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

The Dilemma of Work / 177
people cope with the violence they endure around them and administer
to weaker and defenseless creatures?
The Living Roots of Our Work
The herding culture into which we’ve all been born forces boys to learn
to be tough and to disconnect from their natural feelings of gentleness
and compassion. The work of herding that evolved between four thousand
and ten thousand years ago is the work of harsh and relentless
domination of powerful animals. It requires men capable of performing
cruel mutilation, confinement, manipulation, and killing—both of the
herd animals, who have become valuable commodities, and of other,
potentially predatory animals. Besides this, herders are engaged against
other herders for precious land and water for their animals. By owning
animals, the old emergent herding cultures, which form the historic
foundation and the living core of our culture today, distanced themselves
from the natural world and entered into an adversarial relationship
with it. These ancient cultures have so much power over us today
because we engage in the same core behavior: confining animals and
eating foods sourced from these animals.
Although we have perhaps made some progress in our treatment of
each other over the centuries, our continuing practice of enslaving, torturing,
and killing animals has always worked against our being able to
make substantial progress. Though we decry the enslaving, exploiting,
torturing, and killing of other people in certain circumstances, on a larger
scale we still rationalize and justify it, and it remains undeniably
widespread today.
In Eternal Treblinka, historian Charles Patterson shows how the
parallels between the ways that the old herding cultures abused both
animals and humans have continued into the present day (see Chapter
2). Focusing on the rational, democratic culture that became Nazi
Germany, he points out the startling similarities between our domination
of other people and our domination of animals for food. Adolf
Hitler kept on his office wall a framed picture of Henry Ford, the consummate
capitalist and racist supremacist whose assembly lines inspired
Hitler’s mass extermination mechanism. Ford, in turn, got his assembly