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Because familiarity breeds the assumption that one understands what one doesn’t, and because people tend not to question the sociocultural norms they are born into, even, in this case, when those are extremely dangerous.People think they know what they are familiar with, and they are familiar with eating. So, like those who think they know how to run a school because they have been to school, think they know about sex because they have had sex, or think they understand another person because they’ve encountered him or her in a checkout line, they are full of opinions, and many of them are wrong. This is a well-established cognitive bias.The following are suggestions for talking to nonvegans about veganism. They are from my book “Trillions of Universes” and can be reproduced and distributed as long as the material is not edited and is properly attributed to me.Answers to Arguments against VeganismYou vegans think you are superior. This is precisely the opposite of the vegan position. Vegans are vegan because they believe that in an essential, defining respect, they are NOT, in some important respects, superior to the trillions of other animals with which we share the planet. Vegans know that other animals are just like them in being sentient creatures to whom their own well-being matters. This makes those other creatures into moral subjects as opposed to objects with which we can do as we will.Where do you get your protein? On average, 14 percent of the calories in plant foods are from protein, MORE than enough to provide the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, and all the essential amino acids—the constituents of proteins—are found in readily available veggie sources. Vegans with high protein requirements—ones who are engaged in body building, for example—can concentrate on wide variety of high-protein plant foods. Ask the vegan gorilla and water buffalo where they get their protein. This one really is a no-brainer.Veganism is too expensive. If one were to eat ONLY processed vegan foods—vegan ice cream, vegan cheese, vegan hamburgers, and so on—then yes, veganism could be relatively expensive, though not that much more so than is the average carnivorous diet. Meat and cheese are among the most expensive items in the grocery store. As of this writing,[1] the website How Much Is It? | HowMuchIsIt.org gives the price of ribeye steak at $7-to-$15 per pound, the price of fillet mignon at $16-to-$20 a pound, the price of premium chicken breast at $3-to-$5 per pound, and the price of cheddar cheese at $6-to-$13 per pound (and much, much more for premium varieties). An economist friend of mine recently did a calculation for me. At the lowest end—based on 2014 commodity prices for dry soybeans and rice—one could supply the basic calorie requirements of an adult at a cost of 13 cents a day. I am not suggesting, however, that you start living on a diet of soybeans and rice bought by the truck load. Ellen Jaffe Jones has written a cookbook called Eat Vegan on $4.00 a Day: A Game Plan for the Budget Conscious Cook. One could easily follow her suggestions and eat royally at very, very low cost. Furthermore, it’s fairly easy to learn how to create yummy, low-cost home-made alternatives to those vegan fake meats and cheeses. See the Recipe section of this book for examples. And, of course, as more people become vegan, the prices of prepared vegan meat and cheese alternatives (which you don’t need anyway—they can be a rare treat) will fall. They are already often less than the prices of traditional meat and cheese—far, far less if one factors in the cost in avoidable suffering.But meat and cheese are so tasty! (Variant: I’m a member of PETA—People Eating Tasty Animals). First, something’s being pleasurable in the short run doesn’t mean that it is either good for you in the long run or morally right (good for you and others). It’s easy to find examples where one or both aren’t so. Having sex with random strangers, using heroin or methamphetamine, and skydiving without a parachute spring readily to mind. Second, tastes change. Many people find that after they go vegan, they lose the taste they formerly had for meat and dairy. Here’s an explanation for that: Taste is highly susceptible to cognitive bias. Research shows, for example, that people in focus groups prefer the tastes of low-quality wines labeled as expensive to the taste of high-quality wines labeled as cheap. Their ideas color what they perceive. Many vegans—former meat and dairy consumers, most of them—are put off by the idea of putting dead things in their mouths, or, as is commonly said by vegans, by the idea of “consuming suffering.” Their ideas affect their tastes. This isn’t a bad thing. It serves them and the animals who don’t suffer and die as a result of their choices.I could never give up meat (or cheese or whatever). Yes you can.Vegan food tastes bad. Early vegan alternative meats and cheeses did taste pretty awful, but that’s changed as the numbers of vegans and vegetarians has grown and competitive products have entered the market. This argument is based on a false premise—that vegans eat primarily alternative meats and cheeses, but there are many thousands of standard dishes that are vegan and contain no awful-tasting ersatz meats and dairy products. For most of human history, in most cultures, most people didn’t eat much meat, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of completely vegan dishes that you can eat that are extraordinarily delicious, as one can readily confirm by checking out the menus of vegan restaurants or looking at vegan cookbooks or recipe websites. See Getting Started with Compassionate Eating and the Recipe section of this book for examples.Veganism isn’t natural. In her breathtakingly beautiful book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, writer Annie Dillard tells how etymologists—people who study insects—rarely find specimens in the wild that are not missing a significant portion of their anatomy—an antenna, a leg, a piece of carapace, a wing. “Must everything whole be nibbled?” she asks, and why is life in the grass one great “chomp”? Ten percent of insects, she further points out, are parasitic. Everywhere one looks in the natural world, one finds blood and death, struggle, “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson famously put it.[2] Eating others is nature’s way, some argue. Veganism is therefore unnatural and we should reject it and do the natural thing—eat others and avoid being eaten. It’s easy enough to see why this argument fails. That something is natural doesn’t make it a model for human moral behavior. Parasitism is natural, but few would think this an appropriate model for human action. So is coprophagia, or eating of excrement, found in dung-beetles, flies, termites, rabbits, guinea pigs, chinchillas, male-rats, gorillas, chimpanzees, pigs, and juvenile elephants, giant pandas, koalas, and hippos. That cruelty exists—is part of the order of things—is no reason for adding more cruelty unnecessarily. That some other animals kill for a living does not mean that we have to or should.Cooking meat made us human. This was recently the premise of a best-selling book. The argument? Cooking made available the high-density nutrients in meat, fueling the development of our big brains. However, it ought to be obvious enough that cooking makes available a lot of plant calories that would not otherwise be available.[3] Try chewing on raw tuber. You’ll get the idea.Plants have feelings, too. In the documentary film Native American Prophecy: The Elders Speak, Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper for the Turtle Clan of the Seneca peoples, reminds us that plants form communities:No tree grows by itself. A tree is a community. Certain trees—certain plants will gather around certain trees, and certain medicines will gather around certain plants, so that if you kill all the trees—if you cut all the trees, then you are destroying a community—you’re not just destroying a tree, you are destroying a whole community that surrounds it and thrives on it and that may be very important medicine for people or for animals. Because animals know the same medicine—they use this medicine—that’s where we learned. We learned by watching animals. They taught us a lot. Where is the medicine? They’ll tell you because they use it themselves. And if you replant the tree, you don’t replant the community, you replant the tree, so you’ve lost a community, and if you clear cut, which I what is happening . . . then you are really a very destructive force . . . and if you don’t understand that, you will.Modern scientists are now documenting what indigenous peoples have always known—that plants communicate with one another, form communities, react to noxious stimuli, and even wage war (by chemical means). Watch an accelerated film of plants vining or turning toward the sunlight, and it’s difficult to escape the impression that one is looking at something very much like an animal—something volitional. But do plants think and feel pain? Do they do what animals do, but just in slow motion and in one place? Here’s what botanist David Chamovitz says about that:“[T]hinking and information processing are two different constructs. . . . [P]urposeful thinking necessitates a highly developed brain and autonoetic, or at least noetic, consciousness. Plants exhibit elements of anoetic consciousness which doesn’t include, in my understanding, the ability to think. Just as a plant can’t suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also don’t think that it thinks. . . . [T]he term plant neurobiology is as ridiculous as say, human floral biology. Plants do not have neurons just as humans don’t have flowers!”