Episode 61 The Vegetarian Myth Update 1

Nate: Welcome to Don’t Feed The Trolls. But today, we’re going to feed them. That’s right, this episode is all about plants versus meat. But first!

Matt: But first, Don’t Read the Trolls. That’s right our email segment where we pick one email every week to read, sometimes we don’t. I love when Nate picks them, though, because they’re usually the Bigfoot ones.

This one comes from Mike:

“Hey guys! I love the podcast. I work nightshifts and keep up to date with your stuff. I wanted to let you know that I didn’t really have much interest in Bigfoot despite living in Canada before listening to your podcast.

The first episode peaked my interest, but it was the actual encounter in the second Bigfoot episode that really made me want to look more into it. I found another podcast called “Sas-what?” Which I find very interesting. They tell stories and explore the topic from a skeptic point of view. I just wanted to let you know in case you haven’t heard of it.”

Here we are giving promo for another podcast, Nate.

“Don’t judge it based on the first episode, you have to give it a couple. Who knows, maybe the host would come on your show for the third Bigfoot episode.”

Yeah, we could do that. That would be fun.

“I thought at least Nate would find it interesting. And who knows, Matt, you might find it interesting too. Anyways, thanks for the great content to help pass the night. Keep it up. Mike.”

Thanks, Mike!

Nate: If you don’t know what we’re talking about, we did a couple episodes on Bigfoot. But, no new patrons this week.

Matt: No new patrons.

Nate: But if you want to support our podcast, you can go to trollspodcast.com, click the donate button. Or you can go to patreon.com/dontfeedthetrolls. And support what we’re doing, we love it.

Matt: Yeah, get access to all the cool stuff we have there. Like our Troll Talk episodes, exclusive for our patrons. And a bunch of bonus stuff we’ve posted up there.

To our topic of the day.

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Nate: So , , versus what? What would the alternative be? Just being a carnivore?

Matt: Just carnivore-ism? (laughs) I don’t think people eat exclusively meat.

Nate: Cavemen might have eaten exclusively meat. Bear Grylls.

Matt: Yeah maybe. (laughs) Bear Grylls.

Nate: He’s always cooking something he shot out of a tree.

Matt: I mean that’s good for TV too.

Nate: Well, it’s the hottest trend. You can read books like The China Study or see movies like Fork Over Knives, Cowspiracy, etc. The main argument is the meat industry is bad for people, humans, the planet, etc. Don’t eat meat, end of story, cruelty photos, and you get super guilty.

And I can say that I watched all those things and read a lot of that literature. And I went vegetarian for a year.

Matt: Wow. What were the movies that kind of stuck out for you?

Nate: Fork Over Knives and The China Study. Just kind of like made me think, “Oh, you know, what’s going on?”

Matt: What’s The China Study about?

Nate: The China Study is kind of like a brief overview of where people get cancer and their diets and they try to make it sound like it’s meat-based. But there’s a lot of factors in there.

Matt: So they’re tying cancer to a meat-based diet.

Nate: Yeah. Or animal-based diet.

Matt: So it could be like eggs or dairy, too?

Nate: Yeah. Animal proteins are bad for the body and plant proteins are good for the body.

Matt: So, I think you disagree that animal proteins are bad for the body.

Nate: I just think it depends. I really feel like the health of the animal is the one important factor because places in China, you don’t know what the are eating. You don’t what they’re feeding them. And people think, “Oh yeah, well

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you know, we could just feed them genetically modified corn sprayed with Roundup and the meat’s fine. Right? It’s the same thing.”

But, there’s a lot of studies to show that, no, you know, like, the leaner the cow – in terms of its eating like fresh, green grass – that’s why the grass fed movement is so big right now. Because there’s lots of science to say that if the cow is healthy, then the meat is healthy. If the cow is unhealthy, then the meat is unhealthy.

Matt: So, you watched The China Study and it ties –

Nate: .

Matt: Sorry, that’s the one that made you become a vegetarian. And you’re a vegetarian for a whole year. And then what made you stop being a vegetarian?

Nate: I think I just did more research. Didn’t necessarily feel any better. Started having more conversations with people who had animals and read a couple books. Read a book on milk. Yeah, just read different things, and talked to some different people, and kind of realized like, “Oh, there’s this – “

The world of microorganisms is sort of kind of what I got exposed to. The more microorganisms there are in the soil equals benefits of all things that depend on the soil. So like, you want your plants to be growing in a bio-diverse soil.

They say that, you know, a lot of soil now is just depleted from minerals and stuff. And that’s why we have a lot of health problems because they just grow the same thing over and over again. And then they spray synthetic chemicals down to try to fertilize the soil. They don’t use the natural – the way that they used to do it is they would rotate crops and they would add cover crops and they would do other things to help the soil get better.

So, if you don’t have a good microflora, I guess, in your gut, inside your body, getting that from the soil and from other animal products, then it’s just as bad. So, it’s complicated, honestly.

Matt: So, you’re not just anti-meat because, you know, the meat industry is bad. What you’re saying is, there’s a responsible and sustainable way that’s good for the planet to raise animal products and bring them to market.

So, I guess it’s understandable that people would respond to a very harmful, industrial farming, industrial meat complex or whatever you want to call it. They would respond to that by saying, “No, we’re going to protest meat altogether because we want to shut you down. We want to do away with this.” Can you understand that stance?

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Nate: I don’t know. I guess PETA, PETA’s hard. PETA’s a very, I don’t know. They sort of attack a lot of people.

Matt: Yeah, they go after people. I kind of like that about them, I don’t agree with a lot of their views. But I like that they’re spunky. (laughs)

Nate: Yeah, I mean I think the thing is, yeah, I’m definitely down on the like Big Ag. Because –

Matt: You call it Big Ag. Big Agriculture.

Nate: Michaele Weissman said, “You know, cheap is the devil.” And the reason she says, “Cheap food is the devil,” I think, is because you have to cut corners every step of the way to have cheap food. Which means you have to spray it with pesticides. And you have to spray it with synthetic chemicals. And you have to mass produce it. And you have to mass produce it over and over and over again in the same dirt.

And you strip the environment and you strip the soil. And humans ultimately just lose. It’s a lose, lose situation. So, I think Big Ag, Big Agriculture, when it comes to meat, is probably the worst because you have these animals in feed lots crapping corn all over the place. Poop everywhere, and it just runs into the river.

So you have a highly concentrated pile of feces. And the cows aren’t healthy. They’re not eating green grass. I guess if you just imagine it, it doesn’t even sound interesting. Or healthy or good or the way that I believe God intended animals to live.

Matt: And how we’re supposed to co-exist with nature, right? Not destroy and rape and pillage the earth, but to be a part of the ecosystem and to be a part of – like the pasteurized animals graze. They cut and expose new grass to sunlight, they trample seeds deep into the ground.

Nate: Well, pasteurize is different, (laughs) but, pastured.

Matt: Pastured, sorry. (laughs) Pastured. My bad. It’s early in the morning if anyone can tell.

Nate: That’s funny. Hey, that’s an easy mistake to make. Pasteurized.

Matt: Pasteurized, pastured. What is the difference between – pasteurized is what happens to milk, right?

