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

Some Objections Answered / 203
gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. The powerful and gentle gorillas
eat a totally plant-based diet, as do bonobos, and chimpanzees eat a primarily
plant-based diet. Our own ancient forebears were probably similar,
given our physiology, and according to fossil evidence of such early
humans as Australopithecus, plant foods made up virtually all of their
diet. 3 The problem has been that our culture has fostered its own “man
the predator” mythology, based on and justifying our eating of animals,
propagating the erroneous notion that, as Swiss zoologist C. Guggisberg
wrote in 1970, “man has been a predator and ruthless killer for as long
as he has existed.” 4 This same lie, that “man is a beast of prey” (Oswald
Spengler), has been repeated so much that we believe it and perpetuate
it. Jim Mason explains:
Deeply ingrained in our culture, then, are some very strong values that
favor killing and consuming animals for food. How could they not
have affected studies of human diet, food collection, and evolution?
Surely our own culture’s meat-eater values have been a factor in
the exaggeration of the hunter role in human evolution in the same
way that its patriarchal values have been a factor in the exaggeration
of the male role in evolution. Indeed, both of these cultural biases
worked well together in promoting the man-the-mighty-hunter
model of human evolution. Hunting, as men’s work, was highly valued
by anthropology’s mostly male investigators. And since hunting
provided meat, it was doubly valued by meat-eating investigators.
The hunter-creation myth also helps a meat-eating society with a
very troublesome problem. People, generally, are more than a little
uncomfortable with killing animals for food. Most would probably
not be willing to kill an animal themselves, except in dire circumstances.
Even northern hunting peoples surrounded their hunting
and butchering activities with ritual—much of it, as we shall see, to
ease anxiety and discomfort. 5
Anthropologists Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, in their recent
groundbreaking synthesis of fossil evidence and primatology, explain
that early humans did not have teeth that could eat meat and were not