How often are we reminded to shut off the lights when leaving the house or take shorter showers or recycle whatever and whenever we can? These reminders pop up on TV ads, on dorm posters, and just about anywhere else we’ll run into them on a daily basis. But how often do these posters and advertisements warn against the consumption of meat or dairy when it comes to the environment? Kip Andersen’s The Sustainability Secret tackles the issues that no one, specifically large environmental companies, seems to talk about: the detrimental, unintended impacts of agriculture industries. While the author tends to rely heavily on statistics and advocacy testimonials rather than his own analysis, The Sustainability Secret seems well intentioned but mostly a poorly executed version of the story, whereby the author attempts to make up for lack of expertise by appealing to the emotions of the reader. By making harsh conclusions and inserting inappropriate narration to appear well-written and sympathetic, a sometimes self righteous Kip Andersen attempts to convince readers that only by converting the world to veganism will we likely solve the environmental crisis as we know it.
There’s no doubt that Andersen knows how to appeal to his typical reader, relying heavily on shock factor from the get go, with hopes to leave readers questioning their awareness and lifestyles as early on as the prologue. He does this through the use of his own “research” findings, where numerical statistics and graphics are utilized to give readers a refreshing look into the true environmental impact of the agriculture industry. Although the use of research might imply an objective presentation of facts, Andersen makes no effort to hide the fact that he takes a biased stance on the topic at hand. Ever since he saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, he’s vowed to do his part for the environment, which obviously includes writing a book to convince others to do the same.
At the surface level, Kip Andersen’s argument seems a compelling one, such that I was even momentarily convinced to consider changing my eating habits the first time around, but it quickly becomes clear that Andersen ventured to write a book which he may not have been competent to write quite yet. The premise for the entire book as given by the title, being that large companies are hiding the effects of agriculture industries on the environment, is a strong claim to make and the facts presented don’t do nearly enough “damage” to prove the point. Of course, it introduces a compelling prospect to the reader. Who wouldn’t want to know whether the large companies of corporate America are purposely conspiring to keep secrets from the general public? But given the severity of the claim, it would take two average men with a video camera a completely bullet-proof argument to fully convince an educated reader to consider something so far fetched. And this book just isn’t that. Beyond the first chapter or two, Andersen’s obvious bias and strong desire to convert the reader to veganism restricts him from arguing effectively and giving credit where it is due.
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While some bias may seem innocent and even beneficial to rallying support behind a certain cause, Andersen’s strong desire to appeal to the readers, in the same way that he was persuaded, ultimately hinders the effectiveness of his argument. With no formal background in writing, it should be no surprise that he wrote a book that seems less than professional at times, taking away from his credibility not only as a writer but as a “researcher.” The most often reoccurring instance of this is in his descriptions of appearances of the people he interviews. These descriptions often feel misplaced, slapped down between some quotes, and the fact that Will Anderson, Greenpeace Alaska’s founder, has “intense gray eyes and close-cropped hair” (p. 19) does nothing for the book’s overall argument.
It seems a poor attempt to make the book feel well written. Even the narration of their hands-on travel, albeit a noble approach to the problem, seems a bit of a last ditch effort to give the book some appearance of anything more than just a strung-together collection of interviews and shocking facts unbeknown to the general public. Even just in the first chapter, it’s important to note that multiple pages filled with unnecessary narration of Andersen and Kuhn’s travels to inquire with different corporations would serve the same purpose were they compressed into fewer pages, void of the lengthy, descriptive language used. As it is, the first chapter reads more like a descriptive narrative where a more direct, informational approach might serve the argument more effectively.