Nate: Yeah, Louis Pasteur, I think, is the name of the guy who invented the technology of zapping it to kill bacteria. So, it had nothing to do with pastures.

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Matt: You’re against that too.

Nate: Well, I think it’s actually based on old practices that we no longer have. And you have a lot of states now lobbying to be able to drink milk that’s raw. Because it is a live food. So, if you’re a healthy person, you should be able to drink that live food and get more benefits. If you zap it, it actually makes it more dangerous from what I’ve read.

That’s why you have all these Listeria breakouts because the milk can’t really defend itself if some foreign contaminant gets into it. So, basically you kill everything. You kill the good and the bad bacteria. But the reason they do that, and the reason they did that, is because historically speaking, they used to feed cows distillery mash from the whiskey distilleries.

Matt: So, everything that was like left over.

Nate: Yeah. And then they were in these barns and they were knee deep in their cow crap and they were being milked by whoever, very sloppily. And they would send this milk on trains into the city and kids were getting sick and dying. And that’s why they came out with the Grade A, Grade B, Grade C, Grade D milk. There’s different grades of milk.

Well, the distillery mash milk was like the last of the barrel. It was like, they could zap it and they said in this book I read, you could see the bacteria float to the surface. It was like a film, it was like so gross.

But basically, it was a sort of an easy tool to, you know, solve a problem. And that’s what we do, right? Instead of, “Oh, yeah, we put all these in this house and they get sick. Oh, let’s just throw antibiotics in there and then we cannot worry about them getting sick.” Well, that’s starting to break down.

Matt: Yeah, and that stuff gets into your eggs, and gets into your meat that you eat. And you know, causes all kind of problems –

Nate: Causes all kind of health problems.

Matt: Because then you can be immune to antibiotics. So if you have a health crisis or an infection, if you eat a lot of that meat, I mean, sometimes that can affect the way that antibiotics work on your body. Right?

Nate: Yeah.

Matt: So, let’s talk about the three types of vegetarians because I think, you know, a lot people can broad stroke vegetarians or vegans and just be like, “Oh, you’re a weirdo.” But I think there’s actual like, good reasoning for a lot of people’s motivation to become vegetarian.

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So there’s moral, political, and nutritional. And it sounds like the moral vegetarians they kind of believe it’s possible to eat a diet that includes no animal suffering. So, they don’t want animal deaths, they don’t want animal suffering, and they feel like a moral obligation to protect . And obviously they’re killing vegetables, but you have to draw the line somewhere, right?

I can actually get behind that one a little bit, personally. Like, I don’t know, it’s like recently the more I kind of expand my view of the world, the more connected I feel to things. But, I mean, the nature of humanity is we are living creatures and we live on the death of other living creatures. I mean, that’s the nature of life, right? We’re all just dead stuff that was passed on. You know? Like the soil is dead stuff.

You know, the seed falls from the tree and another plant grows out of that. So that’s the circle of life.

Nate: I think what people don’t realize is that, you know, if you leave a pasture or you leave the land and you don’t have healthy animals grazing on it and crapping on it, it doesn’t aerate the soil. The soil quality doesn’t get better.

That’s what people don’t realize is that animals play an important part of the soil quality. Just like all decomposing elements going into the ground. So the more bio-diverse, more animals that are crapping on areas and moving around, but they’re eating the stuff that is going back into the soil, it creates a better, healthier environment.

And in fact, there’s lots of science that says that it removes CO2, so you have healthier soil.

Matt: Really?

Nate: Yes.

Matt: Because the second vegetarian, the political vegetarian, would say that a lot of the carbon comes from the meat industry. The vast amount of herds and cattle that we’re raising, that are putting out all this CO2 into the air at an unsustainable rate, and it’s causing various kinds of environmental destruction.

Nate: Yeah and I would say that is, if you have cows that are specifically eating corn, eating garbage, eating chicken poop, eating sawdust.

Matt: Well, it’s just the vast amount of cattle. You know? The amount that we consume is so way beyond what is required that it is destroying land.

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Nate: Yeah. So cheap food, you know, that’s the thing. It’s like cheap meat. So, yeah, if you go out and spend, you know, if you want to eat meat every once and a while and you go out and spend some money. You know, I think like the average person back in the 50’s they said ate like 8 ounces of meat a week.

Matt: Wow.

Nate: And now it’s like 8 ounces a day or something.

Matt: (laughs) Yeah, I mean, you’ve seen the comparison with like McDonald’s in the 50’s and what a McDonald’s meal looked like. It was like a tiny little cheeseburger, like a tiny little side of fries, and then it’s just like been super-sized over the last several decades so that we have this demand for it. And that’s why it’s there.

And I guess people who are political vegetarians would say, “Let’s stop demanding meat.”

Nate: Cheap meat.

Matt: Yeah, the cheap meat. Well, yeah. The vegetarian would say meat altogether, perhaps. But there is an who is responsible who is also getting the expensive meat.

And then there’s the nutritional vegetarians who think that animal products are the root of all dietary evil. And lead to heart disease and cancer. And, I guess, your rebuttal to that would be, “Yes, unsustainably raised, irresponsibly raised animals do lead to dietary evils and heart disease and cancer. But if they’re correctly raised, or responsibly raised, they don’t.” Right?

Nate: Yeah, I mean I think that it’s just like you as a human being. If you’re putting good fuel in the tank, good things are going to happen. So, yeah if you put bad fuel in the cow and then you eat that cow, then you have tons of health problems. That’s why heart disease is crazy because people don’t realize that like – it’s an insane number of how much more lean the meat is from a cow that’s just been eating green grass all its life.

Matt: So, what do these feed lot cow eat?

Nate: They eat a, they feed them all kinds of shit, dude. They feed them candy, crab guts, limestone, chicken shit, sawdust, corn.

Matt: (laughs) What? They feed them chicken shit?

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Nate: Yeah, they’ll basically, you know because there’s a lot of, you know, seeds and stuff and they’ll grind it up and they’ll put it up in basically like a dog food and feed it to them.

Matt: Wait, why would they feed them candy? Like that seems expensive.

Nate: Well, it’s high calories and there’s a lot of left over candy that doesn’t, you know. There was something in the news the other day about cows being feed skittles. I don’t know if you saw that.

Matt: So it’s like candy waste from like a candy factory. They’d buy that up and feed it to the cows.

Nate: Yeah.

Matt: Gross.

Nate: And it’s just high calories. And they don’t even take the pack – I read one article – they don’t even necessarily take the plastic off of the candy wrappers, they just poop it out.

So, basically –

Matt: That’s insane.

Nate: And this is the same thing with farmed fish. They feed chicken shit to farmed fish.

Matt: So, it’s like humans getting in and going, “Oh, we’ll help the circle of life. We’ll take the chicken shit.”

Nate: “We’ll manipulate it.”

Matt: “And we’ll toss it in and then they’ll eat the poop and they’ll create food.” But there’s a natural balance that happens in nature and then we can come alongside and partner with that, but we’re not. We’re like, “No. We’re going to do this. Factory this. You know, we’re going to do this this way. This is a resource. We’re going to use that.” And then that ends up environmentally potentially destroying certain subsections of our earth, right?

Nate: Yeah. I mean I think Mad Cow Disease comes from feeding cows actual like dead cows. Cow that died.

Matt: Ugh! Like cannibal cows.

