“death by veganism” — letter to the editor

Posted on June 6, 2007 
Filed Under elsewhere, philosophy

I’m posting below a letter to the editor written by a friend. This is her letter to the Opinion page editor of the New York Times for running Nina Planck’s ridiculous op-ed, “Death by Veganism,” which contains such gems of research and argumentation as

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

and

The fact remains, though, that humans prefer animal proteins and fats to cereals and tubers, because they contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio. This is not true of plant proteins, which are inferior in quantity and quality — even soy.

While other letter writers let Planck have it on the grounds that she can’t get her facts straight, Nancy’s response is, I think, more to the point.

How convenient – not to mention trite – it is to defend humanity’s right to exploit animals in the name of the survival of the human race (”Death by Veganism,” Nina Planck, May 21, 2007). I could not argue with well-made facts about health and nutrition, even if they had been tendered here. But why the relentless campaign against conscious living? Cannot the intelligent resources available to science and the media serve to advance our ability to meet our needs without appealing to speciesist superiority? Is our craving for universal domination so beyond our control that we would rather condemn devastated parents, by whom reasonable risks were taken in the absence of earned community support, than invest in solutions that can protect human life without demanding the misery, suffering, and death of others? Contextualizing this tragedy in the vegan diet does nothing to solve our pandemic public health problems, in a resource-rich nation where children raised on junk food suffer the most. No matter how tempting are the sacrosanct declarations of a benevolent pregnant woman, our survival does not depend on the subordination of animals. Only our hideous arrogance does. An arrogance that has claimed so many lives that it shamefully buries its responsibility for them in the despised, compassionate lives of the forward-thinking vegan in order to survive.

nancy o. gallman

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