[4]Noetic consciousness is subjective, inner experiencing—nonreflexive awareness of the kind clearly possessed by nonhuman animals. Autonoetic, or reflexive, consciousness is the ability to place one’s self in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, as well as the ability to examine one’s own thoughts—all of which have been documented widely in nonhuman animals but never in plants. You can think of it as metaconsciousness, activity of the mind involving attention to one’s own awareness. Plants have neither. Plants have neither neural systems for carrying out such activities nor nociceptors for pain, so they are neither conscious nor sensate in the sense that animals are. Though plants do react to noxious stimuli, they simply do not have physical systems associated with experiencing pain. Imagine sticking a pig and a carrot with a knife. It’s easy enough to see the difference.We should respect indigenous lifeways that involve eating animals and using animal products. Yes, we should. In many places throughout the world, indigenous peoples have survived for thousands of years because they followed the rules. As writer and activist Derrick Jensen points out in several breathtakingly eloquent and persuasive books, including Listening to the Land, A Language Older than Words, Endgame Vols 1 and 2, and What We Leave Behind, they didn’t take more salmon from their streams or more buffalo from their plains than the land could replenish. Those who failed to follow the rules, as detailed in Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, managed to destroy themselves without help from the white younger brother. They are gone.We no longer follow the rules. We murder animals by the trillions and devastate the environment in the process (See Chapter 6). Clearly, what we do must stop. But what about indigenous peoples? Here I feel out of my comfort zone, for though some of the blood that runs in my veins is Cherokee, I have not lived an Indian way of life, and I feel myself as unqualified to speak for Indians as I do for women on the subject of their reproductive rights. How do I square my respect for indigenous lifeways with my insistence that the individual lives of individual animals matter, including the lives of those animals killed to fill the hungry bellies of indigenous children and to make useful articles like tepees, drums, moccasins, and pipes? Here I can only say to my brothers and sisters, let us talk and hear one another.Some indigenous peoples live in environments where they can’t grow sufficient quantities of plant foods. The Dalai Lama has pointed out, for example, that the “northern part of Tibet” has a poor climate for growing vegetables and has suggested that a vegetarian or vegan diet, there, is “very difficult” to sustain.[5] Similarly, the Inuit, unable to cultivate plants in the Arctic, depend heavily on animals as food. Most readers of this book, and most who make this argument, will not be Tibetan or Inuit. So this argument applies neither to them nor to you. It’s simply not an acceptable excuse.Vegans are sickly and weak. Tell that to the thousands of vegan athletes like vegan bodybuilder Jim Morris, vegan Ironman triathlete Bendan Brazier, vegan bodybuilder Robert Cheeke (winner of the INBA USA Overall Novice Bodybuilding Championship), vegan cyclist Jack Lindquist, vegan bodybuilder Robert Hazely, NFL hockey player Georges Laraqu, vegan Olympic runner Carl Lewis, vegan powerlifter Melody Schoenfeld, vegan pitcher for the Minnesota Twins Patrick J. Neshek, vegan marathon champion Fiona Oakes, vegan bodybuilder Amanda Reister (winner of 1st place at the Natural North American Bodybuilding Championships), vegan martial artist David Meyer (holder of seven national and international gold medals), vegan ultradistance runner Damian Stoy, and world champion vegan figure skater Meagan Duhamel. And understand that veganism is NOT a diet. One can eat many possible diets that are vegan. A diet consisting entirely of potato chips and Diet Coke™ would be vegan, but it wouldn’t be good for you. Any vegan who is sickly and weak is not eating a broad, well-balanced diet of fats, fruits, legumes, veggies, and grains. It’s really that simple.Other animals do not behave morally, so we have no moral obligations to them. In our law, we recognize that the very young are not necessarily, because of their youth, morally capable and so culpable. But we do not say that because babies are not yet moral actors, we have no moral obligations to them. Clearly, we do. Furthermore, it simply is not the case that other animals lack a moral sense. Rats, for example, have been shown to be willing, when trapped in cages with limited food, to liberate trapped companions and to share their food with them. For extensive treatments of morality in nonhuman animals, see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce’s Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.[6]Animals can’t be self-aware because they don’t have language. The notion here is that in order for a creature to have a consciousness that matters morally, he or she has to be self-reflective in words. The creature has to be able to think in words about who he or she is, something that nonhuman animals cannot do. Another variant of this—even more extreme—is that self-reflection is possible only in words. I recently encountered this argument in a collection of famous twentieth-century essays on the philosophy of language, but I won’t shame the author by naming him. Such arguments make me want to weep for what we have lost. Only people who have become so stuck in their word worlds that they cannot fathom simply being could possibly think in this way. Are we ready to say that babies are not self-aware because they don’t yet express thoughts to themselves in language?[7] Can anyone actually believe that he or she is not capable of states of awareness that are not mediated by or represented in language? It’s difficult to imagine that anyone who has thought about this could take the idea at all seriously. I can’t help but think that people who hold this position are terribly stunted. They may even be beautifully stunted, like bonsai, but how could they possibly flower and bear fruit? They have forgotten how to be quiet, how simply to be there, a warm breathing, present to their own being and to others’. I hear this argument and I want to write a prescription: Go somewhere—to a mountaintop, to a seashore, to a meditation retreat—and turn off your language for a while. Try to be present to another without language, beyond language. It might be hard a first, but practice. You’ll get the hang of it.Humans have incisors and canine teeth for ripping meat. This is a variety of the “Meat-eating is natural for humans argument,” and it fails miserably. Incisors are the sharp, flat teeth at the front of your mouth. Canines are the sharp, pointed teeth on either side in front. Many entirely herbivorous animals—horses, for example—have incisors. These are useful for cutting plant foods. Quite a few almost entirely herbivorous mammals—gorillas, and chimpanzees, for example—have canine teeth, but in these animals, the canines are dramatically reduced. They are nothing like the massive canines of carnivores like cheetahs or hyenas. Some mostly herbivorous monkeys—baboons and macaques for example, have fairly large canines. Canines in herbivores make readily available a variety of tough plant foods that have to be torn to be eaten. They are also useful in dominance displays, for scaring off predators and rivals, which explains why in polygamous mammals with canines (gorillas, for example), the canine teeth tend to be much larger in males than in females (a sexual dimorphism, or difference in body form, not found in humans).