Nate: They grind it up and feed it back.

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Matt: And then they become zombies.

Nate: You know what? We could talk about this a lot, but we should bring on our guest, Lierre Keith, the author of The Vegetarian Myth, Food Justice and Sustainability. And see what she has to say because she seems to be more the expert on this. But let’s bring her on.

Matt: Welcome, Lierre Keith to the podcast. Just up front, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work?

Lierre: Yeah, the book I’m most famous for is called The Vegetarian Myth. And I wrote it because I had spent 20 years as a vegan and I only stopped being a vegan because my health collapsed completely.

But when that happens to you, nobody gives up being a vegan easily. You know, you’re whole world is kind of left in the rubble at that point. Because nothing makes any sense. Like, “Why didn’t this work? It was supposed to.”

So, then you spend a few years scrambling around trying to figure out who you are and what your place is in the universe and what it all meant. And in that time I was able to revisit a lot of information that I had shuttled to the side. You know, just stuff that I had certainly come across in my never ending search to figure out, you know, what humans had done to the planet and what the nature of that destruction was. And what was the worst kinds of destruction. And all of that.

And, as a vegan, you can have this very fundamentalist mindset. And so anything that pointed the needle toward agriculture, I immediately couldn’t really engage with. Because that meant that the way I was eating was not in fact saving the planet, it was in fact part of the destruction.

So there was this whole realm of information that I was not able to look at fully until I stopped being a vegan. And at that point I went back and really rethought everything. I did a lot of reading, a lot of research. Thought about my own life experiences and came to some very different conclusions than I did when I was a vegan.

And I ended up having to write a book about it because it was just overwhelming. And I also go very tired of having the same discussion over and over again. You know, because after an hour, hour and a half of the same, you know, start from square one. What is soil? Why does it matter?

And you know, you had that discussion over and over with vegetarians and vegans. And they get very upset and that’s understandable because I did too. But you can only have the discussion so many time where you think, “There are thousands of people who want this information, even if it’s difficult emotionally.” They’re looking for it. They are the people who care about the planet. They do

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care about animals and they want to know. They want to know if they’re doing the right thing.

Especially as the diet starts to fail them, which it will. That is inevitable. It’s just a question of how much emotional struggle they’re going to go through to acknowledge that to themselves.

So, I wanted to be able to hand them the tools to say, “You know what people have already figured this out.” I’m 52 years old. There’s an entire generation of us who did this. And ended up with more or less damage. And these are the reasons why it doesn’t even hold water politically or even ethically. Way bigger information.

So, all of that came together in a book. And I’m very pleased that I wrote it because it was just such a relief to just think through my own kind of life process. My own, you know, kind of intellectual sort of growth. You know? In writing a book, you really have to look at it all.

So, it was very sort of healing for me, but I also feel like I’ve reached a lot of young people who otherwise would have gone down an ultimately destructive path for no good reason. So I’m happy to have been a part of other people’s journeys in a way that I wish someone had been there for me.

Nate: It seems like, you know, a lot of the information out there is – from when I stand back and look at it - is being vegan or vegetarian saves the planet. That’s like what everyone’s preaching now. And it seems like you’re saying something different than that. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.

Lierre: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the main reasons people get into it. That and, you know, you see the horrible pictures of factory farming. And that’s indisputable. It’s just terrible stuff.

And so then you’re handed this entire package of, “Well, if you just eat plant , it’ll all be great!” And the problem is that it’s not a big enough framework. They’re not actually addressing the roots of the problem. And this goes back 10,000 years. And what we have to acknowledge is there is an activity called agriculture. And that is the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet.

It’s the most destructive human activity is agriculture. We’ve essentially skinned the planet alive. So you have to understand what that is. You take a piece of land and you clear every living thing off it. And I mean down to the bacteria. And then you plan it to human use.

So, you’ve got like millions of acres of land across this planet that should mostly be either forest or grasslands. They should be dense with species, with plants,

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with animals, with bacteria. You know, with , , , everybody. Like the entire host of life should be there and they’re not.

And they’ve been removed for corn and wheat and soy and rice, primarily. And now, it’s something like 40% of what they call the primary production of the planet goes directly to feed humans. And like another 40, 50% as indirect production also goes to humans.

We’ve essentially extirpated life from this planet.

Matt: To sustain our life, though, right? Like is there a way in between? Because isn’t it just the population that is demanding food? Is there a way to do it correctly?

Lierre: Well, here’s the problem. The moment that you take up agriculture, there’s two things. One is that it’s draw down. So, it’s an inherently destructive activity. You will destroy your land base. And this means that you have to go out and take your neighbor’s land so that you can survive.

So, this is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do each and every time, okay? That is the pattern. You’ve got this bloated power center surrounded by conquered colonies until the entire thing collapse. And it collapses somewhere between 800 and 2,000 years. You know, civilizations have never lasted longer than that.

Literally the length of time until the soil gives out. 2,000 years, nothing makes it longer than that. Now, we’ve added fossil fuel to this. This is what happened in 1950 with the beginning of what’s called the Green Revolution. We figured out how to take, you know, oil and gas and turn it into feedstock – nitrogen, i.e. – usable nitrogen for plants.

There is this gigantic, just upsurge, in the amount of production per square acre. And that’s why, is because they figured out how to take this incredibly dense stuff, oil and gas, and turn it into something plants could eat.

So what happens then is this huge explosion not just in food, but of course in the human population. So from 1950 onward, the human population quadruples. Nobody in their right mind could actually think this is sustainable. In fact, it’s inevitable, right?

The oil and gas are going to run out. All they did was extend the basic problem of all agricultural societies. And I want to say in contrast, for most of our time on this planet, and that’s two and a half million years, we didn’t do agriculture. We did some version of hunter/gatherer.

And whether that’s horticulture, whether that’s pasturalism, those are all, you know, kind of – I mean, there’s some variations there, obviously – but it’s

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basically the same idea. You leave in place the ecosystem. The living biome around you. You leave it in place, you take your food from inside it as a humble participant. Rather than importing yourself across it. Which is what agriculture is.

Matt: I love the ideal of that. But the realist in me is screaming, “There’s no way we can sustain the human population.” Like people would starve if there weren’t agriculture. Is there a way to do that and sustain the human life, do you think?

Lierre: Yeah, well, there’s’ going to be three things there. Number one, this collapse is inevitable. And that’s no fun to have to face, but it’s been true for every single agricultural society and there have been thirty-four so far. Every single one of them ends in collapse because again, it’s based on draw down.

You’re destroying your land base. Eventually the whole thing is, you’re going to hit zero. Okay, it’s declining returns every single year until in the end, all that’s left is salt and desert. And you can go around the world to all the agricultural areas and that’s what you will find is desert.

Look at Iraq. Look at huge sections of Indian Pakistan. China. All the places where agriculture began are just desert at this point, there’s nothing left. The Sahara desert is mostly a man-made phenomena.

Northern Africa was oak savannah. And some of it was actually forested so densely that the sunlight never hit the ground. And a lot of it was destroyed from Rome. Rome conquered that whole area and stripped it dry. It’s a destructive activity.

So, this collapse is going to be inevitable. And the problem is if every institution on the planet would recognize that, and start to pull back, we could have a very soft landing. We could repair what we’ve destroyed and bring our number down to something reasonable that the planet could support.

