A Response to "Death By Veganism"

I, like most, have a limited reserve of emotional energy. If I got worked up over every ridiculous, rude, wrongheaded, malicious or uninformed thing said about vegans or veganism, I would spend out my store and then some before breakfast. It’s been a struggle for me (and one that’s surely not over yet either), learning how to be what I am and believe in what I do strongly, passionately and profoundly, as well as respectfully, openly and calmly. Of course, every once in a while I get pissed off. Today, I was pissed.

I say was pissed, past tense, because it was a fairly brief surge of anger that ripped through me, leaving a tired sadness and an incredible frustration in its wake. Mostly, I’m disheartened now, though there’s a dollop of p.o.ed still in the mix. The source of this taxing emotional expenditure?

Enter: “Death by Veganism”

Presumably many of you have seen this sensationalist op-ed piece in The New York Times, since it is now the number one most emailed story on the Times. If you’re a vegan and haven’t already read it of your own volition, or had it emailed to you, check it out now because it will be haunting you in the form of both well- and bad-intentioned questions and criticisms.

Written by Nina Planck (who purports to be “the leading American expert on farmers’ markets and local food,” a position she seems to have granted herself as the head of a company whose job it is to operate markets for farmers), the piece takes as its starting point a recent case of woefully uneducated parents who starved their baby by feeding him a diet of apple juice and soy milk. The parents in this case understand themselves as vegan and maintain that they were providing their child a vegan diet, so when the baby died of starvation and the tragedy became news, it was branded as “Vegans Starve Baby.” Insert eye-roll here, right? Except that many people honestly believe that this is a representative case of vegan parenting.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone with some amount of knowledge about veganism and without a vegan-bashing agenda that the core issue of this case, as the prosecutor zeroed in on, is that “the child died because he was not fed.” The baby was not fed enough and not fed properly, that is what led to his death; it's not about veganism. The fact is that a non-vegan baby fed only apple juice and cow’s milk in this amounts this baby was given would have starved too. The defense did vegans everywhere a disservice by trying to make this case be about veganism and claiming that the parents were doing the best with what they had available to them as vegans. All the many healthy and happy vegan babies in the world belie this claim.

The parents in this case obviously had no education about how to care for an infant. They weren’t educated in a conventional way: they gave birth at home in a bathtub and never visited a doctor, and who knows why? Maybe they didn’t have the money, maybe they felt that a white middle class male doctor would belittle them and their beliefs and they didn’t want or trust the care that they and their baby would have gotten—whatever it was that kept them from seeking this kind of education, evaluation and guidance is moot now (though it does bear some consideration for the future) but they clearly didn’t turn to any other sources of education either. Suffice to say, the research has been done, the information is there, the experience is there, it can all be benefited from in order to learn about how to have a healthy vegan pregnancy and raise healthy vegan babies.

So, that’s the background, the sad case that has served as a useful soapbox for anti-veg people to climb upon and exploit a tragedy to their own self-affirming and hate-filled ends (“see—I was right all along, vegans are crazy, murdering hypocrites! They kill babies, so pass the steaks!”). While I steered clear of it at the time, I was aware of the discourse going on around this case, but today, I couldn't ignore it when the Times offered up a kinder, gentler, pseudo-scientific platform for the very same self-congratulatory, anti-vegan, provocateurist crap.

Planck is one of those “I used to be vegan”s who use their flirtation with veganism and subsequent “reformation” to build a sense of authority and insight. She’s been there so now she can help you see the light, you sad malnourished moralistic vegan dimwits. She has no medical or nutritional background from which to make her case from (which has come as a surprise to several people I’ve vented about this opinion piece to, since she centers her argument on nutrition) and she mealy-mouths through a barrage of nutritional science, obfuscating, apparently willfully, truths about nutrition and vitamins.

