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

Evolve or Dissolve / 221
actions until they become the devastating waves of insensitivity, conflict,
injustice, brutality, disease, and exploitation that rock our world today.
Even those who acknowledge that our treatment of animals is
indeed a great evil may feel that it is, like the other evils in our world,
simply a product of human limitations, such as ignorance, pride, selfishness,
fear, and so forth. According to this view, the horror we inflict on
animals is a problem, but not a fundamental cause of our problems—
and, because it’s a problem for animals, who are less important than us
humans, it’s a lesser problem.
Only by going beyond “it’s no big deal” and “it’s just a problem like
our other problems” will we be able to step outside our conditioning
and see the full import of our relentless abuse of animals, recognizing it
as the motivating, hidden fury behind our global crisis.
The Cycle of Violence
There is much talk today about stopping the cycle of violence, which is
typically understood as the “hurt people hurt people” syndrome.
Children who are violated and abused will, when they become adults,
tend to violate and abuse their children in a self-perpetuating cycle of
violence that rolls through generations. We address it by trying to stop
the child abuse, and fail to see the deeper dynamic. This human cycle of
violence will not stop until we stop the underlying violence, the
remorseless violence we commit against animals for food. We teach this
behavior and this insensitivity to all our children in a subtle, unintentional,
but powerful form of culturally approved child abuse. Our
actions condition our consciousness; therefore forcing our children to
eat animal foods wounds them deeply. It requires them to disconnect
from the food on their plates, from their feelings, from animals and
nature, and sets up conditions of disease and psychological armoring.
The wounds persist and are passed on to the next generation.
Compelling our children to eat animal foods gives birth to the “hurt
people hurt people” syndrome. Hurt people hurt animals without compunction
in daily food rituals. We will always be violent toward each
other as long as we are violent toward animals—how could we not be?
We carry the violence in our stomachs, in our blood, and in our conscious-