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

130 / the world peace diet
animals’ milk and eggs, we are feeding on their fear and despair, on the
violence that a patriarchal mentality systematically enforces on them. If
we look deeply, we’ll see that this mentality breeds violence in our lives
as well. Should we, who long for mercy, freedom, and joy, and for a
more enlightened society that supports peace and respect for our earth
and the sacredness of all life, be the agents of such violence? When we
make the connection between our culturally induced desire to eat dairy
and egg products and the cruelty to vulnerable mothers that this will
necessarily entail, our intelligence and compassion are nourished, and
we naturally begin to make new choices. There are plenty of substitutes
for animal-derived milk products and eggs, and they are becoming
increasingly available as more of us make these connections.
Reviving Sophia
Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from
aspects of ourselves as well. In exploiting dairy cows and hens, we dominate
them not just for their flesh, skin, bones, and the other body parts
that we can use or sell; we specifically exploit their uteruses and mammary
glands. This inhumane desecration of the most intimate and lifegiving
functions of the feminine principle, that of giving birth to new life
and of tenderly nourishing that life, harms us perhaps as deeply as it
does the cows, though our wounds may be less obvious. Many spiritual
teachers have pointed out that when we harm others, we harm ourselves
even more severely. The hard-heartedness of the killer and
exploiter is in itself a terrible punishment because it is a loss of sensitivity
to the beauty and sacredness of life. That loss may go unrecognized,
but the life itself, armored, violent, and competitive, is lived as a struggle
of separateness and underlying fear, and its relations with others are
poisoned.
By enslaving and cruelly exploiting cow mothers and babies in dairy
operations, we attack and injure the sacred feminine within ourselves as
well as in nature. This is an attack on our essential being, on our sense
of nurturing life and protecting the vulnerable. These are truly terrible
seeds to be sowing, for the feminine principle within us all is the seat of
loving-kindness, receptivity, caring, and the urge to nurture and protect.