Olive Oil Can Tap Dance!

by Zoë Harcombe

  Keith knocks down all three beliefs as follows:

  The moral argument

  I am covering the arguments in the order that Keith does and I could not believe how quickly Keith changed my views in this first part of the book. Even though the Barry Groves and Sally Fallon Morell presentations at the Weston A Price Foundation conference in March 2010 had ended my 15 year period of being vegetarian, I still believed that there was a clear line in the sand on ‘killing for food’ and that vegetarians were on the right side of the line. Oh boy!

  In a nutshell the moral vegetarian argument is “we should not kill”. Keith’s response is:

  a) There is absolutely nothing, nothing at all, that even a vegan can eat that something has not died for (several living things in fact);

  b) Man is not at the top of a food chain – that is an arrogant view that only ‘man’ could hold. All humans are part of thecircle of life. Our bodies end up as food for the soil, just as every other animal that dies (ideally on the prairie) leaves their nutrients and minerals to go back into the soil for new life.

  a) When Keith expanded upon the first point, I was kicking myself within seconds. How could I have been so naive? Keith shared her original vegan view: “I wanted to believe that my life – my physical existence – was possible without killing, without death. It’s not.”

  Before long, the examples came thick and fast and became irrefutable. How many slugs are killed for a lettuce? How many millions of species in a tablespoon of top soil are trashed every second by Cargill? How many rabbits and mice are killed in cultivated fields by industrial size farming equipment? How many fish die, so that rivers can be diverted to irrigate the vegan’s grains? How many wolves and bison have been killed because we turned their homeland into farmland – for grains and plant food? Keith answers the last one: “There were somewhere between 60 and 100 million bison in the United States in 1491. Now there are 350,000 bison and only 12 to 15,000 of those are pure bison that were not cross bred with domestic cattle. The land held between 425,000 and a million wolves; only 10,000 now remain.” “The North American prairie has been reduced to 2% of its original size and the topsoil, once twelve feet deep, can now only be measured in inches.”

  b) Point (b) is so integrally linked to (a) – one of the reasons that no life is possible without death is that the soil upon which life depends relies upon death to return nutrients to the land. Keith explains her first hand experience of trying (and failing) to grow her own food without anything needing to die… (Any vegan that argues that they can grow their own lettuce, with nothing having to die, has to read the whole of this moral section of the book. Keith tried it and then some! The full story is funny and powerful at the same time).

  Organic Gardening magazine soon explained to Keith that the first commandment of organic growing was “feed the soil, not the plant.” She learned that Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium was the “triple Goddess of gardeners.” All three are minerals given back to the land when animals (including humans) die. (Calcium is also a limiting factor for soil – also found in the bones and remains of animals that die and so generously give back their nutrients to the land). We can get nitrogen from fossil fuels, or nitrogen can be given back to the land by the circle of life and death. We are not far from the time (peak oil and all that) when we have the stark choice – use fossil fuels for fertiliser for food or for running the power upon which modern life has come to depend. What do we do when the oil runs out? Manure and carcasses or fossil fuel for fertiliser? – that’s our choice.

  As this part of the book unfolds, Keith hits you with one stark fact after another:

  – “70% of all water from rivers and underground reserves is being spread onto irrigated land that grows one third of the world’s food,” writes Fred Pearce in When the rivers run dry.”

  – “Of China’s 23,000 miles of large rivers, 80 percent don’t support fish anymore.” “Set aside the fossil fuel for the fertilizer and transportation. If you live in Vermont or California and eat vegan brown rice – this is what you’re eating: dead fish and dead birds from a dying river.”

  – “We’re out of topsoil, out of water, out of species, and out of space in the atmosphere for the carbon we can’t seem to stop burning.”

  You come to realise that the ultimate role that we (humans) can play in this universe is to continue to be a part of the universe when we die. Whatever happens to our soul, our body is food for worms, which are food for birds, which are food for cats, which are food for their predators and so on. Humans often look for significance – for a sense of purpose in life. Our purpose is as part of the whole circle of life. All of us have this part to play.

  Keith continues, “The native prairie is now 99.8% gone. There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat and soy.” With all that land cultivated for vegetarian food, which was once home to free roaming animals, there is also no natural process by which the top soil can be rejuvenated. There is only so much that fossil fuel fertiliser can do to repair the damage being done by overworking our scarce land in the name of profit. No wonder (GM) Genetically Modified crops became a necessity – we have to modify crops when we have destroyed the earth to the point that it cannot yield ‘normal’ crops.

  “‘You can look a cow in the eye,’ reads an ad for soy burgers. What about a buffalo?” asks Keith. “Five percent of a species is needed to ensure enough diversity for long-term survival, and less than 1 percent of the buffalo are left.”

  Keith concludes: “It is my conviction that growing annual grains is an activity that cannot be redeemed. It requires wholesale extermination of ecosystems – the land has to be cleared of all life.” We use 5.6 billion pounds (weight) of pesticides per year (a statistic I found elsewhere) – pesticides being designed to kill any living thing that also wants to feed on (our) growing food.

