Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
Will Tuttle, The
World Peace Diet
July 2017
The animal agriculture roots of our multi-dimensional exploitation have been invisible and unrecognized for too long. Now we can finally see and fully understand the dynamics involved. Being compelled from infancy to eat animal foods has created us to be a severely wounded population with drastically reduced capacities intellectually, emotionally, morally, and spiritually to fulfill our potential and create contexts that nurture justice, cooperation, creativity, freedom, joy, radiant health, and sustainability.
We can see two raging infernos on this planet. One is burning and destroying ecosystems, animals, societies, sanity, health, and our children’s future. The other is benevolent and is illuminating and incinerating the obsolete delusions perpetuated by our unquestioned exploitation of animals, and is revealing a new path to a doorway that leads to a positive future.
The most obvious and non-controversial characteristic of animal
agriculture is that it is a system in which humans exploit animals for food.
The vast majority of us go along with the internalized cultural narratives
that justify this exploitation. We don’t realize that we are also being
abused and exploited by the same system that is exploiting the cows,
chickens, fishes, and pigs.
There’s basically one primary reason any of us eats animal-sourced foods: we
do this because we’re following orders that were injected into us from
infancy by well-intentioned people we trusted completely. This
indoctrination is literally eaten in the most potent and pervasive of all
social rituals, our daily meals. It’s important to understand that when we
go to shops and restaurants and purchase animal foods, we are not only
sustaining a system of exploitation of animals, we are also unwittingly
fueling our own exploitation on many levels, and in feeding these foods to
our children, we’re fueling their exploitation as well.
Let’s take cows as a profoundly relevant example. Cows are clearly designed
to thrive on grass, but they are fed richer and more complex grains such as
soy, corn, oats, wheat, and alfalfa in order to boost milk production in
dairies and increase weight gain in beef operations. This causes cows
digestive distress and leads ironically to the proliferation of the E. coli
bacterial strains that are deadly to human consumers of undercooked
hamburgers. However cow exploiters don’t stop with grains. Agricultural
scientists discovered long ago that if cow feed is “enriched” with fish meal
as well as the rendered flesh and offal of chickens, pigs, cows, dogs, cats,
and other animals, this is even better than grain at promoting milk
production and weight gain, and thus increased profits for the industries
involved.
In sum, cows are fed foods that are not in their interest, but that are to
the advantage of their exploiters. With us, if we are eating animal foods,
it is precisely the same situation. Like cows, we are created and have
evolved to thrive on the food for which we are designed, which in our case
is whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Like cows, we
can certainly eat other foods, such as animal flesh and mammary secretions
designed for other species, and as in the case of cows, this harms our
health on many levels, but the significant point is that it increases the
profits of our exploiters, and so it continues. The animal exploiters have
stolen the sovereignty of cows, and so the cows are powerless to eat
anything but what the exploiters provide them. With both cows and humans it
is remarkably similar. Exploiters provide the foods that they want the
exploitees to consume to maximize their profits and power, and the
exploitees dutifully comply. They encourage each other by their shared
example, and additionally in our case, we ironically police each other to
ensure compliance.
Farm Animals...by artist Madeleine Tuttle
The benefits to the exploiters in these situations are vast. The
disempowerment and harm to the exploitees are equally vast. Let’s have a
brief look at the consequences of this exploitation on five levels of our
health.
First, our physical health. Being compelled from infancy to eat animal-based
foods, we are more likely to develop cancer, heart disease, diabetes,
obesity, auto-immune diseases, dementia, and the other chronic diseases
which fuel hundreds of billions of dollars of profits annually for the
pharmaceutical-medical complex, and the banks and financial institutions in
the background. This system, and the governmental, academic, media, and
corporate complex that is tied in with it, requires a steady flood of
reliably sick people. Feeding the population a diet based on animal foods
that concentrate toxins accomplishes this. Most of the wealth generated
concentrates in the hands of a powerful elite, while most of us endure
economic injustices such as exorbitant medical costs that ravage our economy
and well-being. Eating animal foods, we become unwitting cash cows for an
aggressive medical-pharmaceutical complex.
Second, our environmental health. Animal agriculture is well recognized to
be the single most environmentally devastating human activity, destroying
forests, oceans, aquifers, soil quality, climate stability, and propelling
the mass extinction of species through rampant habitat destruction. Here
again, we are being exploited when we purchase and eat animal-based foods.
Because animal-based foods require much more petroleum, land, fertilizer,
pesticides, and water, we are paying powerful and polluting petroleum,
chemical, and agribusiness corporations and financial institutions to not
only devastate the precious air, water, soil, and life quality for ourselves
and our children, but we are also funding their legendary political power to
infiltrate and dominate our governmental, educational, legal, and media
institutions. As a result, these corporations are even subsidized with
billions of our tax dollars annually to damage the health of our ecosystems,
which further erodes our physical health, increasing our disease rates and
the profits to the medical complex and the bankers lurking in the
background.
