The Vegetarian Imperative

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Nonfiction

How about meatless Mondays? 

THE VEGETARIAN IMPERATIVE
By Anand M. Saxena
Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by Rita Richardson

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a hundred times. Eat more fruits and vegetables. After you read this book, you may never want to eat anything else.

The Vegetarian Imperative is not an invitation but an order. An order to curb our unending love of meat and dairy products, the production of which is slowly but surely draining and straining our natural resources to the breaking point.

If you already are a vegan, you'll find plenty of fodder to substantiate your beliefs. If you're a meat, cheese, or dairy lover, you may not like the results of the author's investigations. (He is a lifelong vegetarian himself.)

Saxena describes in detail how our insatiable desire for meat is destroying and decimating every known ecosystem by land and by sea.

In a factual, reportorial fashion--never evangelical or preachy--he presents graphs, tables, footnotes, and charts that show dramatically how we are killing the earth and ourselves with our meat and dairy-based menus.

Chronic diseases, starvation, exhausted resources--a recipe for disaster--are the results of our eating habits. Cattle use land and water and lots of it. Lagoons have become public health hazards. Fish swim in contaminated waters from manure land runoff, while fishing trawlers rake the ocean floor, upsetting the natural order of things.

It's enough to put one from eating anything. 

You may by now be thinking this is another doomsday scenario but it's really a plea to wake up and pay attention to facts like these:

• Emerging nations that once existed solely on a grain and plant-based diet are now devouring meat, adding to the problem.
• Chicken has more cholesterol than beef or pork.
• The daily intake of just 1 ounce of processed meat raises the chance of colorectal cancer by 50 percent.
• Female vegetarians outnumber males 2 to 1.
• The average American consumes 35 pounds of cheese and 22 gallons of milk per year.
• “Farms” in Asia provide 80 percent of the shrimp we eat.

The author readily admits that vegetarianism has never really caught on in our country. Meat and cheese are more satisfying than a bowl of carrots. But he cautions that we need to start making better choices. 

He presents three good arguments for a plant-based diet: personal health; saving the environment for future generations; and combating world hunger. It's hard to argue that these are not superlative reasons to confront reality.

Cut-up meat, all sanitized and wrapped in plastic on a tray, gives the shopper no hint of the inhumane conditions in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). Fish fillets gleaming on ice at the fishmonger don't tell the back story of cages, “farming,” feces, and hormone-infected waters.

This book is a cry for help.

We can't all plant victory gardens or recreate the pastoral idyll of a small family farm, but we can make ourselves aware of where our food really comes from. We can adopt a more plant-based diet; support local farm initiatives; and if not cut out meat completely, then cut down so that meat is a condiment and not the main course. (This is my take-away from the book and not the author's.) 

Should you read this book? That depends on how much you want to know about the current state of food. Saxena sums it up well:

...the current situation and future trends indicate that increasing population, overconsumption, degradation of the environment and exhaustion of...resources may impose...serious restraints on absolute dietary freedom. We must drastically reduce our consumption of food of animal origin and eat more plant-based foods for our lifestyles to become sustainable.

He does an admirable job of backing up this thesis and has done a good job of convincing this reader to begin making better dietary choices. 

For a start: Meatless Mondays anyone?