[8] The canines of humans are relatively tiny and useful for eating a wide variety of plant foods. Think about this the next time you tear into the tough skin of a not-fully-matured apple.Veganism is an upper-middle-class, white, Western fad. Reread the first chapter of this book. For most of human history, in most places, people have subsisted PRIMARILY on plant foods. Lactose tolerance, enabling some people to digest dairy products, is a relatively recent phenomenon, dated to about 4,300 years ago, and today, much of the world—in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, in particular—continues to be lactose intolerant, as are 75 percent “of all African-American, Jewish, Mexican-American, and Native American adults.”[9] Most people in India are vegetarians. Most people throughout history, and most yet today, simply have not been wealthy enough to eat substantial amounts of meat or dairy. Unfortunately, today, as economic conditions improve worldwide, more people are turning to meat and dairy. According to the Vital Signs project of the Worldwatch Institute, meat production worldwide tripled in the four decades preceding 2011.[10] The United Nations projects that global meat consumption per person will increase by around 22 percent and global dairy consumption by 11 percent by 2030, which, given population increases, will mean a doubling of demand, putting enormous strains on resources of land and water.[11] If the rest of the world begins to eat in the extravagantly wasteful, damaging, nonvegan way that we’ve been doing in the West, then we’re doomed. Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornel puts it this way:We need to stop over-consuming land-based products. For example, one of our key challenges is overusing agricultural land for growing meat. There is just not enough land on Earth for everyone in the world to eat like Americans and Europeans. . . . [T]o put this into context and to help sustain feeding a burgeoning global population, we need to reduce our meat consumption by 60 percent.”[12]The upper-middle-class, white, Western fad has been our gorging, in the West, on meat and dairy, and consuming ourselves and the rest of the world in the process. It’s long past time for us to stop, for everyone else’s benefit and our own.Eating meat and dairy is correlated with longevity. The argument goes something like this: People in Nigeria and Laos don’t eat much meat and dairy, and they don’t live very long. People in Finland, the United States, and Japan eat a LOT of meat and dairy, and they have the longest lives. This is a classic example of the logical fallacy of false attribution. People in Finland, the United States, and Japan have access to superb medical care, nutrition, and sanitation. People in Nigeria do not. And with those long lives in Finland, the US, Japan, and other countries in the developed world come epidemics of diseases of affluence—heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and osteoporosis—all associated with diets heavy in meat and dairy. A 2003 metastudy review of the relevant research literature, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that[A] very low meat intake was associated with a significant decrease in risk of death in 4 studies, a nonsignificant decrease in risk of death in the fifth study and virtually no association in the sixth study. . . . 2 of the studies in which a low meat intake significantly decreased mortality risk also indicated that a longer duration (2 decades) of adherence to this diet contributed to a significant decrease in mortality risk and a significant 3.6-y . . . increase in life expectancy. . . . Current prospective cohort data from adults in North America and Europe raise the possibility that a lifestyle pattern that includes a very low meat intake is associated with greater longevity.[13]“Raise the possibility.” This is the kind of understatement that is fashionable in scientific literature. What will you do, as a vegan, with your extra 3.6 years of life?It’s OK if the meat is raised and slaughtered humanely. If ever there was an oxymoron, slaughtered humanely is one. Add it to the pile with just war and Congressional ethics.But I eat only free range eggs, poultry, beef, etc. The USDA regulates use of the term free range only for poultry, and the sole regulation is that there be “access to the outside.”[14] In practice, this means that a producer can label a chicken or turkey “free range” if he or she was raised in a thousand-foot shed with 40,000 other birds, at one end of which was a tiny opening onto a 4 x 4-foot concrete slab that, at any rate, all but a tiny fraction of the birds could never reach in their short, miserable, earth- and sky-deprived lives.It’s OK if you cut out meat but still eat dairy. Reread the description of dairy operations on page 000 and see if you can still believe this. As Rutgers law professor and leader of the Abolitionist Movement in animal rights Gary Francione has eloquently put it: “There is absolutely no morally defensible distinction between flesh and other animal products, such as milk or cheese. Animals used in the dairy industry usually live longer and are treated as badly if not worse than their meat counterparts, and they all end up in the same slaughterhouse anyway. The meat and dairy industries are inextricably intertwined. As far as I am concerned, there is more suffering in a glass of milk than in a pound of steak.”[15]Farm animals would die out if we didn’t eat them. This simply is not so. If freed, domesticated and farmed animals can and do return to their lives in the wild. The technical term for such creatures—formerly domesticated ones living (and often thriving) in the wild—is feral animals. Downtown Tampa, Florida, has a population of wild chickens. Staten Island has a population of mixed wild and feral turkeys. Chirikof Island, in Alaska, has a population of feral cattle, as does Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast. THE USDA Forest Service runs programs to “gather and remove” feral cattle in the American West. Feral pigs are found worldwide. The wild horses of Australia (where there are some 400,000 of them), Portugal, India, and the American West and the Chicoteague Ponies of Assateague Island in Virginia and Maryland are all descendants of domesticated animals. Many, many more examples could be adduced. And, by the way, I prefer to use the term farmed animals rather than farm animals, for the same reason that Frederick Douglas referred to himself as formerly enslaved but not a slave.Farm animals would overpopulate the world if we didn’t eat them. OK, I recognize that this is a ridiculous argument, but one sometimes hears it, so I have felt obliged to include it here. Farmed animals exist in such numbers because we breed them in such numbers. And it’s inaccurate to say that they would overpopulate the world. They already do, and only we can end this overpopulation by stopping the breeding. People often talk about the human population explosion—about the stress on the environment caused by there being seven billion humans on the planet—but they rarely think of the fact that the number of farmed animals is of an entire order of magnitude greater. We have tens of billions of farmed animals (we slaughter 66 billion a year) worldwide, all consuming resources, because we breed them in these astonishing numbers. The environmental pressure created by those tens of billions of farmed animals—pressures from cropland and water consumption, the production of solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes (including greenhouse gases), and pollution of waterways by nitrogen from agricultural operations to produce farmed animal feed—all are unsustainable. No, it is not true that if we went vegan, farmed animals would overpopulate the world. They already overpopulate the world because we are not yet vegan.There is a bond between the farm animal and the producer, a natural bond, one of commensalism and symbiosis. This argument is purest Romanticism that ignores the facts of the enslavement, torture, and eventual murder of the nonhuman animals so bound.Eating soy causes cancer, hypothyroidism, effeminacy in boys, and so on. No, it doesn’t. An extensive review of the research literature by Mark and Virginia Messina (2010) found thatthe evidence indicates that, with the exception of those individuals allergic to soy protein, soyfoods can play a beneficial role in the diets of vegetarians. Concerns about adverse effects are not supported by the clinical or epidemiologic literature. Based on the soy intake associated with health benefits in the epidemiologic studies and the benefits noted in clinical trials, optimal adult soy intake would appear to be between two and four servings per day.[16]See also Dr. Neal Barnard’s definitive review of the subject in “Settling the Soy Controversy.”