  I realised in this part of the book that it comes down to black and white and shades of grey. To the vegan, the world is black and white – “meat is murder.” Keith describes this as “a simple ethical code… but it is the black-and-white thinking of a child.” This is a critical part of the book and one with which I resonated very strongly. I was far more black and white in my 20’s. Things were right and wrong. (Good days and bad days!) This is very child-like thinking. The simple world of a child is right and wrong. The more mature world of the adult has many shades of grey.

  The shades of grey in this killing debate are inescapable – you may draw the line at eating cows, but not dogs; you may draw the line at eating chicken, but not red meat; you may draw the line at eating fish, but not meat; you may draw the line at eating eggs, but not the flesh of animals; you may draw the line by wearing leather shoes, but eating nothing from an animal; you may have a vegan diet and wardrobe – but bison, birds, fish, rabbits, mice and thousands of living creatures in top soil have died for your soya burger and lettuce.

  It’s not that vegans are right and vegetarians are wrong, or vegetarians are right and omnivores are wrong, or omnivores are right and carnivores are wrong – it’s about where we each choose to draw our line. Better still, to return to the arrogant view that ‘man’ thinks he is at the top of a food chain, Keith concluded “I’m not going to draw a line. I’m going to draw a circle.” We are part of the circle of life, just as any other animal is. They and we need to live and die to give back to the land, so that birth and death can continue.

  I remember non-veggies saying to me when I was veggie “If we didn’t eat the animals they wouldn’t be here” and I just couldn’t comprehend the point that they were making. Would that be such a bad thing? Surely the animals would be better off not living if they were just going to be killed for food? (‘Better to have loved/lived and lost, than never to have loved/lived at all’ kind of thing. That’s a massive philosophical argument in itself – we’re all going to die – is it worth being here at all?!) Couldn’t we keep animals and not kill them? I just didn’t think of the practicalities that
no farmer keeps ruminants (that’s the collective term for grass grazing animals – cows, sheep, goats etc) as pets. Animals are kept for food and they always have been within communities throughout history. Each settlement would safeguard the delicate balance between the ‘goose and the golden egg’ – to protect any givers of eggs/milk and the time when it comes to eat the giver of these vital foods. I don’t want a world without sheep & lambs, or cows & calves, in the fields. I want natural manure from these grazing animals nourishing the land naturally. I don’t want oil used to mow the grass, which ruminants could have eaten and then more oil used in fertiliser instead of manure. Animals are a vital part of the circle of life, not a line that modern, arrogant, man thinks he can draw on the land. This brings us nicely on to…

  The political argument

  The political vegetarian argument is that we can only feed the world if everyone is vegetarian. Keith quotes Jim Motavalli, who, in turn quotes the British group Vegfam: “a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn or only 2 producing cattle.” The maths behind this is not provided and Keith can’t work out where it could come from, but she notes that any such statistics will always find against cattle because they start from the premise that the cattle is fed grain. Hence, of course land would produce more grain to be eaten as grain than if that grain were fed to cattle and the cattle output were subsequently calculated. What Keith (and every real food person) argues is – we should not be feeding grain to cattle. Not ever. Not in any circumstances. The maths then falls over.

  Keith opens the political argument section with a detailed description of the digestive system of a ruminant. The term ruminant means a cud-chewing animal, characterised by having four stomach compartments – the first being called a rumen. Keith describes how a cow, for example, is entirely reliant upon a magical internal ecosystem comprising bacteria, fungi and multiples of microbial cultures. The cow is feeding on the bacteria and the microbes are living within (feeding upon) the cow – it is the way of life for/in a ruminant. Grains turn the normally neutral rumen (first stomach) acidic, which makes the cow sick and bloated (not dissimilar to the effect that grains have on many humans!) Hence we should not be feeding ruminants grains. Ruminants, by definition, need to chew on cud – grass.

  Joel Salatin (one of the role models of the local sustainable model) then does the maths for his 10-acre farm in Virginia. He produces 3,000 eggs, 1,000 chickens, 80 hens, 2,000lbs of beef, 2,500lbs of pork, 100 turkeys, 50 rabbits and a few inches of topsoil. No fossil fuels needed whatsoever. The chickens get a bit of supplemental grain (they can ‘stomach it’, literally) and everything else eats grass. Keith compares the calories and nutrition from this organic farm vs. the malnutrition, pellagra and fatal disease that the soy, wheat, corn community would end up with. It is incomparable in favour of eating the sustainable (animal) way.

  The arguments against the political vegetarian are numerous:

  a) Agriculture (turning the little arable land that the world has into grain and soy fields) is destroying the planet. It ‘murders’ the top soil and is completely unsustainable, in that nothing is being done to reverse the damage. Instead – food manufacturers are looking to create GM ‘frankenfoods’, which can still grow when all life and health has been removed from the land. As Keith says: “Who cares if more food can be produced by farming when farming is destroying the world?”

  b) Manure and animals living and dying on land is the natural way to fertilise – to replenish the top soil so vital to life. To replace animals in the food chain with soy and grain is to destroy the entire circle of life. This is also completely unsustainable. There is a finite amount of fossil fuel in the world to use for fertilisers. There can be a sufficient amount of manure from the right number of animals occupying the right land space.