That’s not physically impossible. It’s not biologically impossible. We understand what the problem is. It’s politically. That’s the problem. Like, are these institutions going to do something about this? And the answer seems to be “no.” because they won’t even acknowledge the problem.

So, that’s number one. Yes, we are in vast overshoot. And that crash, while it’s inevitable, could also be averted. If we do nothing, it’s inevitable. But if we could do the right things, no we absolutely could have a population, a number that could be sustained on this planet very easily.

Matt: A basic first step for a lot of people is not consuming so much. Because don’t we consume three times more than we need?

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Lierre: I mean, in the rich nations like the United State we probably consumer fifty times more than we need. It just seems kind of crazy just the level of stuff out there to buy.

Of course when you look at the year 1800, there were only 800 things you could buy. I mean, it’s just like –

Matt: What?!

Lierre: Yeah, you just can’t even imagine how things have expanded since then.

Nate: It seems like that, you know, there’s a – I think I saw this on, it was like a food blog – but it was talking about how there was like this pyramid. And the way we have now with the agricultural system is man’s on the top of the pyramid and everything kind of goes down from there. As opposed to there is a circle of life, man’s somewhere in the circle and he’s not dominating it, but he’s not being passive about it either.

It seems like that’s the way that we have to think about the world. That we’re participants in it. We need all these animals crapping on the ground to keep the soil going.

And I had a lot of arguments after that. There’s this documentary on Netflix called Cowspiracy –

Lierre: Oh, god, yeah. That thing has done more damage –

Matt: (laughs) I love Lierre’s opinion on this. Please roll your eyes more, verbally.

Lierre: No, it’s just everybody believes it because they don’t understand. They don’t understand the nature of the natural world. They don’t understand what life is and how it works. That it really is this incredible complex web of relationships that are so complicated we could not ever understand them. Our brains could not possible conceive how complicated it is.

If you take one tablespoon of soil, there’s over a million living creatures in that one tablespoon! And each of those is constantly interacting with the others to make more life in one way or another. They’re either, you know, producing or degrading. And everybody’s eating somebody. And it’s just like you said, this great big cycle. That’s one tablespoon!

Spreading that out to a forest, to an ocean, to a grassland, how could we ever understand the complexities in there. We’re just one tiny little part of something so vast.

Matt: Well, I was reading about – oh, go ahead.

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Lierre: Well, it’s just when I look at the cave paintings and some of the earliest art we ever made, you know, there’s this amazing moment where our brains suddenly got big enough. And the first thing we did was say thank you.

If you look at the cave paintings, what you find over and over are these just extraordinary artistic visions of the animals that gave us life. It’s the megafauna and we hunted. Nobody’s painting mice, you know? (laughs) There’s painting the animals we ate.

And literally those animals were the ones that gave us brains big enough that we wanted to say thank you. That we could understand ourselves as part of this cosmos. And it compelled us to then express that because it’s such a, the gratitude is so overwhelming. Like, “Wow, I’m alive. Isn’t this amazing! And look who’s making it possible. So, I’m going to say thank you. I have to express something about this because it’s so beautiful and so overwhelming.” You know, those emotions of just that prayerfulness and that thankfulness. And that’s what they did.

And that’s the very first art that we ever made. And that was the megafauna. And that’s what we painted over and over again, that’s what we carved. That’s what we drew. And it’s just all about that participation. It’s a way to turn back and say, “Wow, I’ve got this great big brain now, I’m going to say thank you for it.”

Matt: So what is the modern equivalent of participating in that and saying thank you? What does that look like today for people now?

Lierre: Okay, I’m going to walk you through two different scenarios and we’ll see which one make more sense.

So, you’ve got an acre of land, okay. And that acre has a lot of grass on it. It’s a prairie, it’s some kind of a grassland. And every square meter of it should have at least twenty-five different plants. Okay, that’s how dense with life it is. And there’s mammals, and there’s reptiles, and there’s ground dwelling birds, and there’s little tiny microscopic things that are doing that basic work of life. Underneath it all, there’s these incredible roots. The grassland, the prairie roots are, they can go down twenty-five feet into the ground. I mean, it’s an extraordinary system.

Two thirds of the prairie happens underneath, like it doesn’t happen aboveground, it happens underground. And the reason that they’re prairies and not forests is because there’s not enough moisture. If they were wetter, they’d be forests. But they’re dryer.

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And so all of these creatures have figured out how to survive in a much dryer place, and grasses are one of the ways that they do that. They store a lot of their life forces underground in those roots.

So, it’s this extraordinary thing. And they have these very, very long roots. And those root do a few things that no other creatures in life can do. One is, they provide a soil for the water. So every time it rains – I mean a channel for the water. Every time it rains, the water can physically enter the soil through those channels. Without those roots, water has no way to penetrate into the soil.

And you can see this when it rains. You know, anyplace that’s bare ground, you see the run off. It puddles, it pools, and then it just destroys the surface of the soil. And if there’s any slope at all, it drains off into the nearest river and kills the river with that silt.

Whereas, if the same amount of rain falls on something that’s got permanent cover on it, it’s absorbed And you can walk across it, and you don’t sink into the mud up to your ankles. It’s alive.

So the water table is restored. You know, it’s recharged every time it rains. And the roots in the soil themselves hold a lot of that water. And so as the summer wears on and it gets drier and drier, that moisture is then, you know, drawn back up to the surface of the planet and used by the entire living community.

So that’s how everybody else is still alive, because of those plants with those root systems and that good soil is able to store that water. So, that’s one thing. Very important, the water.

But another thing is that those really deep roots they get down into the bedrock. And with help from bacteria, they degrade the rock. They literally eat the rock. And all those minerals are then drawn up into the bodies of the plants, eaten by animals. But all of the minerals that you and I depend upon to stay alive, that’s where they originate by and large. And sometimes there’s some ocean things involved, but for land life, yes. This is very, very important. That’s where the minerals come from.

You and I cannot digest rock, okay? We can’t do it. (laughs) But plants with the right bacteria can, and that’s what they do. This is only true for perennial plants, the annual crops. So that corn and wheat and soy that’s created all these problems, their roots are nowhere near as long. They don’t have time to make roots that are that long. Because they’re annuals. They only live for one summer. And nobody has time to get that big in one summer, so their root systems are very short, nowhere near as extensive. And they can’t do this work. They can’t absorb the rain and they also can’t reach down and provide that mineral.

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Okay, so, here you’ve got this acre. And it’s got these plants on it and these plants are mostly perennials, and there’s a whole bunch of them. And there’s all these other creatures living there, they all know their role. They’re all doing something to either produce or degrade. Everybody’s eating.

And on top of all this, you’ve got a large ruminant. And let’s call her a cow. It could be a bison, it could be whatever, but let’s just say it’s a cow for now. There’s a cow. And about one acre is what she needs to survive for a year. So, she’s on her acre and she plays a really important role, because in the summer on grasslands, as it gets drier and drier, the bacterial life starts to basically hibernate from the surface of the soil.

It’s too dry, it can’t survive. Some of it goes underground and it’ll stay there kind of dormant. But what keeps the life cycle moving on a grass land in the dry, dry season, are the ruminants. Because where the bacteria also goes to live is inside that ruminant. And they’re called ruminants because they have a rumen. Okay, they usually have multiple stomachs.

