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

The Nature of Intelligence / 31
modifying animals, we have ironically and unavoidably constructed a
system that ultimately commodifies us as well. Our net worth is measured
in dollars, as cows are sold by the pound.
Because virtually all of us are omnivores, our cruelty is invisible and
unmentionable, like an enormous family secret. John Bradshaw,
Virginia Satir, and others who have been attempting to illuminate the
psychological repercussions of dysfunctional families over the last
twenty-five years have emphasized that the more dysfunctional a family
is, the more secrets it has. 1 The secrets are the ongoing addictive and
abusive behaviors that are never discussed. Child abuse, sexual abuse,
drug addiction, and alcoholism have been cultural secrets that, in order
to be healed, must be brought into the light, fully acknowledged, and
then worked through in open discussion. In dysfunctional families, the
secrets and shadows stay buried and painfully unresolved, manifesting
as shame, suicidal behavior, aggression, violence, emotional distancing,
and psychological numbing. The biggest secret our dysfunctional cultural
family has is our horrific brutality against animals for meals, and this
shadow drives us into violent and suicidal behavior. The secret is never
mentioned or even recognized in our ongoing discussions of dysfunctionality
because, being omnivores and thus complicit perpetrators of
abuse, we don’t want to talk about it. Our efforts to understand family
dysfunctionality can thus raise consciousness only to a certain extent.
These efforts are vital, though, because they’re part of the necessary preliminary
work for facing the larger, deeper, more fundamental, and
more ruinous shadow secret: our relentless and hidden abuse of animals
for food.
The remorse and grief we suppress about the horror we routinely
and efficiently inflict on animals in order to eat them is natural and
healthy. People who kill or torture others without remorse appall us,
and we lock them up as sociopaths and psychopaths. Yet we torture and
kill animals who feel pain and fear just as we do, and though we try to
ignore and discount their suffering at our hands, we know, deep down,
that it’s unnecessary, horrifying, and immoral.
There is a German saying, Übung macht den Meister: practice
makes the master. If we practice golf and tennis, we become proficient