We do not need to convine everyone to be meatless to help the environment and the food system. We need to go back to traditional methods that farms used to use before chemicals and factories.

March 13th, while speaking in the auditorium at the 15th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, Lierre Kieth was assaulted by pie throwing goons. The 3 pies were laced with hot pepper and therefor had an effect similar to pepper spray, blinding the author for a time. The painful attack was was carried out by three masked, militant vegans unhappy with the substance of the authors new book, The Vegetarian Myth.

Morally, vegans have a point, but they seem to feel that relative intelligence is the only thing that gives living things value. The more radical vegans don’t seem to understand the ecosystems, or balance of nature at all.
For one thing plants struggle just as hard to survive as animals, they are complex living things, and I find it hard to say they deserve death any more than animals. The fact is most animals have to kill something to survive. Unless you can survive entirely off of nectar or fruit, manure, dirt or sunlight, you have to kill something to eat.

For another thing growing plants can be destructive to the environment too, mono crops with lots of pesticides and chemical fertalizer are very destructive to the environment. There are plenty of methods of growing food that may be less productive in the short term, but in the long term are far more sustainable. Every ecosystem is different. Sometimes grazing animals actually benefit the environment, American buffalo for example lived in harmony with their environment for millions of years, and humans and other predators ate the buffalo. Problems are only caused when you introduce alien species that aren’t well adapted to the local ecosystem.

Vegans seem to make outrageous health claims too. A lot of my friends are vegan or vegetarian, (and most of them aren’t pushy and preachy I might add). However they don’t seem any healthier then me. I’ve known some very preachy vegans though, who seem to get sick with a cold or flu every 2 or 3 months, while they constantly told me how “healthy” their diet was. I usually only get sick once a year despite too much sugar, meat and smoking. It kind of makes my wonder about the their “healthy” diet. If I search online, I find tons of articles both pro-vegan and pro-omnivore, but not much data comparing the life spans of the two groups. Also I’ve read many articles about how bad margarine and many common vegetable oils are for you, (mostly due to how they are processed). It’s hard to tell who’s accurate, because there is so much bias on both sides. The general gist I get is that all extreme diets have trade offs, plus different people have different dietary needs.