And they’re stomachs are very different from ours. They are vast vats of bacteria. So when a cow is eating grass, she’s not actually eating the grass, she’s harvesting the grass for that bacteria. Who’s actually eating the grass, is the bacteria inside her stomach. And they have the capacity to break it down, to break down the grass. You and I cannot eat cellulose. You can try it if you don’t believe me, but feel free to go eat grass for breakfast and see how well you do. You have no capacity to do that.

But rumens, ruminants have this incredible relationship with grass, because they’ve evolved together. So, these are the creatures that do it. So, this cow is carrying around all these bacteria. That’s their habitat, is inside a cow, and they know how to digest the cellulose. And they do that.

And then in exchange for feeding them, she then eats them. So what the cow is doing is trading in really poor nutrient cellulose, for very, very, rich nutrient dense bacteria. So she’s eating the bacteria in the end. And they’re all keeping each other alive. And that’s the only thing that’s breaking down nutrients on the surface of the landmass during the dry season is ruminants.

Without ruminants on grasslands, it degrades into desert and very quickly. And that’s why. Because there’s nobody else who can do that work except ruminants. So that’s why there’s always ruminants on grasslands, right? That’s why there’s bison, you know, across – should be – bison across the United States. Those were the ruminants that kept it going across the Great Plains.

Nate: That’s what I Tweet at Cowspiracy. I said, “If there were 40 million buffalo on the Plains, then we would have had global warming, you know, 300 years ago, 400 years ago.” However long it was. Because that’s their big claim is just there’s

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like 40, 50 thousand or 50 million cows now, and they’re contributing – all the cow farts – are contributing to global warming.

And I was like, “Well, he’s not thinking about the historical fact that there was so many bison on the Plains, it was literally black.” They said.

Lierre: Well, yeah. You could sit on a rock for four days, for four solid days and watch one single herd thunder by. That’s how many animals there where. You’re right, it was somewhere between 40 million and 60 million bison. And we’ve traded them in for 30 or 40 million very sick cows. But there’s no possible way that that’s the problem.

Because like you said, there were that many ruminants before and the climate wasn’t being destroyed.

Alright, so here’s our acre and we’ve got our cow and she’s eating her grass. And from year to year, you could come back to this and you would only find more life. You would find denser soil, you would find more branches in the evolutionary tree. You would find, you know, more resilience. This could go on until the sun burns out. Because it’s all powered by sunlight, there’s plenty of moisture. Everybody knows how to store moisture for when they need it. Everybody’s got a role to play. And year by year by year, all that happens is the soil just gets better and better. And that means there’s more life for everyone.

And the nearby waterways are healthy because the soil is protected, it’s not washing away. The water table’s recharging and everybody has a home. So, all the birds that migrate have a place to go, the ground dwelling birds can stay there. There’s reptiles, there’s mammals, there’s everybody. And there’s this ruminant at the center of it who’s a keystone species. Keeping that cycle alive throughout the summer.

And you can add humans to the picture, because you always need predators on every single living creature. There’s somebody for everybody to eat. And that’s our role. We take the sick, we take the young, we take the ones who aren’t going to survive. And we eat them. And then at the end of our , we are eaten in turn. It’s like the soil eats us all. You know, at the end of the day, none of us can get out of this cycle. And that’s not a bad thing.

That’s actually a really beautiful thing. That’s the problem, like we’ve forgotten how much beauty there is in this. Be humble in the face of it. Like, you’ve got to live, it’s amazing. And then you’re done, great. Somebody else can have my body. And whether you like it or not, it’s going to happen. Every last molecule is going to be eaten by somebody. So you can fight that and try to think, “Well, you can put me in cement tomb and hopefully it won’t happen.” It’s going to happen!

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It starts happening within thirty seconds of your death, some of those bacteria already are starting to eat you.

Matt: Right and on a macro level, you know, we’re all just made from atoms. You know, that stardust billions of years old. So it happens on the micro and the macro.

Lierre: So, that’s our one acre and that is the pattern that nature has created. You have animals integrated into perennial polycultures. And these are systems that can change over time mas climate shifts, as things happen. But life is incredibly resilient and it’ll find a way forward. So, that’s our beautiful one acre. And that includes a human.

And at the end of a year, you know, on that one acre, you can have that one ruminant. And you can slaughter her and feed a human and then the next year there’ll be more ruminants and more humans. And more grass and more everybody. So, that’s our good acre.

Now we’re going to take another acre. Alright, what do we do with this acre? Well, we clear all the life off it. Okay? We remove all the plants, all the animals. Nobody can live there anymore. We’ve exposed the soil. The moment we do that, the soil starts to die.

And for a while, maybe fifty years, maybe a hundred year, maybe 800 years, we’re going to try to grow corn on that one acre. And every year there’s less soil, there’s less life. Of course, all those animals that used to live there can’t live there anymore. There’s a very, very few animals that can try to survive in that monoculture.

So, there’s going to be mice. There’s maybe some crows. But that’s really about it. Maybe a raccoon or two will wander through. But that huge pallet of life is gone, okay?

So now every year, you’re going to have less and less corn as well because the soil’s being degraded. The water table dries up. So even if there were some nearby trees, they’re now dead. Because there’s not enough water for them to survive. All that soil blows away every time, it washes away in the rain. It’s going to clog the nearby waterways. So now there’s no more fish either, everybody’s dead in the stream.

It’s just death and destruction from beginning to end. And then you’ve can take that once acre of corn and you can harvest it and drive it off somewhere into a horrible cement city – essentially – in which they keep tortured cows. And these are very sick animals, very miserable animals. And you can feed them a completely unnatural diet. Which is to say, the corn that you harvested from that one acre. You give it to that cow. She’s really miserable, she’s really sick, there’s

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going to be holes in her stomach. Her liver is rotten. Kill her, fine. Feed her to humans, fine. Those humans get really sick because nothing is right about that meat. Amino acid profile is wrong. The fatty acid profile is wrong. Everybody is miserable from beginning to end.

And at the end of the day, the system is going to collapse. The people are, you know, eventually, there’s not going to be any corn coming off that land anymore. It’s just too degraded and the people get shorter and shorter and sicker and sicker. And this is the archeological record over and over and over again. And then it ends in collapse. And the last proteins in the cooking pots are always, guess what, human proteins because people turn to cannibalism when they’re desperate. And that’s where it is.

Matt: I love that stark contrast. (laughs)

Lierre: And there it is. You got the way of life that’s about that participation. Where you let life do its thing and you’re part of it. And then there’s the other where you are dominating the entire thing. Think you know better, think that you have a right to come to that land and destroy all that life. But at the end of the day, you can’t.

I mean, it might work for a few generations. But eventually it’s over and you have that desert where everybody is dead.

Matt: Do you think humanity has the ability now, it feels like – I don’t know if it’s just me getting older, but – it feels like there is a rise in self-awareness. People, it just seems like generationally we’re acquiring more self-awareness about our need to dominate. Our need to control. Our need to monetize. Our need to be at the top of the chain as opposed to part of a circle.

