A Review of Glen Merzer’s Latest Book “America Goes Vegan!”

How To Help the World Go Vegan

I reviewed Glen Merzer’s previous book, “Food Is Climate,” and it changed my outlook toward veganism. While I had previously been a vegetarian. and later a vegan for over 40 years, before reading that book, I did not realize the extent of animal agriculture’s leading role in causing climate change. It convinced me that animal-based agriculture is by far the leading cause of climate change for two very important reasons.

First, cows and other ruminants emit methane, a greenhouse gas over 120 times as potent per unit weight as CO2 in heating up the atmosphere during the 10 - 15 years it is in the atmosphere. Second, even more importantly, over 40% of the world’s ice-free land is used for grazing and growing feed crops for animals. Because of the decrease in carbon-sequestering trees - from six trillion to three trillion - atmospheric CO2 has risen to very dangerous levels, causing many severe climate effects. Reforesting the vast areas used for animal agriculture could reduce atmospheric CO2 to a safe level. Based on a published peer-reviewed analysis by systems engineer Dr. Sailesh Rao, Merzer reports that animal agriculture is responsible for at least 87% of annual greenhouse emissions, largely due to the missed climate opportunity cost of not reforesting.

I found “Food Is Climate” so valuable and potentially transformative in showing an approach that could avert the looming climate catastrophe that I compared it to such groundbreaking books as “Silent Spring,” by Rachel Carson, “Diet For a New America“ by John Robbins, and “Diet For a Small Planet“ by Francis Moore Lappe,

Because I found “Food Is Climate” so insightful, I looked forward to reading and reviewing Merzer’s recently published “America Goes Vegan!” I was not at all disappointed in this continuation and expansion of his cogent analysis in his previous book.

While, as the title implies, “Food Is Climate” focuses on how shifts toward meat-free dies could greatly reduce climate threats, “America Goes Vegan!” also discusses other reasons that people should become vegans, including reducing diet-related diseases and the massive mistreatment of animals.

Both books have been published at a very important time, as climate threats are becoming more and more apparent. Climate experts are issuing increasingly dire warnings, indicating that the world may soon reach a tipping point when climate spins out of control, and there has been a significant increase in the frequency and severity of heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called the climate situation a “Code Red for humanity” and stated that”delay means death.” While the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization composed of leading climate experts from many nations, warned in 2018 that the world may have only until 2030 to make “unprecedented changes” in order to have a chance to avert a climate catastrophe, CO2 levels have continued to rise annually since then.

As in his previous book, Merzer is sharply critical of environmental organizations including the IPCC and leaders like Al Gore who correctly assess some climate threats and urge major steps to take care of them, but focus on reducing emissions from cars and factories, while ignoring “the cow in the room,” that our only chance to avert a climate catastrophe depends on sharply reducing animal-based diets so that the vast areas now used to produce meat and other animal products can be reforested.

The book is very readable because of Merzer’s humorous style and his willingness to strongly criticize realities of animal-based diets. For example, he points out that hamburger “is nothing but a greasy, unhealthy, artery-destroying sandwich with the decaying muscle tissue of a dead cow at its center” and is unpatriotic, because it “makes so many millions of Americans fat and diabetic and gives them heart attacks and strokes.”

To help people shift to healthier, delicious plant-based diets Merzer provides many practical suggestions and culinary expert Tracy Childs provides many food preparation tips and recipes for healthy, delicious whole-foods, plant-based vegan versions of all the classic American dishes, providing for a potentially joyous transformation for all Americans.

To help leave a habitable, healthy, environmentally sustainable world for future generations, I urge you to read the book and to share its message widely. That could help make the vision of America going vegan into a reality for the whole world. This is essential because there is no Planet B nor effective Plan B.

———

This book give me hope for our world.

Filled with practical information and easy vegan recipes by Tracy Childs centering on comfort foods, America Goes Vegan! is the book that everyone needs to get started on their plant-based journey.”