I’m not a nutritionist, anymore than Planck is, but I’ve done a variety of reading on the subject from many sources, talked with lots of doctors (believe me when I say…) and taken nutrition courses. So, while there are many others far more qualified than I to refute the poor work done in this op-ed piece, even with my limited knowledge I know Planck makes claims that are out and out wrong and there are plenty of significant fact omissions too. Perhaps the Times doesn’t set their fact-checkers to review op-eds? Surely, even though this is the opinion page, readers should be able to depend upon the accuracy of information on which “experts” rest their opinions.

Planck’s whole argument about the “deathly” dangers of a vegan diet rest on the premise that “children fed only plants will not get the precious things they need to live and grow,” an argument that is countered by the position of the American Dietetic Association (ADA), a group with far more credibility, expertise and knowledge on things nutritional than Planck. In their 2003 position paper on vegetarian and vegan diets, the ADA wrote that a “well-planned” vegan diet is appropriate for every life stage, they even specify inclusion of pregnancy and infanthood in this claim. They also go on to say that such well-planned vegetarian and vegan diets are “healthful, nutritionally adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”

Unless Planck has conducted a whole new body of nutritional research, she knows something that nobody else in the nutritional field knows about the inadequacies of veganism. This is also what undermines her silly little dig about how oppressive p.c. vegetarians have made it impossible to talk about "primary" protein sources from animal products and "secondary" protein sources from vegetable sources. This means of classifying proteins is actually a completely outmoded throw-back in the nutritional field which has evolved in its understanding of proteins and protein needs (remember "complementary proteins"? yeah, we're past that too).

I don’t want to belabor this, or “preach to a choir,” not that I assume all readers here are or want to be vegan, in fact, I know there are many who aren’t and don’t, so maybe a little for those readers or non-veg passersby and maybe just to bolster the resolve of my fellow vegans, I will dwell a bit on the nutritional misinformation in this piece.

“A vegan diet may lack vitamin B12, found only in animal foods.”

B12 may exist primarily in animal-proteins, but it is certainly available in vegan forms, for example, in nutritional yeast and in pretty much every milk- and meat-analog on the market. There are also vegan supplements or even injections for B12. I think B12 might be the most difficult vitamin to get a sufficient amount of with a vegan diet, but even when I wasn’t specifically committed to making sure I got a lot of B12 in my vegan diet, my B12 levels were always within a normal range (measured by blood tests).

[vegan diets lack] “…usable vitamins A and D, found in meat, fish, eggs and butter; and necessary minerals like calcium and zinc. When babies are deprived of all these nutrients, they will suffer from retarded growth, rickets and nerve damage.”

People who drink milk are consuming their vitamin D as a supplement because the milk they drink would not have enough of the vitamin in it otherwise. But the real thing here is that most people get most of the vitamin D that they need through the sun. It takes about fifteen minutes of exposure to sunlight to get a daily recommended dose of vitamin D. And sunlight, my friends, is vegan.

Research does show that vitamin A may better absorbed by the body when it is delivered as pre-formed vitamin A, which comes from animal sources, but it is still fully useable to the body when it comes in a vegetable form. 1/2 a cup of carrot juice provides in excess of 500% of the daily recommended value of vitamin A. It's also readily available in spinach, cantaloupe, apricots, papaya, mango, tomato, kale, red peppers... Also, as with vitamin D, most people who eat animal-based foods get their daily value of retinol, the most active and “usable” form of vitamin A, from eating fortified-foods. The point being, people eat animal products, but the vitamins they get from them are generally added to the products they consume because they would otherwise be nutritionally deficient.

Calcium too exists abundantly in many more products than milk. It is available in beans, leafy greens, nuts and seeds, all sorts of things (as is zinc). Further, the American Heart Association points to studies which show that vegetarians retain more calcium than do non-vegetarians. The milk industry in America has based their campaigns on how the calcium contained in milk is good for healthy bones, but the Harvard Nurse’s study, found that there was a relationship between milk consumption and broken bones, in that the more milk women drank, the more likely they were to break a bone. I’ve seen reasonable extrapolations on this finding which wonder if the over-consumption of dairy products taxes the body and leeches vital minerals from it, causing frail bones.

