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Penti Linkola gained notoriety for his refusal to accept the logically fallacious though widely-held belief that anyone who is concerned about ecological overshoot must adopt a completely vegan diet or else be condemned as a hypocrite. https://twitter.com/OatlyUK/status/1362073522609287170
He even found the refutation of this misconception to be important enough to merit a full essay of its own.
In his 1999 “A Look at Vegetarianism” he concluded that universal veganism is just one more ecologically impossible situation among all the others (i.e., universal automation, a universal suburban middle class, universal sanitation, etc.)
First of all, the claim that veganism is hard-wired into human nature is flatly contradicted by nothing short of human anatomy itself.
He noted that from the point of view of health alone, human teeth are neither purely suited for herbivore purposes nor for purely carnivore purposes but are clearly meant to perform a combination of functions to suit an omnivore diet consisting of a wide variety of types of food.
In addition, from the perspective of the bowels, humans’ anatomical status as omnivores is equally clear to anyone willing to see what the Mind of Nature can see.
There is, however, also a political problem with insisting that every single person on the Earth adopt the kind of vegan diets currently fashionable among woke college campus protesters in Boulder, CO or Berkeley, CA.
He noted that anyone who actually has to perform strenuous physical labor on a daily basis simply cannot live on grass and salad.
Few things prove vegan diets’ impossibility of sustaining a population of peasants, blacksmiths, construction workers, and traditional fisherman quite as conclusively as the fact that such a diet has proven unfit even for toddlers.
In 2019, the parents of a 20-month-old child in Australia were arrested after forcing their daughter to survive on a meagre diet of oatmeal, apples, tofu, and a handful of other politically correct items which ensured that “no animals were harmed in the making of this meal.”
Linkola noted in the same essay that it is all the more laughable to claim that the entire global population could be adequately fed on a 100% vegan diet when one considers that this would be forbidden on geological grounds alone.
Much of land surface of the Earth can only grow cattle fodder and is simply unfit for intensive vegetable gardening, a fact reflected in the tendency for traditional cuisines in Central Asia to feature goat, sheep, and cow meat due to unique ecological conditions of the region.
In his lengthy interview published in the final issue of the Finnish magazine Quadrivium in December 2014, Linkola himself noted, “there is the question of where one lives.
If you live in Finland, grain does not grow to the north of Jyväskylä. Or if it does, the crops are small. If you live in Lapland, the only options are fish and meat.”
Yet even if one attempted to convert all farming land whatsoever into permaculture garden spaces, one would quickly find that even plant cultivation requires inputs from animal manure to be viable on a large scale.
Finally, behind the myth that vegan salads hold an intrinsically lower carbon footprint lies the rarely-acknowledged fact that much of the vegetarian diet is actually imported into cold nations such as Finland from far away.
James Howard Kunstler mentioned in Too Much Magic that in his own Upstate New York, most apples in the grocery store originated in Chile, despite the fact that the local area was traditionally known as an apple-growing region!
Linkola noted that it was unprecedented grain surpluses driven by fossil fuel use in the agricultural industry which drove the population bubble to the breaking point. In fact, he noted that a drastic reduction in grain production would be mandated by the Mind of Nature itself.
The fact that we are currently growing and consuming way too much grain becomes even more apparent when one considers that a huge portion of the corn produced in the United States is wasted just to provide empty calories for the fast food, soda pop, and processed food industries.
Linkola noted that we could be both better nourished and have better long-term sustainability by just “[r]eforesting a significant portion of field acreage” currently dedicated to mass-producing cereal grains and by reverting to consuming certain kinds of so-called “junk fish"-
-which have traditionally provided sustainable and healthy sources of protein but have gone out of favour in recent times simply due to “fashion whims” and “popular prejudice.”
Calls for mandated vegan diets across the global population might even be interpreted as a dog whistle for mass genocide in disguise.