And do you think that humanity is getting to a point now, where we’re able to be aware and address this seriously? Or are you just saying it’s going to be, we’re all going to die?

Lierre: No, I think there’s a tremendous struggle right now on this planet. I think that we have some very powerful social movements that have figured out, from many different angles, you know, what the problem is. But I think it points to exactly that.

That we have this hierarchical model that’s based on domination. So whether it’s humans over the planet, or rich people over poor people, or white people over people of color, or men over women, we have these horrible hierarchies that are, you know, ultimately supported by violence. And, you know, terrible atrocities around the world, we all see that.

And also that planet is really being pushed to the edge. You know, there are plenty of stolid, conservative scientists who are like, “We’ve got maybe ten years,

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we’ve got maybe twenty years.” But, you know, with the climate coming to pieces. With mass extinctions, 200 species a day going extinct, the oceans are going to be devoid of life by the year 2030. Devoid of life. The oceans. It’s like hard to fathom how this is even possible.

But this is where we’re headed. And I think a lot of people see that and they feel the horror of it and they feel the trauma of it. And it’s hard not to be overwhelmed. But there are definitely people who want to fight, who want to fight for the things they love. The people they love, the animals they love, the places they love. And putting all that analysis together, I think gives us a lot of mini tools. Because at least we can understand the problem.

Now, whether or not that push is going to be enough considering how much power is on the other side, I don’t know.

Matt: Well, that’s why I think self-awareness is so key, because understanding the problem, the problem is us. The problem is our needs and our need to dominate, our need to control, our need to manipulate, our need to monetize.

Are you looking at like, social structures, political structures, like capitalism, just that ideal of monetizing things and free market and then if you just let it go, it works and everybody’s happy?

I mean, there’s so many way to come at this. You go internal, you go, “What am I doing? Who am I? How am I connected to this problem?” And then you can go external and go, “It’s political.” And then you go, “It’s environmental and it’s spiritual and it’s everything.”

I mean, how does one even start to address it, is my question.

Lierre: Well, I think that we all have our own gifts and our own capacities. Our own talents. And so some people are really good at lawyers. Some people are really good at being farmers. Some people are really good at being artists. And you know, it’s not for me to say what somebody else’s passions is, but, you know, whatever your passion is, you’ve got to direct it at the forces right now that are against justice and against sustainability and against compassion on this planet.

We all have our work to do, but it just seems to me that it’s not, I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out what’s gone so wrong. I think that our big problem is really emotional. You know, I don’t think it’s that hard to notice. It’s like, yeah, there are all these giant institutions that are headed completely in the wrong direction. And we’re going to have to rein them in somehow. We’re going to have to figure out how to get our power back. Because they took it from us.

Nate: Yeah, the Monsantos of the world.

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Lierre: It’s all for their profit and it’s very short-sighted. Because without a living planet it doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank, you can’t eat it. You know? You can’t breathe it at this – there may not be oxygen in a hundred years. Like, that’s how bad it is.

Matt: Right, it’s like you watch the Walking Dead and it’s like this post-apocalyptic thing. And everybody is just killing each other over food. And that’s the reality of it, you know? Like, your money is not going to do anything for you.

Lierre: Well, I think that there’s a reason that those movies are so popular now. I think that it’s in the popular consciousness that things are bad. And that when societies collapse, it doesn’t necessarily look good. Not for a long time.

So, I think that it sort of bubbles around in people’s subconscious that is like, “We are headed for the brink here. Is there any chance of hope?” But I’m not giving up. I think that there’s every chance we could still pull back.

These are human created problems. These are not biological problems. These are not problems of physics, you know, or chemistry. Not about the laws of the universe in anyway, these are human created problems –

Matt: Yeah, it’s supply and demand.

Lierre: We can fix these problems, yeah.

Nate: Yeah, my wife and I, we bought some land. We’ve kind of seen the writing on the wall. I feel a lot like you do. I feel like people have to start getting back on the land and being part of it as opposed to just sitting in cities and consuming. I think there’s enough land for everybody. I think people’s priorities are really different.

You know, I see so many Facebook fights, people arguing about all these different things and I’m like, “I don’t know if these are issues.” People don’t really post about the fact that bees are dying, you know, in crazy numbers. And bees are responsible for 60% of what we eat. And people don’t even care. It’s like, they just argue about all this other stuff.

And it just got to the point where people should own beehives like they own dogs, you know what I mean?

Lierre: No, I completely agree with you.

Nate: That seems to be the environmentalist movement. If you’re going to be an environmentalist and go out there and preach it, you need to have a beehive in your backyard along with a hundred other things that actually help. As opposed to just a cute little Chihuahua in your purse or whatever. I don’t know.

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Lierre: (laughs) There’s an entire province of China where all the pollinators are dead. There’s not a single pollinator left. And so for them to eat, they have to pollenate by hand. Every single food crop that’s out there.

And it’s 500 million years of evolution that’s been wiped off the face of the earth.

Matt: How ridiculous is it that now we have these little micro robot bees that we’re like, “Oh, we’ll save it with these robot bees that cost millions of dollars to make and then create all this waste and garbage.”

Like, “No, how about we just save the bees? (laughs) Let’s just address that.” We have this idea that empiricism and science will eventually fix our problems when it’s more of a – that’s still dominating the issue. We have to submit to fix the problems. We can’t overachieve and get some new technology that’s going to help us farm better. That just creates more and more issues.

Lierre: I completely agree with you. And we’re supposed to be warned about human hubris as we’re growing up. Like the whole story of Icarus flying to the sun. Or, you know, pick your religion, pick your folktales, but there’s, I mean, isn’t there always one of those huge warnings that you’re given as you’re growing up. The stories you’re supposed to absorb.

It’s like, “Be very careful because humans can be prideful and it doesn’t end well.” If we think that we are, you know, out of the constraints of life, out of the constraints of, you know, our physical capacity, we think we are like gods, we are not. We can’t do that. And the results are never good.

Nate: I have those arguments with people about genetically modified foods. GMOs. Where people just think that they’re on the side of science that thinks that we need GMOs. We need science to be genetically altering these things to advance humankind. And I’m just like, “Do you realize the Pandora’s Box that you’re opening? And you have no idea the ramifications down the line.”

And basically now, it’s already open. Do you feel like genetically modified organisms are going to be a part of us collapsing faster?

Lierre: Yeah, well, that’s the terror isn’t it? It’s like who knows what they’ve unleashed on the world now. It’s like there’s genetic pollutions forever. You can’t get those genes back out once you’ve put them in. And you’ve crossed species barriers that those are boundaries that have been there for millions of years.

Like, those forms of life knew what they were doing. We cannot possible have the wisdom of forty million years. We can’t. Life does have that. You know? But we don’t. We’re just humans will little tiny brains. There’s no way we can understand what’s going on.

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Matt: I was watching Chef’s Table, and it was a Mexican chef. And he was talking about the different types of corn they use to make their tortillas. And he was making tacos, like fine dining tacos out of these different types of corn that are almost extinct. Because of GMO corn and the like.

And he’s trying to fight. He’s like, “This is a travesty. I mean, this corn’s been here for millions of years and who are we to think that we can just wipe it out?” And, you know, a lot of these communities in these regions of Mexico still have it. But they’re like hanging by a thread. This ancient corn is almost dead.

