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

Hunting and Herding Sea Life / 107
have observed them using tools, building complex nests, cooperating,
and exhibiting stable cultural traditions and long-term memories. 35
Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, has written, “[Fish] are our fellow citizens
with scales and fins. . . . I would never eat anyone I know personally. I
wouldn’t deliberately eat a grouper any more than I’d eat a cocker
spaniel. They’re so good-natured, so curious. You know, fish are sensitive,
they have personalities, they hurt when they’re wounded.” 36 Fish
are sensitive and intelligent creatures, and their flesh, filled with pain,
fear, and toxins, is obviously unhealthy for us to eat; yet we persist.
Pursuing, confining, slaughtering, and eating them as mere objects to be
consumed, we inevitably deaden ourselves spiritually and emotionally
as well. Paul Watson has noted,
Seafood is simply a socially acceptable form of bush meat. We condemn
Africans for hunting monkeys and mammalian and bird
species from the jungle yet the developed world thinks nothing of
hauling in magnificent wild creatures like swordfish, tuna, halibut,
shark, and salmon for our meals. The fact is that the global slaughter
of marine wildlife is simply the largest massacre of wildlife on the
planet. 37
Chefs know that fish who die with great resistance, struggling
against the net or the hook and line, have a more bitter taste because of
the lactic acid that remains in their muscles. In eating fish, we eat the
lactic acid the fish produce in their death throes, and the fear-induced
adrenalin and other hormones. It should be amply clear that in unwisely
eating fish because of an imagined benefit, we bring into our body a
host of toxins and cause suffering and negative effects that far outweigh
their potential benefit. We can all get ample high-quality protein from
plant sources without causing unnecessary misery and trauma to other
living creatures.
Finally, in exterminating the fish from our waters, we are destroying
the earth’s system for cleaning the waters. It is well known that fish
clean the waters of toxins and impurities: they can be seen as the earth’s