Other Issues
Dubious caricatures of vegans and the violence of speaking for others
It is testimony to the weakness of Keith's core arguments that she has to resort to various straw man caricatures of, and ad hominem attacks on vegans.
There is the oft-repeated implication that vegans are immature sentimentalists, or at the very least have not yet 'grown up'.
For instance:
“In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood.” (5)
That one hears the same arrogant claims repeated by anyone from religious fundamentalists to free market propagandists to so-called 'sensible people' who seek to perpetuate gross systemic injustices by sole virtue of the fact that they're widely accepted (there are many historical defenses of racism and sexism that resort to the same rhetoric, for example), speaks volumes.
Keith also implies that vegans are cultish, sometimes even delusional; her main point of reference here is a clearly ludicrous post on a prominent vegan discussion board that few vegans would take at all seriously:
“A vegan flushed out his idea to keep animals from being killed—not by humans, but by other animals. Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey. Killing is wrong and no animals should ever have to die, so the big cats and wild canines would go on one side, while the wildebeests and zebras would live on the other. He knew the carnivores would be okay because they didn’t need to be carnivores. That was a lie the meat industry told. He’d seen his dog eat grass: therefore, dogs could live on grass.
No one objected. In fact, others chimed in. My cat eats grass, too, one woman added, all enthusiasm. So does mine! someone else posted. Everyone agreed that fencing was the solution to animal death.” (7)
It is concerning that Keith either does not note the obvious humour in the responses to the original post or, even worse, chooses to misrepresent them as serious perspectives held by a significant percentage of vegans.
There is also the implication that vegans are 'armchair activists' or polemicists, as opposed to 'real activists':
“The activist-farmers have a very different plan than the polemicist-writers to carry us from destruction to sustainability.” (5)
It seems as though Keith is unaware of the many vegans doing inspiring and demonstrably successful practical work with non-animal based food production techniques like veganic permaculture. If she is aware of these, she is actively choosing to ignore them as they completely undermine the false dilemma she posits: industrial plant-based monocropping or animal-based small scale organic food production.
Keith also implies that vegans are ignorant on more than one occasion. For instance:
“What separates me from vegetarians isn’t ethics or commitment. It’s information.” (16)
“I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information.” (19)
Finally, Keith asserts that animal rights activists / vegans are liberal humanists:
“The AR movement is liberal individualism applied to animals. It is a reflection of human needs and desires, not the needs and desires of animals themselves.” (75 – see also 74)
While this is true of some vegans, the situation is rapidly changing due to the groundbreaking work of ethical philosophers like Dr Steve Best, Donna Harraway, Rosi Braidotti and others, who have abandoned liberal humanism for poststructuralist and anarchist thinking that recognises the irreducible complexity and difference of different forms of life without subjecting them to the homogenising operations of Enlightenment rationality.
Dr Best also sees animal rights as comparable to earlier 'rights' struggles like those of the abolitionists, the suffragettes or the civil rights movement, additionally noting the intersection of the animal rights movement with other currents, including radical environmentalism and radical anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian politics.
This is very far from a liberal humanist / liberal individualist perspective.
Keith's idiosyncratic veganism and its misrepresentation
One of the strangest things about Keith's book is her constant misrepresentation of vegans, using herself and her peer group as outstanding examples of 'normal' vegans when it is in fact clear that the peculiarities of her increasingly restrictive macrobiotic-vegan diet would not be followed, or even endorsed as at all reasonable, by the majority of vegans.
Her presentation of what she thinks are vegan ethics is similarly fallacious: most vegans, despite her claims to the contrary, do not aim towards an unrealistic 'all-or-nothing' scenario in which their life has absolutely no impact, but rather for the much more attainable goal of diminishing one's impact on other living beings as much as can be reasonably expected.
Her charges of hypocrisy are thus mis-directed: it is those who espouse certain ethical principles but do not consistently adhere to them who can be said to be hypocrites, not those whose ethics are simply not as unrealistically absolutist as the ones Keith held onto for twenty years and then suddenly discarded wholesale.
Here are some examples of Keith's absolutist ethics:
“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.” (16)
“I had bet my whole moral system—and built my whole identity—on the idea that my life did not require death.” (18)