Letters to the Editor

• Misinterpreting

  [Read the article: Murderous vegans]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I think many posters here are misinterpreting Ms. Planck's article, or never read it to begin with. It's also helpful if you have actually her thoughtful book, "Real Food". She's hardly anti-vegetable or suggesting that people live on MacDonalds, and she is, in fact, a strong proponent of organic foods.

  While I think that ADULTS can live very well on a vegan diet IF they understand nutrition, food combining and so on, it is not an appropriate diet for INFANTS. It may be OK for young children above the age of toddlers, again if the parents are really knowledgeable about what they are doing and provide a really well-balanced diet.

  BUT...and this is a big but...that is a minority of vegans (or even vegetarians), in my experience. Most so-called "vegan's/vegetarians" in the US are really people who just like eating a strange restricted diet, usually with the goal of weight loss in mind and little else. Add to that a certain number who are very (perhaps overly) sentimental about animals and who think of farm stock as "pets" (such as in "Babe" or "Charlotte's Web").

  Because their dietary choices are based on this, and not on science or nutrition, you often find these so-called "vegan/vegetarians" eating bizarre things that are probably no healthier than the meat or dairy stuff they gave up -- I have seen women trying to get by on little more than salads, spritzed with vinegar and low-fat, sugar-free soy yogurt and diet sodas -- day after day -- who proudly call themselves vegan/vegetarians! Then of course they wonder why they are hungry all the time, and given to bingeing on fat-free, low-carb gluten-free organic cookies.

  I think we are a culture that is very badly out of balance in regard to simple, normal, healthy eating and that it shows in BOTH the immense growth of vegan/vegetarianism AND obesity AND anorexia....it is at every possible end of the spectrum. We obsess over everything we eat, yet we gulp food down on the run. We rarely cook anything ourselves from scratch, and then get pissed off at the strange brew of additives and chemicals that manufacturers put in our foods. Mostly, we want what we eat to "cure us" of overeating and obesity by magically either adding (oat bran! fiber! Omega-3!) or subtracting (low-fat! low-sugar! low-carb!) some ingredient which will promise us beauty and eternal youth.

  I suspect that the parents in this case were not so much deliberat;y starving their baby out of "stupidity" as is stated so many times but out of a heartfelt belief that they could have controlled their child's biological destiny, i.e., to have ensured the child would be thin. Probably as the poor little tike shiveled away, they congratulated themselves on how THEIR baby wasn't fat -- not like other people's awful, chubby toddlers -- and would be physically attractive, skinny, cute, HEALTHY, in the lowest possible percentile for weight for their age, etc. I imagine they also told themselves that if the baby got breast milk, that was FOOD FROM AN ANIMAL (yup, a human animal) and ergo, must be bad.

  They went absurdly too far, of course, and are certainly guilty of the crimes they were convicted of. But I do not see their behavior as significantly different of MANY people in my acquaintance who are on eccentric no-meat, no-fat, no-carb diets....who think they can starve themselves to perfection.

  There is no perfection in life. Accept that. If you are an adult, please eat what you want...and shut up about it. If you are a parent of an infant though, you need to stop obsessing and accept what science knows about infant nutrition. That's all Ms. Planck is saying -- she's not denying any adults the right to choose their own foods -- and it's basic common sense.

  Permalink Thursday, May 24, 2007 05:08 PM