Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat by Howard F. Lyman
Personal account of a cattle rancher
This is an excellent book by a fourth-generation Montana cattle rancher turned vegetarian. Lyman writes about how he inherited his father’s farm and destroyed it through chemical agricultural practices he learned in college.
Right before undergoing surgery for a spinal tumor he remembered how fertile his soil used to be and how dead it now was. He determined then that he would restore the farm his father had given him. During recuperation he took a personal inventory and saw a selfish and callous man. And that inventory began his change toward compassion, vegetarianism and political activism.
The majority of the book covers the detrimental effects to the environment and our health in choosing a meat-based diet to include chemical farm management, antibiotics, bovine growth hormone, mad cow disease and related human diseases, loss of forest, top soil, desertification, global warming, loss of wildlife, water pollution, etc. You’ll get a nice education of the kind of foods they feed cattle that we in turn ingest. The last chapter includes some dietary recommendations.
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He writes: “It’s humbling to think that, even after turning over the greater share of our public land to cattle ranchers, and in spite of the massive feedlot operations fouling our country, we Americans still need to import beef to satisfy our collective demand for heart attacks. In the process, we facilitate the chopping down of Central and South American rain forest, while leaving the populations of those countries impoverished.”
This book is an excellent introduction to the horrendous negative impact beef production and consumption is having to our health and the health of our planet. It holds a permanent place in my library.
