Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
Will Tuttle, PHD,
The World
Peace Diet
April 2018
Can we joyfully abandon and put an end to our false friendship with animal agriculture, the demonic fiend crushing us, animals, and our world? There is no more pressing task than this!
One of the primary thematic elements in world literature and in our
shared human life over the past few millennia is that of the harmful false
friend. We see it everywhere, from the ancient gift-horse at Troy that
actually contained murderous enemies, to the many court intrigues of both
Europe and Asia, with seemingly loyal ministers actually plotting to betray,
assassinate, and usurp the powers of their benefactors, to our current lives
today, when friends and colleagues may, either unwittingly or deliberately,
do things that harm us. For this reason, wise people have never tired of
admonishing us to practice Right Association: to be discriminating and
careful about whom we trust and with whom we associate. We tend to become
like our friends, and on top of this, those posing as trusted allies are all
the more able to manipulate and harm us, either intentionally or
unintentionally.
This also applies to many traditions and institutions that we are taught to
trust as well. We’re told that the mainstream media are our friends who work
hard to inform us accurately about our world, that governmental agencies are
doing their best to help and protect us, and that pharmaceutical
corporations’ main desires are to help keep us all healthy. They are all our
friends, according to the official narrative. The same holds true for the
conventional foods we’re taught to eat. For many of us, food is one of our
very best friends: intimate, loyal, and fulfilling.
With time we may begin to realize there is a deeper and more accurate
understanding of these seeming friends, and we discover that in many cases,
the most liberating, wise, and empowering action we can take is to question,
resist, and abandon these false friends as best we can.
Food: Friend or Fiend?
From infancy, we are fed our cultural narrative by well-meaning parents,
teachers, doctors, relatives, and neighbors. They all demonstrate to us
unceasingly that animal-based foods are our trusted friends. Hamburgers, hot
dogs, bacon, cheese, omelets, fish sticks, yogurt, fried chicken: these are
all celebrated, praised, and honored as good friends that are not only
delicious but that also provide necessary protein and calcium, and are what
make our country great and define us as a people.
However, we are urgently called today to question this prevailing
narrative—that animal-sourced foods are our friends—and to wake up and
recognize them for what they are: destructive enemies to our well-being on
all five levels of our individual and collective health.
Animal foods are harmful to far more than our bodily health. It’s helpful to
realize that being healthy is not merely concerned with our physical health,
and that while bodily health definitely plays an important role in our
overall happiness, there are four other dimension of health that are equally
and perhaps even more important than our physical health. These other four
are our environmental, cultural, psychological, and spiritual health.
Together with our physical health, these make up the five dimensions of our
health, and the key point to understand today is that animal agriculture
itself—and eating foods of animal origin—devastates and erodes not just our
physical health, but our environmental, cultural, psychological, and
spiritual health as well, more than any other single activity. Meat, dairy
products, and eggs are absolutely not our friends in any way but actively
work to harm our well-being on every level. Animal agriculture is the Trojan
Horse within the walled gates of our city, and the insidious and destructive
forces it unleashes every day are ravaging our ecosystems, our society, our
health, our intelligence, and our natural sensitivity and wisdom.
Full Lifecycle Assessment of Gas Emissions: Most Emissions from Common
Proteins and Vegetables Occur During Production
Environmental Health
Animal agriculture is intensely wasteful of land, water, and fossil fuel
resources because the millions of animals we kill daily for food (cows,
pigs, poultry, and farmed fishes) eat enormous quantities and create toxic
sewage, methane, nitrous oxide, and other waste that cause river and aquifer
pollution, oceanic dead zones, soil erosion, air pollution, and climate
destabilization. Additionally, animal agriculture is the primary driving
force behind deforestation, habitat loss, species extinction, and ocean
destruction due to overfishing and pollution. According to studies by the
National Academy of Sciences, it takes about one-sixth of an acre per year
to grow enough food to feed a vegan, and about three acres (18 times as much
land) to feed someone eating the Standard American Diet. Transitioning to a
whole-foods plant-based diet is the single most potent step we can take to
reduce our environmental footprint.
Cultural Health
The inherent and damaging wastefulness of animal agriculture also harms
our cultural health as well. It’s well understood that food shortages are
one of the main causes of conflicts in the world, and that there can never
be peace without justice. It is not difficult for us in the more
industrialized nations to drive up the price of grain on the world markets
in order to feed most of it to our imprisoned cows, pigs, chickens, and
farmed fishes. In doing so, we price it out of reach of people in less
industrialized nations and economies who are forced into hunger. They are
also driven into overcrowded cities because large-scale animal agriculture
operations are buying up their land to grow grain to fatten and export
livestock. Gandhi summed this situation: “There’s enough for everyone’s need
but not for everyone’s greed.” The unremitting injustice—of mothers holding
starving children while the meat- and dairy-eating wealthier populations
squander most of our land, water, grain, and petroleum resources—erodes our
cultural health and causes conflict, as well as refugees from hunger and
war, which make matters worse. Additionally, we compel armies of workers to
stab, beat, shock, and mutilate millions of animals daily, propelling them
into perpetrator-induced traumatic stress disorder that increases their
rates of suicide, alcoholism, and violence. Animal agriculture is actually a
massive web of trauma inflicted on farmed animals as well as on wildlife,
workers, hungry people, habitats, ecosystems, economies, and every aspect of
our shared social life.
Physical Health
The products of animal agriculture are well understood today to be
harmful to our physical health. Animal agriculture converts grains and
greens into massive amounts of misery, toxic sewage, drug residues, and
other pollutants, as well as the three primary constituents of animal foods:
saturated fat, cholesterol, and acidifying and inflammatory animal protein.
