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

254 / the world peace diet
her, bleed her, disembowel her, send her to the butcher, and eat her during
the following weeks. When we did it this time, though, I wasn’t
shocked, because I’d seen it before. I had lost my feelings.
Seeds of Understanding
For nine more years, I continued, undaunted, to eat the flesh, milk, and
eggs of animals. I simply did not know one could survive without doing
so, and I had never met anyone who ate a plant-based diet. When I went
away to Colby College in Maine and heard of vegetarianism, something
inside me was kindled, but the programming of my inherited
omnivorism was still far too strong to have me question my fundamental
eating habits.
Then, while at Colby in 1974, my junior year, I heard of The Farm
in Tennessee, a relatively newly formed spiritual community of about
eight hundred people, mainly from San Francisco. The more I read
about The Farm, the more intrigued I became, and one of the things that
intrigued me most about The Farm was that everyone there was a vegetarian.
It was a vegan community, actually (though that word was not
yet in commom usage), for they were vegetarian not for health reasons,
but for ethical and spiritual reasons, and they ate no animal products
whatsoever, not even eggs, dairy products, or honey. I had yet knowingly
even to meet a vegetarian in my life at that point, but I saw in the
books published by The Farm pictures of happy, healthy-looking and
highly creative people living with a mission to demonstrate a more sustainable
and harmonious way of living. I did my senior thesis in
Organizational Behavior on The Farm, examining the theory and practice
of a community based on cooperation rather than competition,
sharing rather than owning, and compassion rather than oppression. It
was an eye- and heart-opening project for me to study their way of living.
Success was measured in terms of spiritual values rather than material
values, emphasizing quality of life and service to humanity and to
all life rather than the accumulation of wealth and things. Their purpose
was clearly stated: “We’re here to help save the world!”
In my last two years at Colby I felt a major shift happening within
me. I hungered for a deeper connection with nature and with spiritual-