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

206 / the world peace diet
for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store,
and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos
that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we’ll be able to evolve spiritually
and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.
We’re in an auspicious position today, because the industrialized
nations of the world, which eat the highest percentage of animal foods
and are generally in the north, have food distribution systems that bring
plant-based foods to all their inhabitants, regardless of their climate and
topography. Fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, and even soy milk, tofu,
tempeh, and so forth, are available in markets everywhere. There are
very few people today who must eat animal foods for geographic reasons.
It is the height of irony that eating a diet based on animal foods,
which are complicated, wasteful, cruel, and expensive to produce, is
seen as simple in our culture, and that eating a vegan diet based on plant
foods, which are simple, efficient, inexpensive, and free of cruelty to
produce, is seen as complicated and difficult. Nevertheless, the truth is
slowly coming to light, and the pressures within the old paradigm are
building as more of us refuse to see animals as objects to be eaten or used
for our purposes.
The Justification of Science
A third objection is that science uses animals in experiments, and if science,
which has brought us the technological progress we value so highly,
doesn’t question dominating animals, who are we to do so? We can
see, though, that scientific theories always reflect the fundamental orientation
of the mainstream culture, and that science and culture echo
and reproduce each other. As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated in his classic
work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific paradigms, like
cultural paradigms, resist change. The history of science shows not so
much a gradual accumulation of objectively true knowledge (which can
hardly be said to exist because of the way context determines meaning
and truth) but a series of shifts in the discipline’s underlying paradigms.
Paradigms are the internal patterns through which we structure
knowledge and experience and make sense of the world, and these paradigms
are learned. In school, while we are learning content on the sur-