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

20 / the world peace diet
Bringing a culture in which men viewed women as chattel, they apparently
came in three waves over roughly two thousand years, violently
attacking, destroying, and fundamentally changing the older, more
peaceful partnership societies. 6 According to Eisler, Gimbutas, and others,
these older cultures tended to eat foraged and gardened foods, worship
fertility goddesses, make communities in fertile valleys, use metals
to make bowls rather than weapons, and did not engage in war. The
invading dominator cultures herded animals and ate mainly animal flesh
and milk, worshipped fierce male sky gods like Enlil, Zeus, and
Yahweh, settled on hilltops and fortified them, used metals to make
weapons, and were constantly competing and warring. Violent conflict,
competition, oppression of women, and class strife, according to Eisler,
need not characterize human nature but are relatively recent products of
social pressure and conditioning brought by the invading herding cultures
whose dominator values we have inherited.
Where did these invading patriarchal cultures come from and what
made them that way? In a later book, Sacred Pleasure, Eisler cites the
research of geographer James DeMeo, who ascribes the expansionist
migrations of the Kurgan invaders and other herders to harsh climatic
changes that “set off a complex sequence of events—famine, social
chaos, land abandonment, and mass migration—that eventually led to
a fundamental shift” in human cultural evolution. 7 Herding livestock,
Eisler points out, “tends to lead to aridity,” and to “produce a vicious
cycle of environmental depletion and increasing economic competition
for ever more scarce grazing grounds—and thus a tendency for violent
contests over territorial boundaries.” 8 She adds that the practice of
herding animals produces the psychological hardening characteristic of
dominator cultures:
. . . pastoralism relies on what is basically the enslavement of living
beings, beings that will be exploited for the products they produce . . .
and that will eventually be killed. . . . This would also help to explain
the psychological armoring (or deadening of “soft” emotions) that
DeMeo believes characterized the origins of patrist or dominator societies.
. . . Moreover, once one is habituated to living off enslaved ani-