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

22 / the world peace diet
war for hunting, elaborate arts of sacrifice, monomaniacal pride and
suspicion.’ 10
Mason points out the similarities in these respects among desert
tribes of the Middle East, Chukchi reindeer herders of eastern Siberia
who “love to boast of ‘feats of strength, acts of prowess, violent and
heroic behavior, excessive endurance and expenditure of energy,’ ” and
our American cowboy/rodeo culture. 11
Building on the work of Eisler, Mason, and others, we can see that
the culture we live in today is a modern continuation of the herding culture
that arose in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean basin, and
that the central defining belief of this culture is still the same: animals
are commodities to be owned, used, and eaten. By extension, nature,
land, resources, and people are also seen as commodities to be owned,
used, and exploited. While this seems logical to us today as modern
inhabitants of a herding and animal-consuming capitalist culture, this is
a view with enormous consequences: the commodification of animals
marked the last real revolution in our culture, completely redefining
human relations with animals, nature, the divine, and each other.
In the old herding cultures animals were gradually transformed
from mysterious and fascinating cohabitants of a shared world to mere
property objects to be used, sold, traded, confined, and killed. No
longer wild and free, they were treated with increasing disrespect and
violence, and eventually became contemptible and inferior in the eyes of
the emerging culture’s herders. 12 Wild animals began to be seen merely
as potential threats to the livestock capital; likewise, other human
beings too began to be seen as threats to livestock, or as potential targets
for raiding if they owned animals. Battling others to acquire their
cattle and sheep was the primary capital acquisition strategy; the ancient
Aryan Sanskrit word for war, gavyaa, means literally “the desire for
more cattle.” 13 It appears that war, herding animals, oppression of the
feminine, capitalism, and the desire for more capital/livestock have been
linked since their ancient birth in the commodification of large animals.
The larger and more powerful the animals were that were herded,
the more fierce, cruel, and violent the cultures had to be to successfully