth. I wonder if that has been considered in all of this.
Again, I’m not an expert and this is not my field. I’d love to read more but a book called ‘the vegetarian myth’ is not appealing to me, and the insistence that a vegan diet is unhealthy does not hold up. I’ve read many research based nutrition studies and plant based is extremely healthy when done well.
I also don’t appreciate the many assumptions about my stance implied in these comments. The idea that vegans don’t ‘go deep’ on these topics. My vegan ethics are actually very deeply considered and complex and contain a deep recognition and reverence for predators in the ecosystem. I will write more about this at some point. But I don’t like unpacking everything in a comments section.
We must be able to defend the sentience of farmed animals and their right not to be tortured without answering all the complexities of how we will farm food in a sustainable way. All farming performed under the logic of capitalism will be bad for the earth but the impacts of animal agriculture on climate are staggering. And the necessity of defending sentient beings from torture is imperative regardless of anything else.
Thanks for the image of plants eating animals. I will take that with me. All the best.
After a quick google I can see that the topic of vegan regenerative farming and permaculture already exists with lots of people thinking about and practicing soil regeneration without exploiting or even killing animals. I’ll definitely be reading more about it.
Thanks for taking the time to write back in such detail. I appreciate this exchange and want to respond and dialogue further, but I also wanna respect that you don't like to get into long discussions in your comments sections. So for now, I'd just like to apologize for coming across as assumptive about where you're coming from - I didn't mean to imply that you yourself haven't "gone deep." I can tell you have, and that you're coming from a very deeply considered place with your personal ethics on this issue. In general you come across as a very principled, thoughtful person. What I meant to communicate is that I think a lot of the general discourse on these issues suffers from a disconnect from the complexities that I personally see as someone who's been super involved in agriculture and food production for most of my adult life. I totally understand why you don't want to read a book with a title like that. I think it's a poorly chosen title, especially since upon reading even the first page I can instantly tell that the author cares very deeply about the lives of nonhumans and aches for what we are doing to them and is motivated by a lot of the same ethics that motivate vegans and vegetarians. I'm pretty sure that, as in most cases, the editors/publishers chose the title. But oh well. I'm sorry for blowing up your comments section with essays. Brevity has never been my strong suit. All the best to you too. :)
Thanks, I appreciate that. Veganism is to me what religion is to other people — it is my deepest spiritual commitment and very much in alignment with my belief in seeing the singularity of each being. I think a lot of vegans feel this way and I think people who eat animals who want to engage vegans on this topic should remember that. There’s two levels: a political one and a spiritual one. And the political one is in many ways animated by the spiritual one but is distinct. I’m allll for rewilding (I’m team half earth honestly) and regenerative farming / permaculture is an extremely necessary and important topic that I think can work in tandem with veganism. That’s all for now! But I’m definitely open to more books recs in the future on farming etc.