  As Keith challenges: “Political vegetarians need to answer this question – what is going to feed your food? Fossil fuel or manure?”

  c) It is nonsense to say that we are feeding grain to cattle, which could be used to feed humans. We are feeding grain to cattle, which they cannot digest, because grain is so cheap and so subsidised, that grain manufacturers have to dump it somewhere. Grain to America is the butter mountain of Europe. If grain production were not so lucrative and well subsidised, there is no way that cattle would be fed grain – they might be left to eat the grass that they are supposed to eat. I say ‘might’ because grain also causes cattle to fatten quickly (as it does humans) and this makes the cattle heavier, quicker and thus makes the animals more lucrative in the process. Win win for Cargill. Lose lose for the ruminants and the earth, which they have not been allowed to renourish.

  d) When we factor in all the water and oil and fossil fuels used to ‘feed’ the land in the way that animals would do naturally, the price of grain is the planet itself. Richard Manning is quoted as saying “A typical farm in 1940 produced two calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy used. By 1974 that ratio was 1.1. As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of fuel for a human – somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food.” When fertilisers, pesticides, machinery, harvesting, transportation and so on are taken into account, an acre of corn requires about 50 gallons of oil.

  e) What limited land there is in the world suitable for agriculture, America has more than its share. Encouraging the world to eat grains and soy (the USA food pyramid, the USDA dietary guidelines) makes the world dependent on America for its food – the ultimate dependence. Western countries support the giant food producers with subsidies totalling $360 billion. This substantially reduces world prices. As Oxfam has observed: “Exporters can offer US surpluses for sale at prices around half the cost of production – destroying local agriculture”. US aid is anything but – it is destroying local farmers and communities – making the world dependent on America to eat.

  As Keith says “This is why there are no international aid agencies that suggest vegetarianism as a solution to world hunger: it isn’t one.”

  Gary Taubes once joked “My wife says I blame everything on carbohydrates.”

  In my view, the most serious thing that we need to blame on carbohydrates is that we have exploded the world population to completely unsustainable levels as a direct result of carbohydrates. When communities were based around sustainable, local, lands and foods, the population of the world could only ever be a number that could be sustained.

  Agriculture and grains have enabled an unsustainable explosion in the number of people that we could feed, but this has never been done in a sustainable way. I thought I was a lone voice in thinking this until I read the following in The Vegetarian Myth:

  “Breaking our dependence on the sun and nature’s fertility meant an explosion in grain production and a concomitant expansion in the human population. There are now over 6 billion humans. Understand: billions of us are only here because of fossil fuel, because we figured out how to transform stored energy into edible energy. As the natural gas and oil get more expensive, and then prohibitively expensive, there will be no way to keep that grain coming. And then? It doesn’t sound like a party I want to attend.”

  The world population is due to reach 9 billion by 2050, about the time that the oceans are forecast to be empty of fish and long past peak oil. Keith estimates that we already have multiples too many people in the world – at least 10 times too many, maybe 100!

  The stark reality is that this is an argument that neither the omnivores nor the vegetarians can win. There is nosustainable way to feed the current population – let alone the level that is forecast within the next 40 years. Grain, soy and agriculture are completely unsustainable, for any population level, as they destroy the planet without replenishing it in any way. Meat, fish and eggs are equally unsustainable, for the current population level, as there is not enough grazing land in the world for enough animals to feed us all and we have polluted and raped the ocea
ns of their bounty. Had we not destroyed pastures for grain, the world population would have grown naturally and sustainably to sustainable levels.

  Toward the end of this part of the book is a blunt message – forget peak oil. “Peak soil was ten thousand years ago, on the day before agriculture began.”

  We then move to…

  The nutritional argument

  Even though I never bought this argument, I’ll cover it for completeness and because it is a very interesting part of the book and because many people do use this as a reason for being vegetarian. Unfortunately, dieticians and many charities (World Cancer Research Fund, British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK) seem to be on hand to encourage this position. The nutritional arguments are as follows:

  a) Humans evolved to eat plants and not animals;

  b) Animal foods contain cholesterol and this will kill us;

  c) Animal foods contain fat and this will kill us;

  d) Vegetarian and vegan foods are healthy;

  e) Animal foods contain fat and this will make us fat.

  Keith devotes over 100 pages to this, Part 3, of the book and the attention that she devotes to each argument is impressive. As an example, I address the ‘what did we evolve to eat’ debate in Chapter 12 of The Obesity Epidemic, but Keith goes into it in far more detail. She goes through three roles of teeth, four actions of the jaw, four digestive processes, nine activities of the stomach, two of the gall bladder and every detail on gut flora, the colon and even the length of the small intestine to compare humans, dogs and sheep. She quotes Dr.s Michael and Mary Eades to provide the conclusion: “In anthropological scientific circles, there’s absolutely no debate about it – every respected authority will confirm that we were hunters. Our meat eating heritage is an inescapable fact.” I concluded the same from anthropological research.