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

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pests and competitors—the farmed animal industry also extravagantly
wastes water, petroleum, land, and chemicals; destroys forests and fisheries;
severely pollutes land, water and air; and, at enormous expense,
floods our markets with products that are toxic in the extreme to our
own health.
It would not be possible for us to eat the high quantities of inexpensive
animal foods that we do today without a massive infusion of fossil
fuels into our food production system. If we look at the sharply ascending
human population growth curve of the last hundred years, we see
that it precisely matches the energy growth curve that has allowed us to
create enormous amounts of food. Excess food has fueled the population
explosion of humans—and of confined cows, pigs, chickens, fish,
and other animals raised to be slaughtered for food.
In the 1950s and ’60s our nation’s agriculture became industrialized,
a process that was euphemized as the “Green Revolution.” This
current food production system is based on cheap and abundant oil and
natural gas. Industrial agriculture relies on natural gas to create the
twelve million tons of nitrogen fertilizer used annually in the U.S.,
which represents an energy equivalent of over 100 million barrels of
diesel fuel. 1 It also requires millions of barrels of petroleum to manufacture
the 1.3 million tons of pesticides used every year 2 (over eighty percent
of which is applied to the four crops—corn, soybeans, wheat, and
cotton—that are the major constituents of livestock feed); 3 to pump the
trillions of gallons of irrigation water these crops require; to power the
farm machinery that has virtually replaced human labor; to transport
and house billions of animals annually; and to run the stockyards,
slaughter plants, rendering operations, and refrigerated product transportation
systems. Cheap oil is also a prerequisite of the so-called “Blue
Revolution,” the explosion of factory fish farming. The fish in aquaculture
operations consume both grain and other fish, and the immense
fishing fleets currently over-exploiting planetary fish stocks also require
unsustainably large amounts of cheap diesel fuel. The foundation of
agriculture has switched from soil to oil, and though this has allowed
more people to eat more animal foods than ever in history, the price we
and others pay for this is staggering. Now that we are entering a new