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

236 / the world peace diet
within the moral sphere of our behavior. There are also strong voices in
all the traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should
be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering
of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their
suffering. We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals
and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming
them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others
to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life. This is the
high purpose to which the core teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions
call us. It is an evolutionary imperative, a spiritual imperative, an
imperative of compassion, and, in reality, a vegan imperative. The motivation
behind vegan living is this universal spiritual principle of compassion
that has been articulated both secularly and through the world’s
religious traditions; the difference lies in veganism’s insistence that this
compassion be actually practiced. The words of Donald Watson, who
created the term “vegan” in 1944, reveal this practical orientation and
bear repeating:
Veganism denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to
exclude, as far as is possible and practical, all forms of exploitation
of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose;
and by extension promotes the development and use of animal-free
alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals, and the environment.
Buckminster Fuller often emphasized that the way of cultural transformation
is not so much in fighting against destructive attitudes and
practices, but in recognizing them as being obsolete and offering positive,
higher-level alternatives. The competitive, violent, commodifying
mentality of the ancient herding cultures is, in our age of nuclear
weapons and global interconnectedness, profoundly obsolete, as is eating
the animal foods of these old cultures, which are unhealthy in the
extreme both to our body-minds and to our precious planetary ecology.
Eating animal foods is an indefensible holdover from another era
beyond which we must evolve, and with the ever-increasing profusion
of vegan and vegetarian cookbooks and vegan foods like soy milk, soy