[17]Veganism is impossible because one cannot avoid killing other animals. Drive a car or walk in the woods and other animals will die—the moth on the windshield, the spider underfoot. Eat vegetables, and you are responsible for the maiming and deaths of the many, many animals killed in the processes of tilling and reaping. Yes, I know. But this argument is again based on a false premise. Veganism is not about living so as to bring no harm to other animals. Veganism is aspirational. It is about ahimsa, living so as to bring about as little suffering as possible. As Chapter 5 of this book makes abundantly clear, eating meat and dairy are both extraordinarily wasteful of calories and of land. Most of them get thrown away. By eating vegan, we dramatically reduce the amount of land tilled and reaped and thus the number of animals maimed and killed. We should bike more and drive less. We should be careful where we step.Yes, animal agriculture is horrifically destructive because of the land wasted—land that could be used for wild habitat or far more productively for growing plants for consumption by humans than for feed—but what about highlands that cannot be used for growing crops? We should raise sheep and goats on these and eat them. This argument was popularized by Simon Fairlie in his book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. But I have one word for Mr. Fairlie: erosion. Highlands are delicate ecosystems, not places that we should turn into stomping grounds for artificially introduced animals raised for our consumption.Yes, animal agriculture is horrifically destructive because of the land wasted—land that could be used for wild habitat or far more productively for growing plants for consumption by humans than for feed—but what about feeding pigs and cattle on wastes from our plant agriculture and food operations? There would be fewer of them to eat than there are now, but wastes would be reduced. Another argument from Mr. Fairlie, but this one also fails. Those wastes could not sustain a lot of production, so the meat produced would be very, very expensive—a luxury for the very wealthy, and pressure would inevitably be put on the poor to divert additional food resources to such production. And, of course, Mr. Fairlie misses, in the title of his book, the point: there is nothing benign about killing and eating creatures like pigs with the cognitive capacities of three-year-old human children.Sustainable agriculture requires animal fertilizers, not the artificial stuff we now use that is having such devastating impact. This argument was popularized by Lierre Keith in her book The Vegetarian Myth and in her lectures and workshops to college students around the country. But there are alternatives. One can do vegan farming with a combination of green manures (clover and vetch), mulch, vegetable compost, chipped, branched wood, and techniques like crop rotation and polyculture (planting multiple crops in the same space in imitation of natural diversity), and nonpurists can use some rock-based (phosphate) fertilizers.[18] The techniques involved are known collectively as “veganics.” For more information, see the Vegan Agriculture Network website at Veganic Agriculture Network and the following books: Growing Green—Organic Techniques for a Sustainable Future, by Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst; Veganic Gardening—The Alternative System for Healthier Crops, by Kenneth Dalziel O’Brien; Teaming with Microbes—A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis; and The Vegan Book of Permaculture: Recipes for Healthy Eating and Earthright Living, by Graham Burnett.Humans should eat a Paleolithic diet. Paleolithic humans ate primarily plant foods, supplemented by small amounts of hunted and scavenged meat. So, if you want to eat Paleolithic, don’t neglect your vegetables, and supplement with scavenged meat. Roadkill should do quite nicely. While there is significant recent evidence that fats (which are, like proteins, amply provided by plant foods) are an essential part of a healthy diet, excessive quantities of fats, and particularly of the triglycerides found in such abundance in meat, are bad for you. With that in mind, you might want to get your healthy fats from plants, and skip the roadkill (and its equivalents in the meat aisle of your grocery).Hitler was a vegetarian. Godwin’s Law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” As any vegan who spends time on social media knows, there’s no shortage, in the world, of meat-eaters eager to interrupt a discussion of veganism with the observation that Hitler was a vegetarian. There are, of course, some problems with this. First, Hitler wasn’t a vegetarian. Second, even if he were, that fact would be irrelevant, for two reasons: 1. Veganism is not a diet. It is a philosophy, and that philosophy has as its fundamental tenet ahimsa, or nonviolence. Therefore, “vegan Nazi” is an oxymoron. 2. From the fact that Hitler did x, it does not follow that x is evil. Hitler wore pants, sometimes. This does not mean that wearing pants is evil, though that’s what my mother was told when she dared to wear them many long years ago.[1] July, 2015.[2] “Man . . . trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law--/Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw,/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed” he says in “In Memorium A.H.H.” (1849)[3] Pennisi, Elizabeth. Did cooked tubers spur the evolution of big brains? Science (1999) 283:5410; 2004-2005.[4] Cook, Gareth. “Do Plants Think?” Interview with Daniel Chamovitz. Scientific American. June 5, 2012. Do Plants Think?[5] “The Dalai Lama Might Just be The Ultimate “Fregan.” Ecorazzi. July 30, 2010. The Dalai Lama Might Just Be The Ultimate "Freegan"[6] Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.[7] Human babies fall into the world with a lot of language already wired into them, as Chomsky and the linguists following in his footsteps have abundantly shown, but the question, here, is whether babies are able to use language for self-reflection, which clearly, in the beginning, they cannot do.[8] See Schwartz, Gary T., and Christopher Dean. “Ontogeny of Canine Dimorphism in Extant Hominoids.” Amer. J. of Phys. Anthro. 115:269-283, 2001.[9] Lactose Intolerance Statistics. Statistic Brain. http://www.statisticbrain.com/lactose-intolerance-statistics/ From National Digestive Diseases Information, USA Today. June 23, 2012.[10] “Global Meat Production and Consumption Continue to Rise.” Worldwatch Institute. Oct. 11, 2011. Global Meat Production and Consumption Continue to Rise[11] 52.[12] Friedlander, Blaine. “U.N. Report Sounds Alarm on Farming Land-Use Crisis.” Cornell Chronicle. July 15, 2015. U.N. report sounds alarm on farming land-use crisis[13]Pramil, N. Singh, Joan Sabaté, and Gary E. Fraser. Does low meat consumption increase life expectancy in humans? Am J Clin Nutr 2003;78(suppl):526S–32S.[14] “Meat and Poultry Labeling Terms.” United States Department of Agriculture. 2015.[15] “Gary Francione: Animal Advocate.” The Believer. Feb., 2011. The Believer - Interview with Gary Francione[16] Messina, Mark, and Virginia Messina. The role of soy in vegetarian diets. Nutrients. 2010 Aug; 2(8): 855-888.[17] Barnard, Neal “Settling the Soy Controversy.” The Huffington Post. April 26, 2010.[18] Our current dependence of phosphate fertilizers presents a problem, for phosphorus is a finite resource. Estimates of when we shall reach “peak phosphorus”—the point at which maximum phosphorus production rate (from mining) will be reached vary widely, with some researchers saying that peak production will be reached by the year 2030 and depletion of the resource within 50 to 100 years (Cordell, Dana, et al. The story of phosphorus: Global food security and food for thought. Global Envirn. Change. (2009) 19:2; 292-305). Patrick Dery and Bart Anderson, writing in the August 13, 2007 Energy Bulletin argue that peak phosophorus has already been reached. Others,like Pedro Sanchez, director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at the Earth Institute, claim that reserves are sufficient to last several hundred years (See Cho, Renee. “Phosophorus: Essential to Life—Are We Running Out?” Earth Institute/Columbia Univ. April 1, 2013. Phosphorus: Essential to Life—Are We Running Out?). As with peak oil, the debate rages.

