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

Living the Revolution / 273
polluted by animal agriculture so we can no longer enjoy or swim in
them. We discover our air and groundwater needlessly polluted by animal
abusing industries. We have to endure seeing our friends hunted and
tortured by hunters and fishers, or view billboards with disgusting
images of cooked animal flesh. Our money is taken from us by the government
to support ranchers and dairy, factory farm, and feedlot operators,
as well as predator control operations that needlessly kill more of
our friends, and forests we could enjoy are destroyed to provide the
immense desolate monocultures of livestock feed grains. The prices of
the products and services we buy are higher than necessary because they
have to include not just the government taxes that subsidize animal
foods and make them artificially cheaper than they should be, but also
the enormous medical insurance costs borne by corporations for their
omnivore employees that are passed on to all consumers in higher prices
for everything. The expensive medical procedures required by omnivores
for heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, obesity, and so forth raise
health insurance rates beyond the reach of many with lower incomes.
The U.S. war machine is also forced upon us all; we must not only help
pay for it but also see it destroy the lives of impoverished people to supply
the cheap oil that wasting so much grain and energy on animal foods
requires. When, as vegans, we become sensitized to the violence of the
food system, we can also see that omnivores are victims of this food system
as well.
There are many ways we can be part of the solution rather than part
of the problem. When we buy or eat animal foods, we ourselves become
the agents of our cultural perpetration of unnecessary and gruesome
violence. (If we have any lingering doubt about this, we can view some
of the videos listed in the resource section of this book and behold just
the smallest tip of an iceberg of ongoing horror so vast and ghastly it
overwhelms the mind.)
In violent crimes committed publicly, there are three roles acted out:
that of the perpetrator, that of the victim, and that of the bystander or
witness. It is well known that perpetrators hope bystanders will be silent
and look the other way so they can successfully continue their hurtful
actions, and that victims hope the bystanders will speak up, act, get