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

260 / the world peace diet
not to try to hang on to anything. I remember one Sunday in a small
West Virginia town, when we were asked to give the morning lesson to
the Sunday School children and we told them that we had found the
truth of what Jesus taught us: Seek first the Kingdom of God and everything
else shall be added unto you. Afterward, the church took up a special
collection and gave us a surprise gift of $30 as we walked on to the
next little town. The following day, after we bought two $5 lunches in
a restaurant with the $30 windfall, we gave the waitress the remaining
$20 as a tip and walked on again, pockets empty and hearts free. Once,
when we had not eaten for quite a while and had nothing at all in our
packs, I saw a plastic package up ahead by the side of the road. It was
a fresh sandwich! We ate every bite as slowly and thankfully as we
could. In all the months of walking, we never went seriously hungry.
Seeds of Community
Eventually we were somehow guided to a newly formed commune of
about a dozen people in central Kentucky. They greeted us warmly, and
we learned they were all vegetarians and were affiliated with The Farm
in Tennessee! We learned how to cook soybeans and first heard of something
called “tofu.” Our hosts told us they wore vegetarian shoes and
tried to minimize the suffering they caused to animals. I had been dimly
aware of chickens pecking each other’s eyes out in overcrowded factory
farm cages, of calves being branded and castrated and pigs screaming in
slaughterhouses, and I had seen the transport trucks filled with cattle, but
I knew little of the details, or how to prepare healthy plant-based meals.
In an atmosphere of openness and caring we talked of all these things.
We worked and ate together, and played and meditated together, and it
began to seem absurd and almost barbaric to even consider dining on the
flesh of animals. I vowed within myself to be a vegetarian.
Soon we were heading south toward The Farm in Tennessee, continuing
our pilgrimage and our practice. We eventually reached The
Farm and stayed there several weeks. The experience absolutely sealed
my vegetarianism and was worth the months of walking that it took to
get there. Close to a thousand people, mostly living as married couples
with kids in self-built homes, had created a community on a large piece