The following are suggestions for answering questions from nonvegans about veganism. They are from my book Trillions of Universes and can be reproduced and distributed as long as the material is not edited and is properly attributed to me.Answers to Arguments against VeganismYou vegans think you are superior. This is precisely the opposite of the vegan position. Vegans are vegan because they believe that in an essential, defining respect, they are NOT, superior to the trillions of other animals with which we share the planet. Vegans know that other animals are just like them in being sentient creatures to whom their own well-being matters. This makes those other creatures into moral subjects as opposed to objects with which we can do as we will.Where do you get your protein? On average, 14 percent of the calories in plant foods are from protein, MORE than enough to provide the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, and all the essential amino acids—the constituents of proteins—are found in readily available veggie sources. Vegans with high protein requirements—ones who are engaged in body building, for example—can concentrate on a wide variety of high-protein plant foods. Ask the vegan gorilla and water buffalo where they get their protein. This one really is a no-brainer.Veganism is too expensive. If one were to eat ONLY processed vegan foods—vegan ice cream, vegan cheese, vegan hamburgers, and so on—then yes, veganism could be relatively expensive, though not that much more so than is the average carnivorous diet. Meat and cheese are among the most expensive items in the grocery store. As of this writing,[1] the website How Much Is It? | HowMuchIsIt.org gives the price of ribeye steak at $7-to-$15 per pound, the price of fillet mignon at $16-to-$20 a pound, the price of premium chicken breast at $3-to-$5 per pound, and the price of cheddar cheese at $6-to-$13 per pound (and much, much more for premium varieties). An economist friend of mine recently did a calculation for me. At the lowest end—based on 2014 commodity prices for dry soybeans and rice—one could supply the basic calorie requirements of an adult at a cost of 13 cents a day. I am not suggesting, however, that you start living on a diet of soybeans and rice bought by the truck load. Ellen Jaffe Jones has written a cookbook called Eat Vegan on $4.00 a Day: A Game Plan for the Budget Conscious Cook. One could easily follow her suggestions and eat royally at very, very low cost. Furthermore, it’s fairly easy to learn how to create yummy, low-cost home-made alternatives to those vegan fake meats and cheeses. See the Recipe section of this book for examples. And, of course, as more people become vegan, the prices of prepared vegan meat and cheese alternatives (which you don’t need anyway—they can be a rare treat) will fall. They are already often less than the prices of traditional meat and cheese—far, far less if one factors in the cost in avoidable suffering.But meat and cheese are so tasty! (Variant: I’m a member of PETA—People Eating Tasty Animals). First, something’s being pleasurable in the short run doesn’t mean that it is either good for you in the long run or morally right (good for you and others). It’s easy to find examples where one or both aren’t so. Having sex with random strangers, using heroin or methamphetamine, and skydiving without a parachute spring readily to mind. Second, tastes change. Many people find that after they go vegan, they lose the taste they formerly had for meat and dairy. Here’s an explanation for that: Taste is highly susceptible to cognitive bias. Research shows, for example, that people in focus groups prefer the tastes of low-quality wines labeled as expensive to the taste of high-quality wines labeled as cheap. Their ideas color what they perceive. Many vegans—former meat and dairy consumers, most of them—are put off by the idea of putting dead things in their mouths, or, as is commonly said by vegans, by the idea of “consuming suffering.” Their ideas affect their tastes. This isn’t a bad thing. It serves them and the animals who don’t suffer and die as a result of their choices.I could never give up meat (or cheese or whatever). Yes you can.Vegan food tastes bad. Early vegan alternative meats and cheeses did taste pretty awful, but that’s changed as the numbers of vegans and vegetarians has grown and competitive products have entered the market. This argument is based on a false premise—that vegans eat primarily alternative meats and cheeses, but there are many thousands of standard dishes that are vegan and contain no awful-tasting ersatz meats and dairy products. For most of human history, in most cultures, most people didn’t eat much meat, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of completely vegan dishes that you can eat that are extraordinarily delicious, as one can readily confirm by checking out the menus of vegan restaurants or looking at vegan cookbooks or recipe websites. See Getting Started with Compassionate Eating and the Recipe section of this book for examples.Veganism isn’t natural. In her breathtakingly beautiful book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, writer Annie Dillard tells how etymologists—people who study insects—rarely find specimens in the wild that are not missing a significant portion of their anatomy—an antenna, a leg, a piece of carapace, a wing. “Must everything whole be nibbled?” she asks, and why is life in the grass one great “chomp”? Ten percent of insects, she further points out, are parasitic. Everywhere one looks in the natural world, one finds blood and death, struggle, “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson famously put it.[2] Eating others is nature’s way, some argue. Veganism is therefore unnatural and we should reject it and do the natural thing—eat others and avoid being eaten. It’s easy enough to see why this argument fails. That something is natural doesn’t make it a model for human moral behavior. Parasitism is natural, but few would think this an appropriate model for human action. So is coprophagia, or eating of excrement, found in dung-beetles, flies, termites, rabbits, guinea pigs, chinchillas, male-rats, gorillas, chimpanzees, pigs, and juvenile elephants, giant pandas, koalas, and hippos. That cruelty exists—is part of the order of things—is no reason for adding more cruelty unnecessarily. That some other animals kill for a living does not mean that we have to or should.Cooking meat made us human. This was recently the premise of a best-selling book. The argument? Cooking made available the high-density nutrients in meat, fueling the development of our big brains. However, it ought to be obvious enough that cooking makes available a lot of plant calories that would not otherwise be available.[3] Try chewing on raw tuber. You’ll get the idea.Plants have feelings, too. In the documentary film Native American Prophecy: The Elders Speak, Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper for the Turtle Clan of the Seneca peoples, reminds us that plants form communities:No tree grows by itself. A tree is a community. Certain trees—certain plants will gather around certain trees, and certain medicines will gather around certain plants, so that if you kill all the trees—if you cut all the trees, then you are destroying a community—you’re not just destroying a tree, you are destroying a whole community that surrounds it and thrives on it and that may be very important medicine for people or for animals. Because animals know the same medicine—they use this medicine—that’s where we learned. We learned by watching animals. They taught us a lot. Where is the medicine? They’ll tell you because they use it themselves. And if you replant the tree, you don’t replant the community, you replant the tree, so you’ve lost a community, and if you clear cut, which I what is happening . . . then you are really a very destructive force . . . and if you don’t understand that, you will.Modern scientists are now documenting what indigenous peoples have always known—that plants communicate with one another, form communities, react to noxious stimuli, and even wage war (by chemical means). Watch an accelerated film of plants vining or turning toward the sunlight, and it’s difficult to escape the impression that one is looking at something very much like an animal—something volitional. But do plants think and feel pain? Do they do what animals do, but just in slow motion and in one place? Here’s what botanist David Chamovitz says about that:“[T]hinking and information processing are two different constructs. . . . [P]urposeful thinking necessitates a highly developed brain and autonoetic, or at least noetic, consciousness. Plants exhibit elements of anoetic consciousness which doesn’t include, in my understanding, the ability to think. Just as a plant can’t suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also don’t think that it thinks. . . . [T]he term plant neurobiology is as ridiculous as say, human floral biology. Plants do not have neurons just as humans don’t have flowers!”