I have responded to McWilliams flawed pieces in the NYT and The Atlantic in the past, and given his penchant for wrapping deficient strands of logic around his flimsily constructed straw men, I am astounded that these two publications continue to grant him space. With his latest NYT’s post, he plumbs new depths in writing with a sloppy use of words, a paucity of facts, and a logic that would impress Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. I suggest that given the good Associate Professor’s credentials, had a student submitted this piece to him, he would have returned it covered in red ink!

The good Associate Professor has created his flimsiest straw man here, making no attempt to demonstrate it with ‘facts,’ but be has done this before. When constructing the argument for his Op-Ed piece Free-Range Trichinosis, he also took shortcuts, mischaracterizing a scientific study and misrepresenting its results. When confronted with these errors and flaws in logic, he responded in the online pages of The Atlantic:

“Faced with the choice of spending a couple of paragraphs qualifying this distinction for lay readers, I looked to see how other reports of the study dealt with the matter. At this point I was thinking not like a scientist but a writer. I wanted to keep the piece flowing without getting bogged down in the distracting minutiae of seroprevalence.”

Well, since the good Associate Professor seems to have a habit of ‘writing down’ for his readers, in popular periodicals at least, I guess this sloppiness is not surprising, but I am amazed that an associate professor of history fails to check any of the historical record, or chooses to ignore it, even when just writing a blog post.

If the whole world goes vegan we can expect to die out soon after. Quite aside from the nutritional concerns (more on that in a minute), we can’t live without forests. And you can’t grow most of what goes into a vegetarian human’s diet under tree cover.

Besides, most of the vegetarian claims about nutrition come from the very same industrial food interests I thought we were trying to fight–the idea that meat’s bad for you (oh wait, it has a narrow profit margin compared to grain), the idea that we’re healthier on low-fat diets (sure explains the infertility and mental illness epidemics), or the idea that there are nutrients we need from plants because we can’t get them from animals, when actually the reverse is true.

There are carnivorous indigenous people who are quite healthy, thank you. There are no vegan indigenous people. Of the Hindus who will not even consume ghee or eggs, the only reason they’re not dropping dead from pernicious anemia is because India is a subtropical/tropical country and they can’t keep the bugs off the produce. Bugs count as animals. Eating bugs, even accidentally, does not constitute a vegan diet.

We have got our values entirely backwards and it’s going to cost us.