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

238 / the world peace diet
boys experience, making the connections between these inner emotional
torments and the outer problems of adolescent suicide (the third leading
cause of death), drinking, drugs, illicit sex, violence, and cruelty. As
a solution, it emphasizes that we need to “provide boys models of male
heroism that go beyond the muscular, the self-absorbed, and the simplistically
heroic,” 9 that we need to be more understanding of boys, use less
harsh discipline, and encourage them to express and connect with their
feelings.
Yet Raising Cain makes a contribution that is acceptable to the
herding culture in which we live, for it never makes the connection
with the real source of the “emotional miseducation” of boys, which is
our cultural practice of eating cruelly confined and slaughtered animals.
Ironically, in order to build rapport with boys they work with,
the two researchers often have lunch with them and may take them out
for hamburgers. 10 Neither these omnivores nor their omnivorous culture,
it seems, can begin to make the deeper connections between the
violence we impose on animals and the “emotional miseducation” of
our youth, particularly boys. Nor do they recognize the more obvious
surface connections, for example that boys are generally pushed to eat
animal flesh—and thus to identify themselves as predatory and privileged—more
than girls are. Boys are also more commonly hardened by
being encouraged to deceive and attack animals through hunting and
fishing activities. Even if they could see these connections, though, the
authors probably knew better than write about them in a book that
they and their publishers hoped would make the best-seller list. It
seems that the shadow of animal food cruelty is too enormous and dangerous
to be faced directly by the mass consciousness of our culture,
though in order to evolve as a culture, this is precisely what we are
called to do.
The entire testimony of Kindlon and Thompson in Raising Cain
reflects profound and obvious evidence that the herding culture mentality
of domination, exclusion, and cruelty to animals that forces boys
to disconnect from their feelings is alive and well today, so that like
their fathers and their fathers before them, boys can grow up to kill
competing herders, vie for power through the accumulation of live-