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

Some Objections Answered / 207
face level (e.g., facts and ideas about biology, history, or mathematics),
we are also learning on a paradigmatic level through the form of the
educational process itself. It is invisible learning, conveyed through educational
structures like giving tests, having students compete with each
other, dividing knowledge into discrete subjects, using animals for dissection,
giving teachers authority over students, and so forth. It is
through this paradigmatic learning that the culture reproduces itself.
The fundamental paradigm of our culture and science toward nature,
which is of quantification and commodification, is learned in this way,
though it is being increasingly challenged by paradigms of a higher
order, like the vegan and spiritual paradigms of compassion for all
beings and the interconnectedness of all life. We are now beginning to
see the tension between these paradigms reflected in all our cultural
institutions.
Kuhn emphasized that theories and findings that challenge the prevailing
scientific paradigms typically come from researchers who are
either young or from outside disciplines, and who are thus more free to
think outside the conventional paradigmatic boxes. The response from
those within the dominant paradigm is first to ignore and deny the new
paradigm, and then, if it gets stronger, to ridicule and attack it.
Eventually, if the new paradigm continues to gain credence over time, it
may overturn and replace the dominant paradigm. With regard to eating,
as the pressure continues to build, coming primarily from people
who are either young or from outside (home-leavers), the dominant paradigm
can no longer just ignore the vegan paradigm.
Science, a stalwart defender of the dominant herding paradigm,
could be a potent tool for unseating it. Openly and fairly applied and
publicized, science easily and clearly demonstrates that plant-based diets
are far healthier and more sustainable than animal-based diets, and that
animals experience a full range of feelings, including physical and psychological
anguish when confined and treated cruelly. However, the old
paradigm is protected by those who control funding to scientific institutions.
Scientific studies tend to “prove” conclusions that support the
corporate agenda. With corporations now providing massive research
funding to universities, and with the government’s industry-serving ori-