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

178 / the world peace diet
line idea from the disassembly lines in the old Chicago slaughterhouses.
In Nazi Germany, Jews, communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and
other “vermin” were treated as food animals, transported from stockyards
on cattle cars to concentration camps like modern factory farms,
where they might be vivisected before being sent into the same sort of
final tunnel that awaits every animal slaughtered for food. Ironically,
the term “holocaust” originally meant “whole burning” and referred to
the killing and sacrificing of animals as burnt offerings.
The same underlying dynamic is still in place today. We universally
condemn supremacism, elitism, and exclusivism for destroying peace
and social justice, yet we unquestioningly and even proudly adopt precisely
these attitudes when it comes to animals. The lesson is plain:
when we harden ourselves to the suffering we inflict on animals in our
own interest, and justify it by proclaiming our superiority or specialness,
it is but a short and unavoidable step to justifying and inflicting
the same kind of suffering on other humans in our own interest while
likewise proclaiming our supremacy or specialness. The unremitting
conflict and oppression of history are inevitable by-products of confining
and killing animals for food, as is the male role model of macho
toughness that is required of both the professional animal killer (herder)
and the soldier. If we desire to eat animal foods, this suffering is the
price we must pay.
Work as Joy, Work as Burden
The progressive voices of the left, while often criticizing conventional
science and religion, and even questioning our rampant exploitation of
nature and domination of the feminine, have so far almost completely
failed to see the connection between the core ritual of our herding culture—eating
animals—and our destructive values and institutions.
Whether we’re of the right, left, or in between, we all agree to ignore
this basic causal root of our problems. For example, in his book The
Reinvention of Work, progressive theologian and priest Matthew Fox
probes deeply into the values and beliefs that underlie our experience of
work and our attitudes toward it. Drawing upon a wide range of scriptures
including the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching, as