And it’s just like the bees and it’s just like the birds and it’s like the oceans and how we over fish. I can look at it all and go, “This is overwhelming. I don’t know what to do.” Is there any practical thing (laughs) that I can do? You know, like just practically I feel convicted, you’re blowing my mind. What can I do about it?

Lierre: Well, you know, on a personal level, one of the most important things we can do is to find the farmers in our region who are doing it well. And that is to say, find the grass base farmers who are restoring topsoil, you know, restoring life to the land and producing good food.

Every single centimeter of topsoil that they are producing is carbon that’s being sucked out of the atmosphere and being stored permanently. And for other no other reason, find the grass base farmers in your region and support them. Because with every bit you eat, you are sequestering carbon.

Some of the statistics, some of the numbers on this actually really hopeful. If we could take even 75% of the world’s trashed out grassland – which have been trashed for agriculture, let’s be very up front about that. It’s corn and wheat and soy that have done this. But if we could return them to some kind of grassland, some kind of pasture land, it would only take about 15 years for us to sequester all the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age.

15 years is all it would take. That’s how good grass is at building topsoil. So the number one thing is find those farmers and support them. There’s some really great resources online, it’s actually really easy. You can go to eatwild.com and there’s a woman named Jo Robinson who’s written a number of really good books about this subject. But you can go state by state and just, you know, you can look. “Who’s doing this well in my area?” And you can go directly to a lot of these farms and just buy what you need.

You can go to farmers markets an dfind a lot of it. You can pressure your local co-op, you’re local grocery store, even the bigger chains, and ask them to have grass fed and pasture raised food as much as they can.

So grass fed beef, you know, pasture raised chicken, all of that should be in every store at this point. And I mean, we shouldn’t even be having the other kind. It

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shouldn’t even exist. Like, why is anybody feeding corn to cows? It doesn’t even make any sense. Why are we even growing that kind of stuff to start with?

But, you know, even putting that aside, why is it being fed to cows? I mean, the whole thing’s insane. And it’s a model based on A, fossil fuel. And then B, how do you make this – there’s no morality left in it because the whole morality is that, “Well, it’s the profits that matter.” And indeed you can make meat really fast by feeding corn to cows. But it’s crazy. It makes them sick, and it’s just – all of this was made possible because of that surplus.

I mean, factory farming did not exist before 1950. And this is the exact reason. And this is why a lot of the people have it backwards. Because they think that corn is being produced to feed it to cows, and they’re completely wrong. It’s surplus because of the Green Revolution. And it ended up getting fed to cows because it’s so cheap.

And the reason it’s so cheap is because gas and oil are cheap. That is the flow.

Matt: And it’s subsidized by the government.

Lierre: Yes. And there’s not a single farmer that would stop producing corn. Even if every one of us stopped eating factory farmed meat it wouldn’t stop it because that’s not the driver. And so, there’s this very naïve idea of, “Well, it’ll stop if we all stop eating factory farmed meat.”

And it’s not true because that’s not the driver. And of course, I believed that for 20 years. But if you go out into farm country you see that that’s not the truth of it. That’s one of those things that I wish people would understand. And I know it’s complicated. Farm policy is not an easy thing to dig your teeth into. But we’ve got to get involved. I mean, it’s not going to change if we don’t get involved.

So whatever your passion is about this, whether it’s, you know, nutrition, whether it’s global warming, whether it’s animal rights, whatever it is, there’s so many ways to get involved. Finding other people in your region who are working on these issues and join with them. You know, put your labor and your love –

Matt: You said eatwell.com is a good resource.

Lierre: Eat wild.

Matt: Eat wild?

Lierre: Eatwild.com.

Matt: Eatwild.com, okay.

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Lierre: Yeah, she’s great. You can just click on your state and it will show you who is doing grass based farming where you live. Mostly, you can buy directly from them, which is really wonderful, because you can go to the farm and see for yourself. “Wow! Look at all this soil that they’re building. It’s lush and it’s green and it’s beautiful. And the animals look so healthy and happy.” The farmers will talk to you about what they’re doing and how they do it.

And you can feel happy about it. You can know that you are helping the planet by just buying this food.

Matt: You’ve done a good job at – I don’t know whether or not it’s alarmist or not – but at least convicting me of what I need to do. So I appreciate that. Our podcast – we’re called Don’t Feed The Trolls – and we talk a lot about dualistic thinking and either or, black or white, binary thinking. You know? And how that can often lead to just finding your identity in a tribe. And just never being open to the other side or maybe that there is another truth or another reality.

And you mentioned at the top of the interview that you were a fundamentalist in a way. And I thought that was fascinating because we’re using kind of terms that are like religious terms. But it’s about our identity in veganism or vegetarianism. And you can be so staunch whether you’re a hyper religious fundamentalist or a hyper vegan fundamentalist or whatever active thing that you identify with. That’s part of your tribal identity. That you can’t, that you’re no longer open.

And the pendulum can swing with duality because you’re going from one side to the other. And at some point, like you said, life happens and you’re forced to break that down and deconstruct that identity. Which it seems – you know, you were a vegan for 20 years, and then suddenly it didn’t work anymore. And I just see so many parallels in people’s lives with politics, with faith.

You’re raised one way, you’re taught one way. Or maybe you adopt it in your early twenties or something. And that becomes part of your life. And then it just doesn’t work anymore and you’re forced to tear it apart.

And then, it’s, like you said, it’s dramatic. And kind of Nate and I, have both been through that. That dramatic change of like, “Oh, I don’t know what I believe about this anymore. What do I hold onto?” And then you reconstruct.

And the way I like your story – I’m talking a lot, I’m sorry – but the reason I like your story is because you reconstruct it into this not just “screw it all” you know? You’re still very much an activist. You’re still very much passionate, but you’re passionate about a more holistic approach than just simply being black and white. Or dualistic, or fundamentalist, about veganism.

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Do you see that parallel at all between like – it seems almost religious how people get into this. And are all out for it, to the point where they don’t even think about it or can’t question it.

Lierre: There are very cult-like elements in veganism. I wouldn’t go all out and say, “Oh, it’s a cult.” But very cult-like elements. You will lose your friends if you stop being a vegan. You will lose your friends even if you say you’re thinking about not being a vegan anymore. I lost friends over not being a vegan.

And I’ve been in group after group that has been absolutely wrecked because the vegans wouldn’t stop. It’s not a vegan group, it’s not even an animal rights group. It’s a different kind of group entirely, and it doesn’t matter. They come in, and they just demand that everybody has to eat their way and everybody has to prioritize their thing. And the group just can’t function anymore because of their bad behavior.

And they don’t seem to even understand that, even just from the perspective of, “How do we get people to join our movement?” Like, you’re failing utterly by behaving this way. (laughs)

Yes, there is a very, very fundamentalist kind of mindset that goes with this.

Matt: And the same people would hate religious fundamentalists. Like they would just look at, you know, Westboro Baptist Church or people like that and be like, “What evil, evil people.” And then go out and kind of behave in similar fashion. Throwing arrows and darts and disrupting people’s lives who believe different things from them.

Lierre: Well, you know, you’ll read these little messages and then someone will say, “Oh, it’s like every time I go out in public I get in a fight with someone.” I’m like, “Why are you doing that? You’re even admitting yourself. Like you’re compelled to get in a fight with people. Just shut the fuck up, like what are you doing?”