Third, our cultural health. Because animal agriculture is profoundly
wasteful of oil, water, land, and food, we have chronic food shortages in
our world, even though we grow more than enough food to feed everyone, if we
ate plant-based food directly rather than feeding it to livestock. Food
shortages are well recognized to be the primary driving force behind much of
the conflict in our world, and together with this inevitable conflict, is
the direct cause of refugees, social breakdown, and many forms of human
trafficking. The very first word for war going back ten thousand years is
the ancient word “gavyaa” meaning literally “the desire for more cows.”
Economic injustice, war, hunger, domination of women, and the arising of a
privileged ruling elite are all linked to the ancient invention of animal
herding around which we still organize our society. Thus, instead of using
our economic surplus to revitalize our ecosystems, rebuild our
infrastructure, and assure adequate housing, food, education, healthcare,
and opportunity for all, we use it primarily for subsidizing the wealthy
military and medical complexes. We sacrifice our children in wars that
benefit a ruling class that uses the media and other institutions to
propagate narratives that justify and promote an agenda of violence. Eating
animal foods, we are fueling continued harm to our cultural health as well
as the ongoing exploitation of our children and of ourselves.
Fourth, our psychological health. When, as children, we are compelled to sit
at the table and eat animal foods that are harmful to our physical health,
we are also being compelled to eat attitudes and beliefs that injure our
psychological health. With every meal, we are being colonized
psychologically in order to be malleable to the
military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex. There are many dimensions to
this, but to keep it brief, we’ll just look at a few, for example, the
attitude of disconnectedness and desensitization that is imposed on us by
being required as children to relentlessly eat animal foods. It’s well
understood in systems theory that intelligence is the capacity for any
system to make relevant connections and respond to feedback. Eating animal
foods reduces this capacity and numbs our feelings both individually and
collectively. We learn to stay shallow and avoid looking, listening, and
feeling deeply. We avoid making the dreaded connection between what we are
eating and what it took to get it on our plate. We are indoctrinated in
daily meal rituals to repress our natural empathy and caring for others and
this reduction of our cognitive and affective intelligence makes it
comparatively easy for us to become gullible and uncritical consumers of
narratives and products that reduce, harm, and enslave others and us. Our
minds and bodies are also colonized by the poisonous attitude that beings
are not beings but are rather mere commodities: material objects that we buy
and sell by the pound. Upon reflection, this is shockingly debasing to
others and to ourselves, but we both propel and consume this highly
exploitive attitude with every meal, sowing seeds of our own exploitation.
Finally, we are compelled to eat dairy, eggs, and meat products that require
rampant abuse of animal mothers, their forced insemination and stealing of
their babies and the destruction of their sacred mother-child bonds. We
become easily exploited psychologically by causing and eating this trauma,
repressing our feminine capacity, and feeding this to our trusting children.
We eat products that are the embodiment of misery, fear, despair, insomnia,
frustration, and chronic pain. The pharmaceutical industry’s most immense
profits come from people buying drugs for precisely these conditions:
despair, trauma, insomnia, depression, and chronic pain.
Fifth, and finally, our spiritual health. This may be the most severe
exploitation of all. Every meal corrodes our basic connection with our true
nature as eternal expressions of consciousness. By being required to
repeatedly and ritually reduce other magnificent expressions of life to mere
physical matter devoid of subjectivity and purpose, we sever our connection
with the beauty, abundance, and enchantment of the living, interconnected
web of life that is celebrating on this Earth. We have unwittingly become,
in significant ways, an abusive scourge on this Earth that destroys and
consumes as our life-purpose, both individually and collectively.
"Pig" art by Madeleine Tuttle
Our innate spiritual wisdom and our purpose have been paved over and
repressed, and as we become sick and addicted, our exploitation increases
dramatically. A false purpose and set of narratives has been forced on us by
the herding culture into which we are born: that we are here to exploit the
garden and consume it. Other animals and ecosystems pay a steep price for
our inability to free ourselves from being exploited, as do our children and
we ourselves, ultimately.
The animal agriculture roots of our multi-dimensional exploitation have been
invisible and unrecognized for too long. Now we can finally see and fully
understand the dynamics involved. Being compelled from infancy to eat animal
foods has created us to be a severely wounded population with drastically
reduced capacities intellectually, emotionally, morally, and spiritually to
fulfill our potential and create contexts that nurture justice, cooperation,
creativity, freedom, joy, radiant health, and sustainability. Fortunately,
this is beginning to change, and the momentum of our healing and awakening
is increasing.
We can see two raging infernos on this planet. One is burning and destroying
ecosystems, animals, societies, sanity, health, and our children’s future.
The other is benevolent and is illuminating and incinerating the obsolete
delusions perpetuated by our unquestioned exploitation of animals, and is
revealing a new path to a doorway that leads to a positive future.
We will be free when we free others, and there is nothing physically holding
us back from the evolution of respect, freedom, and harmony that is
beckoning us. Whenever we eat animals foods of any kind—free-range,
grass-fed, wild-caught, factory-farmed—it is all the same and cut from the
same cloth: exploitation. Our exploitation ends when we awaken from the
cultural program of exploiting other living beings and co-create a more
aware plant-based way of eating and living, and understand the reasons
behind this. Exploiting animals, we exploit and delude ourselves; freeing
animals, we free ourselves.
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