Vegan
The New Ethics of Eating
(Revised Edition)
By Erik Marcus
McBooks Press, 2001
Paperback, 211 pages,
$26.50
Reviewed by Syd Baumel
Erik Marcus and McBooks Press are so committed to getting their message across that they're giving downloadable copies of this book away at www.vegan.com. It's not like they have thousands of hard copies moldering away in a warehouse. Recently released in its second edition (as is the download), Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating is a turn of the millennium classic of popular animal welfare literature. As I write this, the book is ranking a respectable 10,908 at Amazon.com in a field of a million or two. "Marcus' book," Bruce Friedrich of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) writes in a blurb at Amazon, "is widely considered to be the best introduction to veganism." Fully twenty-eight Amazon reader reviewers have given it an average 5-star rating. "I was a lacto/ovo-vegetarian for over a year, then I was 90% vegan for a few months, and this book helped push me to the 100% mark. Not preachy at all, and very inspiring," one reader writes.
Vegan certainly deserves to be widely read and praised. Marcus, a conscientious gen-Xer who awakened to the call of veganism as a college student, makes the case for the cause with a light, no guilt-trip hand (as another Amazonian notes: "I have read many books on the subject, this is the first one I feel comfortable giving to my in-laws"). It isn't necessary for the heartbreaking stories behind-the-scenes of steak on your plate and milk in your coffee to be aggressively milked to prick most people's consciences. Marcus presents these facts with an artillery of supporting references mostly from the agricultural literature itself. A fair journalist, he lets the data speak for itself, even debunking the occasional vegan talking point. In a strong chapter on the environmentally unsustainable toll of large-scale meat production, Marcus refutes the popular vegan notion that redeploying the planet's resources to grow a plant-based diet would guarantee an end to world hunger. "Starvation is due to local shortages of wealth, not global shortages of food," Marcus quotes one expert. Nonetheless, "if the entire world switched to a vegan diet, our current food production could properly nourish 7 billion people," he quotes another. That's nearly twice as many well fed mouths as now. Thus, with the requisite political will and kindness, every step away from cheeseburger culture can indeed be a step toward feeding the world's hungry.
Side by side with all the anguishing data on animal neglect and abuse is a series of sidebars on the kindhearted people - and heartwarming animals - at Farm Sanctuary in Upstate New York, a haven for refugees from the factory farm system. In a chapter on the life of factory-farmed pigs, foe example, we read on one page how in farrowing crates "if a piglet slips under the sow, there is no natural cushioning of mud or straw - the piglet gets crushed or smothered against concrete, wood, or metal." Glance over to the next page and read about a pig named Dawn rescued by Farm Sanctuary. She had been left to starve because she was too sickly to be worth feeding. "Just touching her belly," Marcus discovers, "makes her instantly flop over for a belly rub."
Worth the price of admission is a chapter (excerpted on our website) in which Marcus eloquently reflects on how he happened to become one of these strange vegan birds. I'm sure many vegans will read it and think "that is so me." More importantly, given its compelling mixture of logic and compassion, it's a chapter many latent vegans will read and think, "that so should be me."
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