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

18 / the world peace diet
was to our forebears a few thousand years ago, our culture is, like theirs,
essentially a herding culture, organized around owning and commodifying
animals and eating them.
It was roughly ten thousand years ago that wandering tribes in the
Kurdish hill country of northeastern Iraq began domesticating sheep and
initiated a revolution with enormous consequences. 1 Anthropologists
believe it was an outgrowth of the hunting practices of these tribes, who
began attaching themselves to particular herds of wild sheep, culling
them and increasingly controlling their mobility, food, and reproductive
lives. They eventually learned to castrate and kill off male sheep so that
the herd consisted primarily of females with a few rams; from this they
learned selective breeding to create animals with more desirable characteristics.
Goats were apparently domesticated soon after sheep, followed
by cattle two thousand years later to the west and north, and subsequently
by horses and camels another two to four thousand years after
that. 2 Highly charged concepts of property ownership and of male
bloodlines and bloodline purity gradually emerged, of which there is
ample evidence by the time the historical period began about four thousand
years ago.
Our Western culture can be seen as having two main roots: ancient
Greece and the ancient Levant (the eastern Mediterranean basin and
Middle East). Reading the earliest extant writings from these cultures
from about three thousand years ago, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,
and the Old Testament accounts of the ancient kings and their wars, we
find that these cultures were oriented around meat eating, herding, slavery,
violent conquest, male supremacy, and offering animal sacrifices to
their mostly male gods.
For the old herding cultures, confined animals were not just food;
they were also wealth, security, and power. The first money and form of
capital were sheep, goats, and cattle, for only they were consumable
property with tangible worth. 3 In fact, our word “capital” derives from
capita, Latin for “head,” as in head of cattle and sheep. The first capitalists
were the herders who fought each other for land and capital and
created the first kingdoms, complete with slavery, regular warfare, and
power concentrated in the hands of a wealthy cattle-owning elite. Our