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

Some Objections Answered / 217
almost any conceivable human behavior by finding it in some animals,
but we certainly wouldn’t do so. As for the other objections, if every
time we wanted to eat some animal flesh, we had to hold the terrified
animal in our hands, look her in the eye, and stab her with a knife, we
would find these rationalizations evaporating quickly. Finally, the last
objection is especially ironic; we’ve all been told what to eat our entire
lives, and that’s the only reason we eat animal foods.
This brings us to another common objection to switching to plantbased
meals: that it is just too difficult, inconvenient, or unappetizing to
do so. This nearly universal objection of the herding paradigm ignores
the difficulty and inconvenience (to put it mildly) we impose on animals,
starving and disadvantaged people, and future generations by eating
animal foods. It also ignores the connections between eating animal
foods and the intractable problems of pollution, terrorism, drug addiction,
chronic disease, and so forth that were discussed earlier. Slave
owners used the same objection to justify commodifying human beings
and, short of a war, were unwilling to give up the convenience of enslaving
people. Just how difficult, inconvenient, and unappetizing must the
suffering we sow and reap today become before it motivates us to transform
our paradigm and change our behavior?
A more serious objection to veganism is the reverse of the previous
one. The objection says that we can’t expect to effect impressive positive
changes in our individual and collective lives by adopting this simpler,
tastier, more affordable diet. This objection is influenced by our
culture’s mentality of violence, which assumes that peace, joy, harmony,
and fulfillment are difficult to attain. Of course they are difficult to
attain when we are practicing daily food rituals that force us to view
beings as objects, kill them relentlessly, and divide and numb ourselves
to keep the whole affair hidden from ourselves. However, we will find
that as we begin to view animals as unique beings with interests, feelings,
drives, and purposes, and as our behavior changes to reflect this
view, then harmony, peace, and joy easily and naturally begin unfolding
in our lives. Practicing nonviolence in our daily lives, we can discover
the easy equanimity that shines as the foundation of our being.
While becoming a vegan may appear easy enough, why then is it not