When not full of seemingly unnecessary narration, many pages of The Sustainability Secret are crowded with interview quotes, references to other sources (more than 450 footnotes in a little over 100 pages), and figures that depict just how impactful the agriculture business is on the environment. While it may seem strange to criticize an author that includes supporting facts and testimonies from those more knowledgeable than him, what’s even stranger is that little to none of this research that he utilizes aims to refute any of his points. In fact, chapters like the third, about grass-fed farms, do very little to strengthen the book’s argument because of just this. Andersen undoubtedly means to use such a chapter to properly discredit the notion that there exist any really effective efforts to lessen the environmental impacts of the agriculture business in America. With this chapter though, the first few pages are the only pages that really contain
any effort on Andersen’s part to give “credit” to the grass fed farms he observes, if that. He keeps this effort limited and superficial in nature – he mentions how beautiful the landscape is, describes how good looking the family is (again, unnecessary), and openly pities the children on the farm (p. 39-40). Beyond this, he relies only on more interview-style narration and the pitfalls of the Markegards’ farming methods, while refusing to entertain any notion that do the slightest to question his preferred solution (i.e. no need agriculture industry if everyone would just go vegan). It would be permissible to ignore the fact that he shed no light on the humanitarian or other positive efforts of grass-fed farming if it wasn’t for his later strategic use of vivid imagery regarding the sanitation, or lack thereof, and slaughtering of animals in factory farms.
In the following chapter, Andersen resorts to the use of vivid descriptions of slaughterhouses to invoke disgust and sympathy in the mind of readers, but when this becomes a fall back for a lack of other methods to convince readers to go vegan, the argument weakens significantly. He relies heavily on convincing readers that the animal products they consume are dirty and diseased, and their subsequent ability to affect human health as discussed in a later section, which demonstrates his knowledge that his argument on environmental impacts is simply not enough to convince the readers to adopt vegan habits. This is an obvious and weak, tactic to employ, not only because the book’s focus is and should be on sustainability, but also because it’d be close to impossible to find someone able to argue that fecal matter making its way into food production is anything shy of repulsive. Blowing over the opposition’s “straw man” argument is one thing, but Andersen doesn’t even allow a straw man to be created against his position; more often than not, he just acts as if there is no opposition to begin with. Choosing arguments with an abundance of supporting evidence and little room for opposition seems to be a trend used throughout, and often asserts a somehow morally superior voice to be carried along the entirety of the book.
The severity of some of the author’s limited “analysis” that the book actually does offer always suggests that meat eaters are actively destroying the planet we live on, whether it be in eliminating a cure for cancer (p. 83) or eroding the atmosphere at skyrocketing rates. In the final chapter, Andersen highlights the colossal effects that just one day of eliminating meat from anyone’s diet could have, but in chapter six he clearly denounces people who choose to only live their lives differently for one day of the week. The tone of these sorts of comments comes off as condescending, and as though the only way for people to be accepted by his standards is to welcome his enlightenment by cold-turkey deciding to convert to veganism. Further, Andersen quotes Dr. Will Tuttle, who asserts that only by a society wide vegan diet “our health would return.” This seems a big claim, not uncommon to this book or unlike the claim that eating meat prohibits a cure for cancer, that acts to scare the reader into submission by painting a slippery slope linking non-vegans to the downfall of mankind.
Not far from his misguided idea that meat eaters are all things bad in this world, he hopes to paint himself in an exceedingly brave and heroic light for taking on the task of exposing an industry that has the potential to take legal and sometimes fatal measures against those who rise up against them. In a book about the sustainability of agriculture, it seems inappropriate to allot an entire chapter dedicated to dangers associated with the type of work he is doing, as if only to make the reader appreciative of his courage in the face of threat and even further sympathetic to his cause. This is another example of a chapter that would lose little persuasive value if it was
shortened so as to be less concerned with how it makes the reader sound, and more concerned with how its contents contribute to the actual argument being given.
Overall, The Sustainability Secret offers fresh and compelling insight into the effects that the agriculture industry has on the environment and has the potential to change the minds of the masses about the food they consume, but the way the information is presented leaves much to be desired. A majority of the execution is sloppy and Kip Andersen’s overuse of pathos, along with an abundance of words and ideas that aren’t his own (think interviews and overuse of outside sources), is not enough to compensate for the expertise he lacks in the field he ventures to explore. At the end of the day, his book claims that a person is either a meat eater, and therefore a selfish environment hater, or a vegan who sacrifices for the greater good. He clearly states that anything sitting in the balance between these is purely a “Band-Aid” and no real solution to the problems he presents. His conclusions and assertions for the reader are too harsh to effectively promote any sort of change, lest it be radical. The extremism he promotes makes it difficult for the reader to simply walk away with a new perspective without feeling an equal sense of guilt for not doing “the most” for the planet. The overall argument may have been more effective had Andersen been less concerned with his own appearance and the complete conversion of his readers, and more so with actively recognizing and discrediting his opposition.
