The Book That Saved Derrick Jensen’s Life

The book, which I have not read, that saved Derrick Jensen's life is called The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith, who was a vegan for 20 years, suffered serious medical problems, and started feeling better when she recommenced eating animals. Here's a review by vegetarian Mark Hand, who still eschewed "meat" even after reading the book. Here are some tidbits:

• Keith believes humans need to embrace the consumption of animal products, including beef, or else face severe and chronic health problems. “All the friends of my youth were radical, righteous, intense. Vegetarianism was the obvious path, with veganism the high road alongside it. And those of us who did it long term ended up damaged,” she writes.
• Some might argue that Keith has simply become an advocate of “happy meat”—local, grass-fed, sustainably produced, and humanely raised meat. But that would be unfair. If there were ever a movement devoted to the principles set out in The Vegetarian Myth and if it proved successful, such a movement would easily result in a spectacular reduction in the suffering and torture of animals, compared to what they experience today in factory farms and due to ecosystem devastation.
• Throughout the book, Keith mocks vegetarians and vegans. She portrays them as adolescents. “In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood,” Keith writes. “It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else had to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose a different way, a better way.”
• Clinical studies, according to Keith, have found that low-fat diets increase anger, depression and anxiety. Low cholesterol levels occur more often among criminals, individuals diagnosed with violent or aggressive conduct disorders, and homicidal offenders with histories of violence and suicide attempts related to alcohol.

Keith's argument is not alien to vegan-environmentalists, and it of course ends at places like Polyface Farms (according to Hand's review).

I'm going to see if my library can get the book because I am curious about why Keith would consider vegans "naive, unhealthful and destructive," and I'm interesting in her explanations/rationalizations. I think there are people (and dogs) for whom veganism is nutritionally difficult and who have to work hard at getting and assimilating what they need due to their own unique constitutions and combination of health challenges. But to generalize that humans should be consuming other sentient beings because of that is, I think, a stretch.

Hand isn't convinced, but does steer us to happy meat in the event of health problems caused by our veganism. And with regard to killing in order to survive, there's a difference between "killing" a carrot and killing a cow, whom you know is just as sentient as your dog or your child.

If anyone has read the book, let me know your thoughts.