Because the media are beholden to their largest advertisers—the
pharmaceutical, chemical, petroleum, and fast-food industries—we as
consumers and citizens don’t learn that meat, dairy products, and eggs are
not a helpful source of calcium and other nutrients, and are linked with
diabetes, osteoporosis, liver disease, kidney disease, obesity, heart
disease, strokes, dementia, breast, prostate, and colon cancer, and other
debilitating diseases. The problem of course is that great profits for the
wealthy elite are generated by disease, war, and environmental pollution,
and these also make people weaker and easier to control. The shining truth
though is that all of us have been given the gift of physical bodies that do
not require any animal to suffer or die to get all the nutrients that we
need to thrive and celebrate our lives on this beautiful and abundant Earth.
The ever-growing presence of millions of healthy vegans is making this
undeniably clear to everyone.
Psychological Health
The first three dimensions of health just discussed are essentially external, and thus tend to be more obvious, though the devastating effects of our false friendship with animal foods still remain mainly unrecognized in our culture.
Cow by
visionary artist Madeleine Tuttle
This is because we live in a herding culture organized
around animal agriculture with its consequent narrative of human supremacy.
This narrative justifies and rationalizes our ruthless exploitation of
animals and nature, and blinds us to the harmful consequences of this
behavior. However, it’s vital to understand that animal agriculture is not
only destroying the outer world of our environment, our society, and our
bodily health; it is also devastating to the inner landscape of our
consciousness. Being compelled from infancy to participate in animal-based
meal rituals, we are not just eating animal-sourced foods that are harmful
to our health, we are also eating attitudes that destroy our natural
capacities for sensitivity, empathy, intelligence, self-respect, and harmony
with nature and with each other. This is where the violence inherent in
meat, dairy, and eggs most insidiously wounds us, and yet it is strangely
invisible to us, because the wounding also reduces our capacity to recognize
and respect our original nature as radiant, free, and magnificent
expressions of life. From infancy, unfortunately, we are required to
ritually promote and partake of dysfunctional attitudes with every meal.
One such attitude is disconnectedness. We are taught to stay shallow and to
avoid looking deeply, caring deeply, and making the obvious and necessary
connections between what is on our plate and the actual living being abused
to produce it. This has serious consequences because the essential
definition of intelligence in both individuals and societies is their
capacity to make relevant connections. Animal agriculture is a direct
assault on this capacity, eroding it relentlessly. Another attitude implicit
in animal foods and required of all of us in this culture is the attitude of
elitism, privilege, and might-makes-right. This is what we are actually
eating and cultivating in every meal at the deepest levels, so of course we
reap a world of social injustice that defies all attempts at resolution. We
are causing abuse and injustice and then literally incorporating these
actions into every cell of our being with our meals, which are in every
culture the primary social rituals. A third devastating attitude is that of
commodifying life: everything and everyone has a price, and animals, nature,
and humans all are reduced to mere commodities in a heartless and
competitive economic system. A fourth attitude is the complete domination
and exploitation of the feminine dimension of life and consciousness,
referred to in The World Peace Diet as Sophia. Sophia is our inner feminine
wisdom that naturally yearns to protect and nurture children, communities,
and our shared life, but animal agriculture is based at its core on
impregnating females on rape-racks, stealing and killing their babies, and
then killing the mothers, and doing it millions of times daily. How can we
have healthy family and gender relations, or respect the feminine dimension
of life and consciousness, when these opposing attitudes are being injected
deeply into us on a daily basis through our meals?
Spiritual/Ethical Health
This fifth dimension of health is perhaps the most important of all,
because it has to do with our basic sense of purpose and our connection with
our true nature as conscious beings capable of living lives of authenticity,
creativity, awakening, and fulfillment. However, animal agriculture is the
absolute antithesis of all these qualities. Animals are born into slavery
and misery, their purposes stolen, their lives, milk, eggs, autonomy,
sovereignty, children, and meaning all stolen and destroyed. We are taught
to see beings as mere material objects whose value is determined by their
weight! Can anyone imagine any system more barbaric, insane, and demonic?
Disconnected from basic wisdom, ethics, and awareness, animal agriculture
lays waste not just our outer world, but reaches to the intimate depths of
our basic connection with the source of our life, and poisons and perverts
our consciousness by colonizing it with a narrative based on abuse,
exploitation, fear, and separation.
False Friends and Genuine Friends
We live at a critical juncture in our human journey. A false
friend—animal agriculture and the meat, dairy products, and eggs that fill
our supermarkets, restaurants, meals, and cells—is unleashing an ongoing
barrage of destruction and chaos that is bringing us to the brink of
oblivion. Nuclear weapons, plutocracy, disease epidemics, and ocean collapse
are just a few of the many outer manifestations of our old false friends,
meat, dairy products, and eggs. If we were born as cows or chickens, we
would understand intensely just how harmful these “foods” are. Now, more
than ever, it’s imperative that we make an effort to understand their true
nature, awaken from our culturally-induced trance and call them by their
true names: the destroyers of our life, our Earth, our society, our sanity,
our inner and outer peace.
Compassionate Harvest by
visionary
artist Madeleine Tuttle
Fortunately, genuine friends surround us everywhere. Trees, flowers, gardens, orchards, and fields can provide all the healthy nutrition we need on a fraction of the land and resources we are currently using and harming. We can transform the foundation of our culture from the misery of herderism to the abundance and freedom of veganic plant-based living, based on inclusion and respect for all expressions of life. The door to our prison is open. Can we help each other walk through it? Can we joyfully abandon and put an end to our false friendship with animal agriculture, the demonic fiend crushing us, animals, and our world? There is no more pressing task than this
Return to Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle