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

180 / the world peace diet
The commodifying, confining, and killing of animals is a complete
perversion of the word “work” as defined by Fox. Until our defining
work is transformed from killing animals for food to protecting and caring
for life, we will never “reinvent” work in our culture. We will only
make technological progress that gives us the means to exploit animals,
nature, and each other more efficiently and cruelly, and to eat more animal
flesh, eggs, and dairy products than ever in recorded history.
World peace and harmony require those of us in positions of power
and affluence in the global village to stop dominating people, animals,
and nature through our craving for animal foods. It’s easy to forget that
if we’re reading these words we are actually among the richest and most
powerful people on this planet. Because of our relative wealth and
power, our example, our voice, and our lifestyle can impact many people,
either positively or negatively. We are thus obliged to honor this
responsibility to our brothers and sisters.
Resurrecting Work
Because of the fundamentally violent nature of its defining work—herding
and killing animals—our culture has a basic distaste for work itself.
We all hear that working less is better than working more, and not working
at all is best of all. The story we all learned in Genesis, of being cast
out of the garden, is significant, for it was then that God punished us
with enforced hard labor while we live on this earth. This metaphor, part
of the herding mythos, is revealing, for it depicts work as a distasteful
burden and attributes it to a divine edict that came with being thrown
out of the garden. In the garden, we ate a completely plant-based diet,
and there was no concept of work as a separate activity. We lived in harmony
with animals, the earth, and each other, not killing them for food
or competing with each other. Our work was our life, and it was joy, and
all was “very good.” There was no work as separate activity, nor any
concept of being saved, for we had not committed the original sin of seeing
others as objects to be manipulated, used, and killed.
Many other world mythologies also talk about a lost golden age of
innocence and peace. Perhaps these stories, as Eisler and others suggest,
are reminiscences of the ancient partnership cultures described by con-