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

Journey of Transformation / 247
Consequently, for the first twenty-two years of my life I, like most
Americans, ate large quantities of animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products.
I did, however, encounter seeds of inspiration that lay dormant at
first but later began to sprout vigorously. Though these seeds pertain to
one unique journey, they may illumine half-hidden seeds that are sending
forth new shoots of understanding for others.
For me, one seed was being born and raised in the town of Concord,
Massachusetts, the home of two of the so-called revolutions that the
United States has experienced: the political revolution of the 1760s and
’70s, and the literary revolution of the 1840s and ’50s. Being born and
raised in Concord gave me a sense of intimate connectedness with these
two revolutions and of being their descendant, with an urge to question
them, understand what motivated them, and carry them on myself. I
believe these two revolutions have contributed to the emerging vegan
revolution, which is a cultural revolution of profound significance that
can heal our culture at the deepest level.
The political revolution culminated in the beginning of the
Revolutionary War at the Old North Bridge in Concord on April 19,
1775. The farmers and villagers living in Concord and the other towns
surrounding Boston provided some of the strongest resistance to British
imperialist rule and fought the unjust economic domination imposed by
the British East India Company and other British multinational corporate
forces that were being militarily and politically supported and legitimized
by the British government at that time. This eighteenth-century
revolution led eventually to independence from the British Empire and
birthed the epic American experiment in democracy, equality, cultural
pluralism, and individual freedom that continues to attract and inspire
people all over the world.
It is remarkable that the literary and philosophical revolution of the
following century was also based in Concord. It sprang from the lives
and writings of the American transcendentalists living there—Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May
Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Nathaniel Hawthorne—and many
others, like Walt Whitman, who were inspired by the transcendentalists
and journeyed to visit them. We recognize these leading thinkers today