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

26 / the world peace diet
lence, and would help us cultivate equality and loving-kindness in our
relationships as well as develop our capacity for inner serenity. By sowing
and nurturing seeds of inclusiveness and sensitivity, we can reap an
understanding of our interconnectedness and an ability to live in peace.
This means doing a lot of inner weeding, because the herding culture
into which we have been born has sown in us the seeds of competitiveness,
hubris, anxiety, and disconnectedness. By viewing animals and
people as Thous rather than as Its, and by cultivating awareness and
compassion, we can nurture within us the seeds of cooperation and caring.
We are blessed by blessing others; by using or excluding others or
seeking to control or dominate them, we become enmeshed in suffering
and further enslaved to the illusion of separateness, which is the herding
culture’s fundamental orientation.
When we cultivate mindful awareness of the consequences of our
food choices and conscientiously adopt a plant-based way of eating,
refusing to participate in the domination of animals and the dulling of
awareness this requires, we make a profound statement that both flows
from and reinforces our ability to make connections. We become a force
of sensitivity, healing, and compassion. We become a revolution of one,
contributing to the foundation of a new world with every meal we eat.
As we share our ideas with others, we promote what may be the most
uplifting and healing revolution our culture has ever experienced.
In fact, when we speak of the various revolutions that have supposedly
transformed our culture, such as the Industrial Revolution, the
Scientific Revolution, and the Information-Communications
Revolution, we are missing the bigger picture. None of these are actually
revolutions at all, for they’ve all taken place entirely within the context
of a culture of commodification, exploitation, and domination.
These “revolutions” have not changed these underlying cultural values;
if anything, they have further reinforced them! A true revolution must
be far more fundamental than these.
The revolution that is demanded by our yearning for peace, freedom,
and happiness must provide a new foundation for our culture,
moving it away from its herding values of oppression and disconnectedness
toward the post-herding values of respect, kindness, equality, sen-