Review of The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone

The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet by Alicia Silverstone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Enjoyed reading this book and checking out the recipes. Before starting to read, I already agreed with a lot of what Alicia Silverstone says about the way we eat, what we put in our own bodies and the way we (humans) treat, use and abuse other living beings. A lot of what this book explains makes sense to me and sounds very logical. Still, I'm not an expert on nutrition or anything like that, so judge for yourself! I highly recommend reading The Kind Diet, if only because it's important that we all think about what we eat and where our food really comes from.


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Goodreads may not be the place to share my thoughts on eating meat or consuming dairy, however my personal blog - most definitely the right place!

I'm not much of a meat-eater myself. Would say I'm about 95% vegetarian, actually. If not more than that. I don't eat (a lot of) meat for many different reasons.

• First: I don't much like the taste of meat most of the time. I often find it too fatty, rich and filling.

• Second: After a few bites of a steak or a burger I start really thinking about what (or rather who) I'm eating - did he or she have a name, were they cute, did they have a good life, what part of them am I currently consuming...

• Third: Humans may be angry and aggressive creatures, however we do not have claws or sharp and nasty teeth. If we were meant to smoke, we would have chimneys coming out of our heads. If we were meant to live underwater, we would have gills or blow-holes. If we were meant to be carnivores / hunters and eat meat, we would have claws and dangerous, sharp, pointy teeth. We don't.

• Fourth: I refuse to support an industry that breeds and grows living beings just to slaughter and eat them.

Personally, I think I would be a much more enthusiastic meat-eater if humans ate meat just to survive. Say we hunted only in winter when other foods weren't available, I could understand that. Say we killed and ate those animals who tried getting past our barriers and walls, who came to attack us, to eat our old, our weak and our children, I could understand that. Say we ate meat because it was all that was available in a harsh climate where other foods simply wouldn't grow and couldn't be found, I could understand that. Maybe I wouldn't like it all that much, however I could understand it.

Yet we keep living, breathing beings, we grow them and breed them, for the sole purpose of slaughtering them and eating them. We lock them up in cages or fields or stables, fatten them up and then, when we are ready to eat them - when we decide we are ready - we kill them.

Perhaps the sheep, cows, pigs and other animals we fatten up and slaughter have good lives. Perhaps they have better lives than they would have had if not born in captivity. (Whether 'better' for animals is the same as for humans is a whole 'nother discussion, though...) Perhaps we treat them with 'dignity' and 'allow' them to be happy. Perhaps we treat them well, feed them well, keep them from harm, ensure they're not cold... Does that justify how we treat them?

Does being kind to the animals we kill or giving them 'a good life' justify locking them up, denying them their freedom, keeping them contained or imprisoned? No matter how we justify our treatment of these living beings, does the excuse that 'they lived good lives' really trump their right, as living, breathing, thinking, feeling beings, to live their own lives as they choose, as is right to them, as they see fit, as they were meant to? Who are we to decide when another living being lives or dies or remains captive?

And are we really arrogant enough to believe that somehow we are better than all other living beings, that we are more entitled to happiness or freedom or the ability to choose our own path in life? Out of all the living beings that inhabit planet earth, we are the ones who are destroying the planet, treating it as a garbage heap, cutting down forests, dumping our waste in the seas, polluting the air and endangering the lives of whole species because of our greed. We seem to believe that we are superior to or better than all other beings on this earth and that somehow, our feeling of entitlement gives us the right to treat beings who think and feel as nothing more than slaves or food.

If we treated human beings the way we treat animals - would we be 'okay' with that? If we kept human beings locked up in cages or fields or stables or heck, in ghettos, kept them there to slaughter them at our convenience, would we be 'okay' with that? It's the year 2015. Seventy years ago not all that far from where I sit writing this, there were ghettos with people in them. Human beings like you and me - men, women, children, people of all ages. Ghettos where people were kept locked up, contained, separated from other living beings because there were a few 'people' who thought it was just and right to treat others like that. Seventy years ago, there were special camps people were sent to, camps where they were kept for a short period before being killed, slaughtered by the dozens or more. Sounds like today's abattoirs and slaughterhouses, only different. The people who were kept in ghettos and sent to extermination camps, they were living, breathing, thinking beings able to feel and cry and love and smile and hope and dream. Just like all the rest of us. They were humans, not animals. Yet they were treated as animals, worse (much, much worse) than many treat their animals. If it is wrong to treat human beings as animals, then is it not also wrong to treat animals as animals? 

Animals may not be able to speak as humans do, they may not read books or play video games or take photos or keep blogs. Animals may not care about selfies or money or wealth, they don't drive cars or pollute or care about things like computers and smartphones. They are different from us, other, because they are not human. And thank God for that. Or thank the universe or Goddess or nature or the Powers That Be or whoever or whatever you'd like to thank! Because if animals were human and thought like we did, acted like we did, reasoned like we did, treated other living beings like we did, cared about the same silly and superficial things so many of us care about, would we still have a planet left or would all of us together have succeeded in destroying our only home a long time ago?