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

The Metaphysics of Food / 147
mask, and transforms that ambivalence into a psychological release or
catharsis by showing the milk mustache masks being worn by the gods
of our culture: the most prominent figures in athletics, entertainment,
science, and politics. The mask represents our culture’s covering up of
the hidden misery in the dairy industry and its brutal domination of the
feminine, and because this is the last thing we want to support and partake
of, we pretend to be oblivious to the suffering involved.
This unseen shadow of violence generates an irrepressible energy
field within our culture. All animal researchers know that fear is one of
the most powerful and basic emotions for all animals (including us), and
extreme fear is an inescapable reality for the animals in our factory
farms and slaughterhouses. Albert Schweitzer, in urging kindness to animals,
wrote, “Pain is a more terrible lord . . . than even death himself. 15
By inflicting massive amounts of both acute pain and chronic pain on
the animals we eat, we generate similarly massive amounts of acute fear
and chronic fear. We eat terror and are thus fascinated with it, lured by
the lurid, the grotesque, and the violent. Our fascination with blood,
death, terror, and violence is a manifestation of the repressed shadow of
our wholesale brutality and killing of animals, sublimated and projected
into countless expressions in the mass media and in popular entertainment.
Violence and horror in movies, novels, and music fascinate
and attract us only because we are regularly eating violence and horror
and are therefore complicit. The knives, swords, and guns that permeate
the popular media reflect the killing and stunning guns fired around
the clock in slaughterhouses and the long knives that bleed the animals
there and carve their flesh for our consumption. Though we hide and
repress the violence of our meals, it erupts on our movie screens and televisions,
undeniable, fascinating, and irresistibly interesting to us.
By celebrating and cultivating terror and cruelty in the media, we
sow those same seeds in consciousness and they bear fruit in further violence.
Increased violence in the media, especially television, has been
conclusively linked with increased violence in child TV viewers. The
violence we practice against animals for food, sublimated and projected
through the TV as violence against people, then becomes violence by
children, with animals being the easiest and most vulnerable targets.