[4]Noetic consciousness is subjective, inner experiencing—nonreflexive awareness of the kind clearly possessed by nonhuman animals. Autonoetic, or reflexive, consciousness is the ability to place one’s self in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, as well as the ability to examine one’s own thoughts—all of which have been documented widely in nonhuman animals but never in plants. You can think of it as metaconsciousness, activity of the mind involving attention to one’s own awareness. Plants have neither. Plants have neither neural systems for carrying out such activities nor nociceptors for pain, so they are neither conscious nor sensate in the sense that animals are. Though plants do react to noxious stimuli, they simply do not have physical systems associated with experiencing pain. Imagine sticking a pig and a carrot with a knife. It’s easy enough to see the difference.We should respect indigenous lifeways that involve eating animals and using animal products. Yes, we should. In many places throughout the world, indigenous peoples have survived for thousands of years because they followed the rules. As writer and activist Derrick Jensen points out in several breathtakingly eloquent and persuasive books, including Listening to the Land, A Language Older than Words, Endgame Vols 1 and 2, and What We Leave Behind, they didn’t take more salmon from their streams or more buffalo from their plains than the land could replenish. Those who failed to follow the rules, as detailed in Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, managed to destroy themselves without help from the white younger brother. They are gone.We no longer follow the rules. We murder animals by the trillions and devastate the environment in the process (See Chapter 6). Clearly, what we do must stop. But what about indigenous peoples? Here I feel out of my comfort zone, for though some of the blood that runs in my veins is Cherokee, I have not lived an Indian way of life, and I feel myself as unqualified to speak for Indians as I do for women on the subject of their reproductive rights. How do I square my respect for indigenous lifeways with my insistence that the individual lives of individual animals matter, including the lives of those animals killed to fill the hungry bellies of indigenous children and to make useful articles like tepees, drums, moccasins, and pipes? Here I can only say to my brothers and sisters, let us talk and hear one another.Some indigenous peoples live in environments where they can’t grow sufficient quantities of plant foods. The Dalai Lama has pointed out, for example, that the “northern part of Tibet” has a poor climate for growing vegetables and has suggested that a vegetarian or vegan diet, there, is “very difficult” to sustain.[5] Similarly, the Inuit, unable to cultivate plants in the Arctic, depend heavily on animals as food. Most readers of this book, and most who make this argument, will not be Tibetan or Inuit. So this argument applies neither to them nor to you. It’s simply not an acceptable excuse.Vegans are sickly and weak. Tell that to the thousands of vegan athletes like vegan bodybuilder Jim Morris, vegan Ironman triathlete Bendan Brazier, vegan bodybuilder Robert Cheeke (winner of the INBA USA Overall Novice Bodybuilding Championship), vegan cyclist Jack Lindquist, vegan bodybuilder Robert Hazely, NFL hockey player Georges Laraqu, vegan Olympic runner Carl Lewis, vegan powerlifter Melody Schoenfeld, vegan pitcher for the Minnesota Twins Patrick J. Neshek, vegan marathon champion Fiona Oakes, vegan bodybuilder Amanda Reister (winner of 1st place at the Natural North American Bodybuilding Championships), vegan martial artist David Meyer (holder of seven national and international gold medals), vegan ultradistance runner Damian Stoy, and world champion vegan figure skater Meagan Duhamel. And understand that veganism is NOT a diet. One can eat many possible diets that are vegan. A diet consisting entirely of potato chips and Diet Coke™ would be vegan, but it wouldn’t be good for you. Any vegan who is sickly and weak is not eating a broad, well-balanced diet of fats, fruits, legumes, veggies, and grains. It’s really that simple.Other animals do not behave morally, so we have no moral obligations to them. In our law, we recognize that the very young are not necessarily, because of their youth, morally capable and so culpable. But we do not say that because babies are not yet moral actors, we have no moral obligations to them. Clearly, we do. Furthermore, it simply is not the case that other animals lack a moral sense. Rats, for example, have been shown to be willing, when trapped in cages with limited food, to liberate trapped companions and to share their food with them. For extensive treatments of morality in nonhuman animals, see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce’s Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.[6]Animals can’t be self-aware because they don’t have language. The notion here is that in order for a creature to have a consciousness that matters morally, he or she has to be self-reflective in words. The creature has to be able to think in words about who he or she is, something that nonhuman animals cannot do. Another variant of this—even more extreme—is that self-reflection is possible only in words. I recently encountered this argument in a collection of famous twentieth-century essays on the philosophy of language, but I won’t shame the author by naming him. Such arguments make me want to weep for what we have lost. Only people who have become so stuck in their word worlds that they cannot fathom simply being could possibly think in this way. Are we ready to say that babies are not self-aware because they don’t yet express thoughts to themselves in language?[7] Can anyone actually believe that he or she is not capable of states of awareness that are not mediated by or represented in language? It’s difficult to imagine that anyone who has thought about this could take the idea at all seriously. I can’t help but think that people who hold this position are terribly stunted. They may even be beautifully stunted, like bonsai, but how could they possibly flower and bear fruit? They have forgotten how to be quiet, how simply to be there, a warm breathing, present to their own being and to others’. I hear this argument and I want to write a prescription: Go somewhere—to a mountaintop, to a seashore, to a meditation retreat—and turn off your language for a while. Try to be present to another without language, beyond language. It might be hard a first, but practice. You’ll get the hang of it.Humans have incisors and canine teeth for ripping meat. This is a variety of the “Meat-eating is natural for humans argument,” and it fails miserably. Incisors are the sharp, flat teeth at the front of your mouth. Canines are the sharp, pointed teeth on either side in front. Many entirely herbivorous animals—horses, for example—have incisors. These are useful for cutting plant foods. Quite a few almost entirely herbivorous mammals—gorillas, and chimpanzees, for example—have canine teeth, but in these animals, the canines are dramatically reduced. They are nothing like the massive canines of carnivores like cheetahs or hyenas. Some mostly herbivorous monkeys—baboons and macaques for example, have fairly large canines. Canines in herbivores make readily available a variety of tough plant foods that have to be torn to be eaten. They are also useful in dominance displays, for scaring off predators and rivals, which explains why in polygamous mammals with canines (gorillas, for example), the canine teeth tend to be much larger in males than in females (a sexual dimorphism, or difference in body form, not found in humans).[8] The canines of humans are relatively tiny and useful for eating a wide variety of plant foods. Think about this the next time you tear into the tough skin of a not-fully-matured apple.Veganism is an upper-middle-class, white, Western fad. Reread the first chapter of this book. For most of human history, in most places, people have subsisted PRIMARILY on plant foods. Lactose tolerance, enabling some people to digest dairy products, is a relatively recent phenomenon, dated to about 4,300 years ago, and today, much of the world—in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, in particular—continues to be lactose intolerant, as are 75 percent “of all African-American, Jewish, Mexican-American, and Native American adults.”[9] Most people in India are vegetarians. Most people throughout history, and most yet today, simply have not been wealthy enough to eat substantial amounts of meat or dairy. Unfortunately, today, as economic conditions improve worldwide, more people are turning to meat and dairy. According to the Vital Signs project of the Worldwatch Institute, meat production worldwide tripled in the four decades preceding 2011.[10] The United Nations projects that global meat consumption per person will increase by around 22 percent and global dairy consumption by 11 percent by 2030, which, given population increases, will mean a doubling of demand, putting enormous strains on resources of land and water.[11] If the rest of the world begins to eat in the extravagantly wasteful, damaging, nonvegan way that we’ve been doing in the West, then we’re doomed. Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornel puts it this way:We need to stop over-consuming land-based products. For example, one of our key challenges is overusing agricultural land for growing meat. There is just not enough land on Earth for everyone in the world to eat like Americans and Europeans. . . . [T]o put this into context and to help sustain feeding a burgeoning global population, we need to reduce our meat consumption by 60 percent.”