"Responsible vegan parents know that breast milk is ideal."

I could be over-reading this, but there’s an insinuation here, I think, that vegans do not think breastfeeding is vegan and that they don’t want to engage in it, despite knowing it’s best. I don’t know why, but this comes up over and over again. Of course, breastfeeding is vegan. It is given freely by a woman to her baby. And surely, Planck could not say that non-vegan mothers consistently breastfeed, even in the face of irrefutable evidence that it’s the best thing for babies nutritionally speaking. It's taken many years of activism, awareness, education and social change to encourage and make spaces and time for mothers to breastfeed and still only about a third of mothers (according to a National Immunization Survey) report breastfeeding their babies six months after birth. The numbers drop lower for mothers who live below the poverty line and get WIC, which provides them with assistance in purchasing infant formula.

“Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development.”

This study (whatever it is and if it is reputable and replicable, sorry, but I’m not inclined to take Planck on faith...) has produced an important finding. So, surprise! Maybe vegan mothers, like almost all nursing women, need to take a supplement to make sure that the demands placed on their bodies by pregnancy and nursing can be fully supported by their nutritional intake. There are several vegan sources for omega 3s, like flax seed oil, green leafy vegetables, some beans, linseeds, certain oils, and nuts. There are also DHA supplements that are made from sea-vegetables, the very same vegetables that the fish, which Planck suggests need to be used to make oil to feed babies, eat to produce DHA. (Everyone did catch the part in this piece where Planck says that babies are made from fish oil? I’m not kidding, this is what she says. I, for one, was not made from fish oil and do not seem to be the worse for it.)

"There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run."

This seems to be a trump card for people in playing against veganism, but I'm still unsure of what it buys them. I don't have the background or research to cite specific societies that were more or less vegan, there are others who could. (There should be a response wiki for this op-ed, pooling the combined knowledge of everyone!) But, I also think that responding to this claim by listing examples of veg-based societies is totally beside the point. I'm vegan in the here and now as a response to the here and now and in a way that is totally sustainable and nutritionally adequate. Veganism is a option that offers some remediation to modern problems. There are many things about contemporary society that have never been a part of any society in the past and that's the way it should be; we should always be active, engaged, learning, and responding to contemporary conditions and changes.

But in point of fact, I think this is a piece that hides its petty, garden-variety, anti-political correctness face behind a slew of misinformation about the “dangers” of a vegan diet. We get to the real heart of it when Planck writes, “…Though it’s not politically correct to say so, all diets are not created equal.” On her website, she bills herself as the “antidote to faddists and kooks.” Obviously, she sees veganism as a fad practiced by kooks, who protest against eating “real food.” You know, like the stuff she sells.

I’m fairly sure that Planck and I would agree on the merits of a local, whole-food based diet and would advocate for many similar modes of shopping and eating. The fact then that she picks up on this anomalous tragedy to make an argument against vegans on the pages of the American paper of record, rather than pointing to real, wide-spread, systematic problems in food production, distribution and consumption is a shame.

Clearly, Planck wanted to ride a high horse and point the finger, but there are so many more useful targets out there if this is the mode in which she has to operate. What about the culpability of parents who provide completely unhealthy, unbalanced animal-based diets for their children who suffer from a variety of diseases that are caused in large part by their diets (diabetes, obesity, etc.)? What about school systems that get the green light for defining corn-syrup filled ketchup as a vegetable? What about the over-processed, over-packaged food options that fill our grocery stores with empty calories and needless amounts of “bad” fats? What about people living on food stamps or with a limited income who struggle to buy nutritionally adequate food for themselves or their children? (I noticed that Planck scoffs at this concern on her website, saying of course everyone can buy good, whole foods for themselves, if only they are as smart as she is. Why then do educated members of Congress, armed with a life time of privilege, struggle to get by on food stamps?)

