I just listened to it twice and wasn't too thrilled with the debate, overall. But it was enlightening. Unfortunately, here's what I learned about the vegan position:
Close-minded: Inherent in the title is "[no one] should eat anything with a face". There's no room for omnivores.
Anti-Evolution: Imposing a one-diet-fits-all model even though it is unnatural for an evolutionary system based on variation. It's unscientific and simplistic to think that all people groups everywhere have the same nutritional needs genetically.
Ethnocentric: Not every culture has access to the vast array of pills, powders and produce that wealthy westerners take for granted.
Weak Science: Fallacy's abound! Avoid meat because it has carcinogenic elements? Bollocks. False-dichotomy. Carcinogens are everywhere. Toast is carcinogenic! The question is, do the benefits of a particular food/diet outweigh the carcinogens that you will ingest regardless? And that overly-simplistic blame-meat story of the patient with bad arteries... not a word about his overall diet. Interesting. Also, there is no historical/anthropological evidence that veganism even works long-term because there has been no documented culture that has ever been purely vegan for generations. And there are no agricultural models to point to either, unless you count the 2 vegan farms mentioned, the older one having been around for a mere 3 decades. *sigh* Nothing historical or anthropological, precious little tangible; only theories.
This shoddy evidence seems more an excuse to simply promote the ethic, "killing animals is wrong". Of course it's noble, but this is not a position empirically provable with science. It is ultimately a belief.
In short... the vegan position used weak scientific arguments to promote a close-minded, anti-evolution, ethnocentric belief.
That sounds uncomfortably familiar.
I don't know what's more alarming, that such faulty belief systems gets a pass, or that they were able to "convert" the audience with their rhetoric and come away the winners in the debate (even though the opposition had an animal/ecological-friendly ethic, with an open-minded, pro-evolution, non-ethnocentric position, backed by current, historical and anthropological evidence: a working model farm based on millennia of farming tradition, Weston Price's multicultural research highlighting the benefits of an omnivore diet cross-culturally, and an ethic that treats animals as sacred, not unlike the harmonious way of the Native Americans)
An enlightening debate, indeed.
