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

168 / the world peace diet
panic, terror. It can’t know the absolute will of each and every life to
desperately, frantically, vainly hold on.
The human mind can’t imagine the inside of a slaughterhouse; it
is something one can only experience—and it is utterly shocking. 3
It is well documented that slaughterhouse and factory farm work is
ugly and terribly stressful, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Slaughterhouse workers, perhaps the lowest caste in the U.S., have the
highest rate of work-related injuries and one of the highest turnover
rates. 4 Statistics aside, the mind-bending and heart-hardening actions
that these brothers and sisters must do so that we can satisfy our desire
for animal foods are excruciating to contemplate. With our dollars we
communicate our desires to a vast and impersonal system that will fulfill
those desires as cheaply as possible. This means high-speed production
and a perverse philosophy of mechanization toward the animals
who are imprisoned, “harvested,” and disassembled. They are no longer
sentient creatures but are categorized with fruits, machines, and other
nonsentient things as unfeeling commodities, summed up by this advice
to pork producers in a hog-farming journal, “Forget the pig is an animal.
Treat him just like a machine in a factory.” 5 Over and over, in the
literature of animal “agriculture” and slaughterhouses, feedlots, stockyards,
and transport operations, one hears workers and management
repeating this, like a mantra: Don’t think of it as an animal. Forget it
has any feelings. And the workers use every type of denigrating language
and categorization possible, referring to the chickens, pigs,
turkeys, cows, and other animals they kill and mutilate as stupid, stubborn,
ornery, or quite simply as “motherfuckers.” 6
What is the effect of all this upon the health and sensibilities of these
workers? And upon their wives, husbands, and children? Violence, cruelty,
and insensitivity breed more of the same; they are vibrations that
affect consciousness, and it is not just the workers, but their families,
friends, and ultimately all of us who are affected by what we force them
to do by our market demand. As one former pig sticker (a slaughterhouse
worker who stabbed pigs in the neck to bleed them to death) said,
“You get just as sadistic as the company itself. When I was sticking