Planck didn’t go after any big issues or work to further a discussion about food and diet in America. She scooped some low-hanging fruit and in so doing has offered up a pile of inaccuracies and grounds for worry among readers of the Times. My mom, for example, wrote me today worried about the claims made in the article, even though she knows I am very careful and concerned about practicing a healthful diet, if somewhat too given to confections…

Planck’s low-grab at this sad story has also provided a means for all sorts of bottom-feeders to vent on vegans because the choices that vegans make about diet seem to imply a judgment of the standard American diet and its meaning and implications that makes them uncomfortable. People get touchy about diet, they don’t want to be told what to eat. People get really touchy about their kids, they don’t want to be told how to raise them or feed them, though interestingly, they think that vegans should be told how to feed their kids because that wacky veganism shouldn’t be “forced” on a child, though of course, every diet every child is fed is “forced” on them until they can make their own choices about what to eat and why.

It’s with the “why” that controversy comes. Many people don’t really consider why they eat what they do or what the implications for their food purchases on ecological or ethical levels are and they are hesitant to make changes or considerations that jeopardize something as fundamental as the food they eat. Food is part of our intimate daily lives and it’s part of our history and identity and family. It’s powerful stuff and opening it up to question is hard.

"Death by Veganism" is a disappointing article and the aftermath is sure to be even more troubling. I don’t want to link to these blogs because I’d hate have them trackback to me or to give them any more traffic than they already get, but on one particularly vitriolic conservative blog, Moonbattery (whatever that means…), the story of Crown Shakur’s starvation death prompted the writer to say, “The moonbattery of liberal kooks is always good for a laugh — until the innocent get killed. Atlanta vegans Lamont Thomas and Jade Sanders attempted to impose their wacky ideology on their newborn son Crown Shakur by feeding him a diet of soy milk and apple juice. (Vegans consider it politically incorrect to consume animal products.)” He goes on to say that liberals generally like to kill their babies with abortion, but that this is a new low. I hardly even know how one could respond to that.

You can imagine that this is just more fodder for the uninformed and hate-mongering. Veganism as political correctness, this is a formulation I wasn’t aware of before today, but it looks like an idea that has legs. Sigh.

Or what about this slice of hysteria from the Livin’ La Vida Low Carb blog? “Vegans are an interesting breed of human being that claim to be eating the ‘perfect’ diet that is most sensitive to the welfare of animals. But what are they doing to the people--and BABIES--who are eating this way?... This diet killed Crown... Remember that the next time a vegan starts spouting off how his diet is saving the planet while keeping him healthy. You'll know the truth!”

I could spend ten pages deconstructing these passages, but the viciousness and vegan dis-info will still be there in morning and I’ll only be more exhausted than I already am.

I would encourage everyone to write to the Times about this op-ed. They should be held to a higher standard.

While anyone who is a vegan has surely faced this kind of opposition and disregard before, don’t just let this pass because you’re sick and tired of going over the same arguments. As this op-ed spends out its little cultural moment, highlighting veganism in this negative way, don’t let yourself be forced into making sound bites and distilling your beliefs into neat little packages for adversaries and media outlets to tear apart; provide a full picture of healthy, happy, unsanctimonious, informed, and rational veganism. Be a strong, respectful and responsible advocate.

And now, so that I don’t look like some undernourished vegan, wasting away with fatigue, I am to bed, but before I go…like any good nerd-punk, I am devoted to the Boing-Boing blog, where they employ the concept of a unicorn chaser. A unicorn chaser is a picture of a unicorn, an image of purity and beauty that follows up something distasteful, gross or sad. After all of this unpleasantness, I feel that you are all are owed a cupcake chaser. A vegan cupcake chaser.

Ah…peanut butter, what can’t you make better?