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

chapter one
FOOD’S POWER
“The world is his who can see through its pretensions. What deafness,
what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there
only by sufferance—your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have
already dealt it a mortal blow.”
—Emerson
“The most violent weapon on earth is the table fork.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
Food as Metaphor
Since time immemorial—going back at least two and a half millennia to
Pythagoras in Greece, the Old Testament prophets in the ancient
Levant, and Mahavira and Gautama Buddha in India, as well as later
luminaries such as Plato, Plotinus, and the early Christian fathers—
social reformers and spiritual teachers have emphasized the importance
of attending to our attitudes and practices surrounding food. The fact
that these teachings have been aggressively ignored, discounted, and
covered up over the centuries is of paramount significance, and if we
look deeply into the wounds and attitudes responsible for this cover-up,
we will discover liberating truths about our culture and ourselves, and
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