[12]The upper-middle-class, white, Western fad has been our gorging, in the West, on meat and dairy, and consuming ourselves and the rest of the world in the process. It’s long past time for us to stop, for everyone else’s benefit and our own.Eating meat and dairy is correlated with longevity. The argument goes something like this: People in Nigeria and Laos don’t eat much meat and dairy, and they don’t live very long. People in Finland, the United States, and Japan eat a LOT of meat and dairy, and they have the longest lives. This is a classic example of the logical fallacy of false attribution. People in Finland, the United States, and Japan have access to superb medical care, nutrition, and sanitation. People in Nigeria do not. And with those long lives in Finland, the US, Japan, and other countries in the developed world come epidemics of diseases of affluence—heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and osteoporosis—all associated with diets heavy in meat and dairy. A 2003 metastudy review of the relevant research literature, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that[A] very low meat intake was associated with a significant decrease in risk of death in 4 studies, a nonsignificant decrease in risk of death in the fifth study and virtually no association in the sixth study. . . . 2 of the studies in which a low meat intake significantly decreased mortality risk also indicated that a longer duration (2 decades) of adherence to this diet contributed to a significant decrease in mortality risk and a significant 3.6-y . . . increase in life expectancy. . . . Current prospective cohort data from adults in North America and Europe raise the possibility that a lifestyle pattern that includes a very low meat intake is associated with greater longevity.[13]“Raise the possibility.” This is the kind of understatement that is fashionable in scientific literature. What will you do, as a vegan, with your extra 3.6 years of life?It’s OK if the meat is raised and slaughtered humanely. If ever there was an oxymoron, slaughtered humanely is one. Add it to the pile with just war and Congressional ethics.But I eat only free range eggs, poultry, beef, etc. The USDA regulates use of the term free range only for poultry, and the sole regulation is that there be “access to the outside.”[14] In practice, this means that a producer can label a chicken or turkey “free range” if he or she was raised in a thousand-foot shed with 40,000 other birds, at one end of which was a tiny opening onto a 4 x 4-foot concrete slab that, at any rate, all but a tiny fraction of the birds could never reach in their short, miserable, earth- and sky-deprived lives.It’s OK if you cut out meat but still eat dairy. Reread the description of dairy operations on page 000 and see if you can still believe this. As Rutgers law professor and leader of the Abolitionist Movement in animal rights Gary Francione has eloquently put it: “There is absolutely no morally defensible distinction between flesh and other animal products, such as milk or cheese. Animals used in the dairy industry usually live longer and are treated as badly if not worse than their meat counterparts, and they all end up in the same slaughterhouse anyway. The meat and dairy industries are inextricably intertwined. As far as I am concerned, there is more suffering in a glass of milk than in a pound of steak.”[15]Farm animals would die out if we didn’t eat them. This simply is not so. If freed, domesticated and farmed animals can and do return to their lives in the wild. The technical term for such creatures—formerly domesticated ones living (and often thriving) in the wild—is feral animals. Downtown Tampa, Florida, has a population of wild chickens. Staten Island has a population of mixed wild and feral turkeys. Chirikof Island, in Alaska, has a population of feral cattle, as does Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast. THE USDA Forest Service runs programs to “gather and remove” feral cattle in the American West. Feral pigs are found worldwide. The wild horses of Australia (where there are some 400,000 of them), Portugal, India, and the American West and the Chicoteague Ponies of Assateague Island in Virginia and Maryland are all descendants of domesticated animals. Many, many more examples could be adduced. And, by the way, I prefer to use the term farmed animals rather than farm animals, for the same reason that Frederick Douglas referred to himself as formerly enslaved but not a slave.Farm animals would overpopulate the world if we didn’t eat them. OK, I recognize that this is a ridiculous argument, but one sometimes hears it, so I have felt obliged to include it here. Farmed animals exist in such numbers because we breed them in such numbers. And it’s inaccurate to say that they would overpopulate the world. They already do, and only we can end this overpopulation by stopping the breeding. People often talk about the human population explosion—about the stress on the environment caused by there being seven billion humans on the planet—but they rarely think of the fact that the number of farmed animals is of an entire order of magnitude greater. We have tens of billions of farmed animals (we slaughter 66 billion a year) worldwide, all consuming resources, because we breed them in these astonishing numbers. The environmental pressure created by those tens of billions of farmed animals—pressures from cropland and water consumption, the production of solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes (including greenhouse gases), and pollution of waterways by nitrogen from agricultural operations to produce farmed animal feed—all are unsustainable. No, it is not true that if we went vegan, farmed animals would overpopulate the world. They already overpopulate the world because we are not yet vegan.There is a bond between the farm animal and the producer, a natural bond, one of commensalism and symbiosis. This argument is purest Romanticism that ignores the facts of the enslavement, torture, and eventual murder of the nonhuman animals so bound.Eating soy causes cancer, hypothyroidism, effeminacy in boys, and so on. No, it doesn’t. An extensive review of the research literature by Mark and Virginia Messina (2010) found thatthe evidence indicates that, with the exception of those individuals allergic to soy protein, soyfoods can play a beneficial role in the diets of vegetarians. Concerns about adverse effects are not supported by the clinical or epidemiologic literature. Based on the soy intake associated with health benefits in the epidemiologic studies and the benefits noted in clinical trials, optimal adult soy intake would appear to be between two and four servings per day.[16]See also Dr. Neal Barnard’s definitive review of the subject in “Settling the Soy Controversy.”[17]Veganism is impossible because one cannot avoid killing other animals. Drive a car or walk in the woods and other animals will die—the moth on the windshield, the spider underfoot. Eat vegetables, and you are responsible for the maiming and deaths of the many, many animals killed in the processes of tilling and reaping. Yes, I know. But this argument is again based on a false premise. Veganism is not about living so as to bring no harm to other animals. Veganism is aspirational. It is about ahimsa, living so as to bring about as little suffering as possible. As Chapter 5 of this book makes abundantly clear, eating meat and dairy are both extraordinarily wasteful of calories and of land. Most of them get thrown away. By eating vegan, we dramatically reduce the amount of land tilled and reaped and thus the number of animals maimed and killed. We should bike more and drive less. We should be careful where we step.Yes, animal agriculture is horrifically destructive because of the land wasted—land that could be used for wild habitat or far more productively for growing plants for consumption by humans than for feed—but what about highlands that cannot be used for growing crops? We should raise sheep and goats on these and eat them. This argument was popularized by Simon Fairlie in his book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. But I have one word for Mr. Fairlie: erosion. Highlands are delicate ecosystems, not places that we should turn into stomping grounds for artificially introduced animals raised for our consumption.Yes, animal agriculture is horrifically destructive because of the land wasted—land that could be used for wild habitat or far more productively for growing plants for consumption by humans than for feed—but what about feeding pigs and cattle on wastes from our plant agriculture and food operations? There would be fewer of them to eat than there are now, but wastes would be reduced. Another argument from Mr. Fairlie, but this one also fails. Those wastes could not sustain a lot of production, so the meat produced would be very, very expensive—a luxury for the very wealthy, and pressure would inevitably be put on the poor to divert additional food resources to such production. And, of course, Mr. Fairlie misses, in the title of his book, the point: there is nothing benign about killing and eating creatures like pigs with the cognitive capacities of three-year-old human children.Sustainable agriculture requires animal fertilizers, not the artificial stuff we now use that is having such devastating impact. This argument was popularized by Lierre Keith in her book The Vegetarian Myth and in her lectures and workshops to college students around the country. But there are alternatives. One can do vegan farming with a combination of green manures (clover and vetch), mulch, vegetable compost, chipped, branched wood, and techniques like crop rotation and polyculture (planting multiple crops in the same space in imitation of natural diversity), and nonpurists can use some rock-based (phosphate) fertilizers.