In just one sentence, he summarizes the powerful solution: the global abolishment of animal-based foods, including fish. Why do our political leaders not want us to know this? The actions Merzer suggests are urgently necessary for us to even have a chance of preventing runaway climate change and the subsequent extinction of humanity.

As he points out, we are free to choose a different path to improve our health, and save the animals and the planet. In this book you’ll find a plethora of healthy delicious recipes from Tracy Childs, from burgers to shakes, to help you on your own path to better health.”—

————-

Yes, it may seem shocking to read the assertion at “at least 87%” of greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to animal agriculture, but this estimate takes into account a factor that most estimates, made by bureaucrats and scientists wearing blinders, fail to address: Carbon Opportunity Cost, or the amount of carbon sequestration that has been forfeited by the razing of forests to accommodate grazing. If we were to rewild all the grazing land on earth, and protect the oceans from industrial fishing, we would eventually return to desirable and stable levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—even without taking other actions, however welcome, to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

This is, in fact, the only possible path to escaping an apocalyptic climate future. Some, of course, consider it unrealistic to imagine that humans would ever willingly limit themselves to eating human foods. Well, we’re simply going to have to do so if we are to survive as a species.

——-

destroy our planet and our atmosphere.

Facing cascading health and climate crises, we cannot afford the luxury of disinterest in whether or not others learn the simple truth that we are designed to eat plants, not animals.

Vegans do no one any favors by being shy about their diet. We all need to get on board, and get our friends on board. But how do you get everyone on board without preaching? That’s the vegan’s dilemma.

Those of us who eat a whole food, plant-exclusive diet know how much it has improved our health, and we’ve seen it improve the health of so many others. We’ve seen many overcome obesity for the first time in their lives and become fit. We’ve seen the plants-only diet reverse heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and autoimmune conditions. Studies have even shown that a plants-only diet offers a massive degree of protection from severe Covid.2 We’ve seen it restore people’s energy and stamina. We’ve seen how a diet of plant foods can outperform medicines. We know that it works. We want to share the good fortune we’ve enjoyed since we learned to limit our diet to plants. We understand that it’s vital for the environment and the climate that we collectively make this shift. We even know that it can prevent pandemics. And, of course, nobody can dispute that it’s better for the animals.

Knowing all that, are we supposed to just keep quiet about it, and let people we care about eat themselves into an early grave, so that we don’t risk diminishing anyone’s enjoyment of cheesesteak? Are we going to let the demand for sea creatures result in lifeless seas, so that our friends can dine obliviously on salmon or lobster, until all the salmon and the lobsters disappear? Should we tolerate the destruction of rainforest and its transformation into desert in deference to the juicy hamburgers “grown” there—burgers that are as American as obesity itself? Should we feel bad about spoiling everyone’s fun, armed as we are with the knowledge that our climate, gloriously stable for twelve thousand years before the twentieth century, has now been rendered unstable by the global 13

production of meat and dairy and the untrammeled harvesting of all life from the seas?

Are we supposed to stay mum every time we hear our friends spout nutritional nonsense, such as the notion that they need to eat meat for the protein, and that it’s consequently a necessary part of the human diet? We know that they’re merely regurgitating meat industry lies. There is an abundance of protein in legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), and more protein-per-calorie in leafy greens and other vegetables than in flesh foods. Plant protein is superior to animal protein in many ways, but most importantly of all, it doesn’t enter your mouth accompanied by saturated fat, cholesterol, and endotoxins, as meat does. Plant foods also provide you with fiber, which meat does not. T. Colin Campbell, in The China Study, demonstrated the carcinogenic properties of animal protein. (The World Health Organization has categorized processed meat as a Class 1 carcinogen, and other red meat as a mere Class 2, so, meat-eaters, pick your poison.

———-

hamburger: that it is nothing but a greasy, unhealthy, artery-destroying sandwich with the decaying muscle tissue of a dead cow at its center.

tasty, nutrient-rich whole foods burger like the Purple Plant Burger.

The common hamburger, by contrast, is truly unpatriotic. A food that makes so many millions of Americans fat and diabetic and gives them heart attacks and strokes can only be considered an unpatriotic food.