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

Evolve or Dissolve / 237
ice cream, rice syrup, tofu, veggie burgers, and so forth, as well as fresh
organically grown vegetables, legumes, fruits, grains, nuts, pastas, and
cereals, we see alternatives proliferating. Books, videos, websites, vegetarian/vegan
restaurants and menu options, animal rights groups, and
vegan organizations are also multiplying as we respond to the vegan
imperative.
Seeing the role of our systemic violence against animals in creating
our problems, we can begin to comprehend and solve them. To truly
solve a problem, we must rise to a higher level and, in fact, transcend it
with our understanding. As long as we abuse and commodify animals,
we chain ourselves to the same deluded evolutionary levels as our problems
and thus continually re-experience them as violence, stress,
bondage, and disease.
The Emotional Miseducation of Boys
For example, a best-selling book entitled Raising Cain: Protecting the
Emotional Life of Boys, written by two experienced psychologists, contains
a wealth of understanding about the enormous suffering boys
experience in our culture, but it does not and cannot begin to address
the underlying causes of this suffering rooted in our socially approved
brutalization of animals for food. The authors, Kindlon and Thompson,
build a powerful case that boys in our culture are emotionally damaged
by our culture’s male stereotypes of toughness, and that these wounds
not only cause them misery but warp them for life and cause enormous
suffering to females as well.
The two authors blame the culturally imposed image of stoic,
unfeeling masculinity as the fundamental cause of boys’ pain and stress.
They document and discuss how boys are taught to disconnect from
their feelings by cultural forces on every side: their parents, their teachers,
cultural institutions, the media, and each other. They call the culture
of adolescent boys “the culture of cruelty” and write powerfully about
the emotional devastation caused by the psychological and physical cruelty
and teasing that boys inflict on each other.
The book offers poignant glimpses into the rage, pain, despair,
shame, hopelessness, depression, numbness, and embattled solitude that