But so many people said to me after I stopped being a vegan, they were like, “You were like the only nice one I ever met.” I stood out as like the nice one because everyone else is so miserable in that world.

Part of it is – I hate to say this – part of it is the nutritional deficits of being a vegan. When you don’t have enough cholesterol, you don’t have enough fat, and you don’t have the right amino acids in your diet, with the right proteins, your brain just isn’t able to function. And it’s really hard to keep a stable mood state without especially the fat in your brain. Your brain itself is almost 80% fat.

And its preferred food is fat. And you’re eating these food that just are wrong. It’s nothing but carbohydrate. So the macronutrient level does not provide the brain with what it needs.

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And this is why there’s various studies from all around the world that show that vegans have anywhere from two to five times as many mental illnesses as other people. And it’s strictly nutritional. So they do end up with a very inflexible brain and with a lot of depression and a lot of rage.

And some of that is based on, you know, the kind of echo chamber effect. But some of it really is just the food they’re eating is making them crazy. And is making them [inaudible]. You know, they don’t want to hear that, but look how they behave. It’s predictable how they behave.

We all know what we’re talking about when we say the Vegan Police or the obnoxious vegan. Everybody rolls their eyes because we’ve all met that person. And it’s the same. Like there’s so few that aren’t that way. And it really is a huge chunk of this that’s just biochemically, this is what happens to your brain if you don’t feed it the right fuel.

Matt: Right. Vegan, cross head, atheist walk into a bar. How do you know?

Lierre: Because they won’t shut up about it.

Matt: They’ll tell you. (laughs) Yeah, that whole thing. It’s stupid when it becomes a caricature. And I understand the intent. Like I can see myself, you know, as I’ve deconstructed my world view growing up and kind of it’s become more holistic and more expansive. I can see all viewpoints now and I can see how we’re all connected.

My daughter brought home a sunflower seed in a Dixie cup. She got it from preschool. And I was very skeptical that it would work. But like life happened. And this thing sprouted up overnight. And it grows like an inch and half a day. And I’ve seen it move.

Lierre: Oh, they’re amazing, yeah.

Matt: I’ve seen it move!

Lierre: Yeah, you can hear them growing sometimes.

Matt: Yeah! And I’m like, I can see myself so connected to this. It’s life, you know? So I could see myself morally going, “I don’t want to eat any animal that I don’t know. And maybe I don’t want to eat them at all.” I can see that, I can see my life kind of trending towards that.

Do you think that’s something that happens with like age or do you think like – I guess some people close off with age. But I just kind of want to be more open to the idea that like I’m connected to things.

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Lierre: You are connected to things. And all things are sentient. And this is the wisdom of pretty much every tradition around the world until modern times was that the universe is alive, the cosmos is a living being. And every creature that you see, whether it’s somebody like us or somebody not like us, they all have that spirit. They all have a way that they are alive and that means we can all communicate. Because we all have the little bit of the sacred in us.

So whether it’s a tree, a rock, a river, the raindrops, you know, the antelope, whatever it is that’s around you, they’re all alive in some way that’s similar to me and you. And that means that the world is full of other beings into which we can enter a relationship.

And when that closes down, then only what’s possible are, you know, objectification and relationships of exploitation. But it’s the shutting down that makes that possible.

Now, the opening to all of that does not mean that we don’t kill to eat because no matter what you eat, you are killing something. And I think in those much older wisdom traditions, there’s no higher value put on a bison than on, you know, the blue stem grass, or whatever. Like, it’s all the creatures are part of each other. They understood that. That you can’t just pluck one out and say, “Well, this one is important, but the others aren’t.” Because they all depend on each other.

And at any given instance, they’re all become each other. And that includes us. You know, like someday, there’s going to be a fox baby that has some of my cells in her little body. Like it’s just the way it is. There’s going to be birds that have little bits of what was me, once.

And that’s just going to keep going until I’m completely dispersed. And then I’ll reform some other way. You know, like you get another chance and we’re all part of this life.

And I think that that’s the bigger wisdom because I understand that. I mean, I got stuck there when I was 16 like, “Oh my god, I don’t want to kill. I don’t want to kill, I can’t kill. Animals matter. I don’t want to kill.” And I didn’t understand that it wasn’t just about what was dead on my plate, it was what died to get that food there.

And if I was eating agricultural foods, the answer was the entire planet is dying to bet you that food. It just didn’t look that way because I didn’t know the difference. I didn’t know, nobody had told me.

So it’s easy to take that compassion and that willingness to enter into relationship and dead end it, you know, into a very simplistic kind of, “Well, no death. And

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the only deaths that matter are deaths of creatures very much like me in these certain ways.” And that’s pretty much what the vegans do.

And it misses the right impulse. Like, you should care about life, you should care that there are other creatures on this planet and that they have their own reasons for living. And that they have their own beauty and their own magic. That’s all good. And we should be compassionate and we should care about justice. But the part they’re missing is that no matter what you eat, something is going to die to feed you. No matter what it is. And some of those creatures are going to be animals.

Whether you eat them or not, they’re dying to feed you. So the bigger question is, “Is this the death that’s killing everything? Or is this the death that’s just a part of that cycle that I have to accept, be humble before.” And that’s it. Those are really our only options.

Matt: Ah, it’s beautifully said, beautifully stated. And we thank you for your time today. We’re going to let you go because we don’t want to hold you off from your work, but where can people find you online and what’s the best way to discover your work? Where do you want to point people?

Lierre: So, I have a website: lierrekeith.com. And my joke is, “That’s really easy, it’s just my name.” And that’s a joke because I have a crazy name to spell. So it’s L-I-E- R-R-E, Lierre Keith.

If you can’t remember that, like if you’re driving like, “I want to read more.” The easiest thing to remember is Vegetarian Myth, that’s the name of my book and the only person who wrote that book, if you type in “Vegetarian Myth” into Google, you’ll find me immediately. You’ll also find a lot of evil stuff about me, you can go there or not, I don’t care. But if you want the book, that’s where you go and you’ll find my website and you can find my book or not or listen to it online or whatever. So, that’s the best place to find out.

Matt: Awesome. So, I’ll ask the question. Have you ever done like the enneagram personality test?

Lierre: Oh gosh, years ago! I don’t remember what mine was, but I remember that was a big – everybody loved it.

Matt: We might share a number. I just like the way you talk. (laughs) It’s very entertaining and I feel like a kinship.

Lierre: Well, I know in Myers-Briggs, I’m an INFP.

Matt: Oh, there you go. I’m an ENFJ, so that’s way off. That about wraps it up. Thanks, everyone, for listening to Don’t Feed The Trolls. Tell your friends about us. You

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can email us at [email protected]. Trollspodcast.com, all over the internet.

That was Lierre Keith and she’s awesome. Check her out at lierrekeith.com and we’ll see you next week.

Nate: Thanks.

Matt: Sweet.

Lierre: That’s wonderful, thank you!

Matt: Alright, well, we’ll let you know when it posts!

Lierre: Very good.

Matt: Alright, thank you.

Lierre: Bye.

Matt: Bye-bye.

Don’t Feed The Trolls Podcast