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

278 / the world peace diet
strenuously blocked for obvious reasons by our herding culture, but
they are held as logical and true by many cultures that don’t abuse animals
as viciously and systematically as ours has for the past eight to ten
thousand years. Perpetrators and victims are known to exchange roles
over and over again in countless subtle and obvious ways. The cycle of
violence may span larger dimensions than we in our herding culture
would like to admit, and there are many wisdom traditions that affirm
that it does. Until we see from the highest level, we had best heed the
counsel of every enlightened spiritual teacher from every time: be ye
kind to one another.
Paths Away from and Back to Sanity
The underlying assumptions of the culture into which we have been
born are faulty and obsolete. If not questioned and changed, they will
continue to drive us into deeper cultural insanity, just as they do the animals
we mercilessly dominate. Recognizing the insanity of our actions
and beliefs is the first and essential step to healing and awakening. The
signs are evident: producing and using weapons of mass destruction
while millions of people starve to death, attacking our living earth so
savagely that within the space of just twenty-five years more species are
forced into extinction than in the previous sixty-five million years combined,
and genetically scrambling organisms with reckless disregard for
the consequences these artificial creatures will have on the delicately
interconnected living strands of our planet’s biocommunities.
The powerful financial and media forces that block us from seeing
any of this are continuing the spread of the herding culture and its obsolete
and oppressive assumptions throughout the world. The transnational
corporations that profit from abused animals are one example, and
include gigantic retailers as well as the huge animal agriculture conglomerates
that relentlessly push to expand their factory farm and
slaughterhouse operations into the less industrialized cultures. In typically
eating far fewer animals per person, these less wealthy societies
represent markets with enormous potential for lucrative growth. The
chemical, pesticide, and pharmaceutical corporations all profit from
and encourage this same expansion. Charitable organizations like the