The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

80 / the world peace diet
deadly PCBs, chemical residues, antibiotics, and the human-created
nightmare we now call the prion. Prions are thought to cause mad cow
disease and the other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies that
have raged through both human cannibal populations (such as the cannibalistic
Fore people of Papua New Guinea where a type of human
spongiform encephalopathy, called by them “kuru,” was first documented
in the 1950s) and animal cannibal populations (such as the
farmed sheep and mink populations that developed scrapie and transmissible
mink encephalopathy after being fed rendered animal flesh).
Similar diseases such as Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (the human equivalent
of mad cow) and, according to some researchers, certain forms of
Alzheimer’s disease, now threaten human omnivore populations as well
because of perverse industry standards that have dictated feeding cows
to other cows, and that still feed pigs to other pigs, chickens to other
chickens, and pigs and chickens to cows. 30
It is also well known that animal foods are heavily contaminated
with viruses and bacteria such as salmonella, listeria, E. coli, campylobacter,
and streptococcus, which can be harmful if not fatal to people,
especially given our already overworked immune systems. 31 The urea in
animal flesh also contains toxins. It has furthermore recently been
shown that cooked animal flesh contains heterocyclic amines, which are
carcinogenic chemicals that form during the cooking process. Thus, by
not cooking flesh enough, we may expose ourselves to salmonella, E.
coli, and other pathogens, and by cooking it, we end up eating cancercausing
chemicals formed by heating the animal fat.
The industrialization of food production has created large-scale
Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also called factory
farms, that imprison animals in crowded, toxic environments that
reduce labor costs and allow for lower prices of animal foods by relying
on cheap fossil fuels and subsidies. To lower costs, the confined mammals,
birds, and fish are bred for rapid weight gain and given steroid
hormones to further shorten the time between birth and slaughter.
Chickens, for example, are now killed when just forty-five days old,
compared with eighty-four days in the 1950s. 32 These hormones and
growth promotants are illegal in Europe because research has shown