[18] The techniques involved are known collectively as “veganics.” For more information, see the Vegan Agriculture Network website at Veganic Agriculture Network and the following books: Growing Green—Organic Techniques for a Sustainable Future, by Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst; Veganic Gardening—The Alternative System for Healthier Crops, by Kenneth Dalziel O’Brien; Teaming with Microbes—A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis; and The Vegan Book of Permaculture: Recipes for Healthy Eating and Earthright Living, by Graham Burnett.Humans should eat a Paleolithic diet. Paleolithic humans ate primarily plant foods, supplemented by small amounts of hunted and scavenged meat. So, if you want to eat Paleolithic, don’t neglect your vegetables, and supplement with scavenged meat. Roadkill should do quite nicely. While there is significant recent evidence that fats (which are, like proteins, amply provided by plant foods) are an essential part of a healthy diet, excessive quantities of fats, and particularly of the triglycerides found in such abundance in meat, are bad for you. With that in mind, you might want to get your healthy fats from plants, and skip the roadkill (and its equivalents in the meat aisle of your grocery).Hitler was a vegetarian. Godwin’s Law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” As any vegan who spends time on social media knows, there’s no shortage, in the world, of meat-eaters eager to interrupt a discussion of veganism with the observation that Hitler was a vegetarian. There are, of course, some problems with this. First, Hitler wasn’t a vegetarian. Second, even if he were, that fact would be irrelevant, for two reasons: 1. Veganism is not a diet. It is a philosophy, and that philosophy has as its fundamental tenet ahimsa, or nonviolence. Therefore, “vegan Nazi” is an oxymoron. 2. From the fact that Hitler did x, it does not follow that x is evil. Hitler wore pants, sometimes. This does not mean that wearing pants is evil, though that’s what my mother was told when she dared to wear them many long years ago.Footnotes[1] July, 2015.[2] “Man . . . trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law--/Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw,/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed” he says in “In Memorium A.H.H.” (1849)[3] Pennisi, Elizabeth. Did cooked tubers spur the evolution of big brains? Science (1999) 283:5410; 2004-2005.[4] Cook, Gareth. “Do Plants Think?” Interview with Daniel Chamovitz. Scientific American. June 5, 2012. Do Plants Think?[5] “The Dalai Lama Might Just be The Ultimate “Fregan.” Ecorazzi. July 30, 2010. The Dalai Lama Might Just Be The Ultimate "Freegan"[6] Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.[7] Human babies fall into the world with a lot of language already wired into them, as Chomsky and the linguists following in his footsteps have abundantly shown, but the question, here, is whether babies are able to use language for self-reflection, which clearly, in the beginning, they cannot do.[8] See Schwartz, Gary T., and Christopher Dean. “Ontogeny of Canine Dimorphism in Extant Hominoids.” Amer. J. of Phys. Anthro. 115:269-283, 2001.[9] Lactose Intolerance Statistics. Statistic Brain. http://www.statisticbrain.com/la... From National Digestive Diseases Information, USA Today. June 23, 2012.[10] “Global Meat Production and Consumption Continue to Rise.” Worldwatch Institute. Oct. 11, 2011. Global Meat Production and Consumption Continue to Rise[11] 52.

The grass loves the nitrogen from the rain and you love the greener grass that's is the results of nitrogen.If the grass looks greener after the skies have cleared, your eyes aren't deceiving you.There are several reasons rain helps lawns green up, said Jennifer Knoepp, a research soil scientist with the USDA Forest Service, SRS, Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in Otto, North Carolina. Both of those reasons involve nitrogen, but one of them might surprise you.After it rains, there's typically more water available in the soil for plants, Knoepp said. When plants take up that water, they are also taking up nitrogen from the organic matter that's in the soil.Here's how that works: "As plants grow, their small roots die and new roots grow," Knoepp said. When that happens, soil microbes cause the dead roots to decay. Think of this process as similar to adding compost to your lawn, only this action takes place underground and naturally, without your intervention. The roots are made up of large chemical compounds consisting mostly of carbon but also some nitrogen. Soil microbes use carbon and some of the nitrogen to cause the dead roots to decompose. As this happens, a portion of the nitrogen is released back into the soil as a sort of waste product.As rain soaks into the soil, it activates the microbes to release more nitrogen, said Knoepp. The grass benefits from the freshly fallen rain because the flush of water allows the roots to take up this "new" nitrogen as well as the nitrogen that the microbes have previously released. At the same time, "the grass is very active with photosynthesis" when the sun returns, Knoepp explained.Something else happens with nitrogen when it rains. The atmosphere is made up of 78 percent nitrogen gas, which is inert or non-reactive. It also carries particulate nitrogen in the form of ammonium and nitrate. When it rains, the rain brings some of this particulate nitrogen down onto lawns in the form of nitrate and ammonium nitrogen. However, Knoepp said — and this is what might surprise you — only a small amount of the particulate nitrogen that falls directly on grass during rain events is directly absorbed into the leaves.Monitoring your lawn's nitrogenJust how much nitrogen falls in the rain depends on several factors, Knoepp said. The factors include where you live (rain in the Northeast contains more particulate nitrogen than rain in the Southeast), how dry it's been and even where the rain that falls in your area is coming from. Particulate nitrogen in the atmosphere can come from various forms and sources, including nitrogen gas that's been oxidized by lightning as well as nitrogen that's the result of emissions from cars or industrial or agricultural inputs. The amounts of particulate nitrogen in the atmosphere have also changed since the mid-1990s, Knoepp pointed out. Since the implementation of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Air Act amendment, nitrate nitrogen has been declining and, more recently, ammonium nitrogen has been increasing.There's an easy way to find out what kind of nitrogen and how much of it is falling when it rains on your lawn. The National Atmospheric Deposition Program has been monitoring atmospheric chemistry since 1978 and has numerous sampling stations around the country. Their site has an interactive map or handy table to find a sampling location near you. That location will have estimates of nitrogen inputs from rainfall.Even though rain helps boost the nitrogen that's available to your lawn in several ways, and it remains in water you collect in a rain barrel, you can't count on nitrogen from rain to meet all of the fertilizer needs of your grass or your vegetable garden, Knoepp said. Commercial fertilizers or organic soil amendments are still needed for a balanced fertilizer program, but she urges caution in applying them. While nitrogen is an essential ingredient for good plant growth, be sure to follow package directions. Too much of a good thing can be harmful not only to plants but to nearby ponds, lakes, streams and rivers."Nitrate nitrogen is very mobile," Knoepp said. Rain can move it deep into the soil, well below plant root zones, into streams, bodies of water and then aquifers. "You don't want that," Knoepp said. Streams don’t need a lot of nitrogen, and too much of it can lead to problems like the formation of algae.After all, it's not green streams but green lawns that homeowners want to see when the clouds depart and the sun returns.