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

32 / the world peace diet
at golf and tennis, and golf and tennis become part of us and part of our
way of being. If we practice music, art, drama, or martial arts, we
become proficient in these, and they influence us and become part of
our way of being. If we practice generosity, kindness, and thoughtfulness,
we become skilled at being more generous, kind, and thoughtful of
others, and these qualities become part of our way of being. If we practice
killing, lying and stealing, we become adept at killing, lying and
stealing, and these activities become part of us and part of our way of
being. By relentlessly and assiduously practicing the ability to disconnect
the reality of the flesh, cheese, or egg on our plate from the reality
of the misery a feeling being endured to provide it, we have become
masters at reducing feeling beings to mere objects, to tools, to means, to
property. We have become skilled at being numb and switching off, at
not feeling sympathy for the suffering that we demand by our desire to
eat animal foods. We have become masters of denial, absolutely refusing
to register in consciousness the consequences of our actions. This
denial becomes a sort of paralysis that prevents effective and innovative
action. Practiced since infancy, our daily rituals of eating have made us
highly skilled in the art of objectifying others. This is an enormous
tragedy and we have hardly allowed ourselves to become aware of it.
In our churches, ministers often speak about the tragedy of loving
things and using people, when we must instead love people and use
things. After the services, people eat meals in which animals have
become things to be used, not loved. This action, ritually repeated, propels
us into using people just as we use animals—as things. We all know
in our bones that other animals feel and suffer as we do. If we use them
as things, we will inevitably use other humans as things. This is an
impersonal universal principle, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
It operates with mathematical regularity as Pythagoras taught: what we
sow in our treatment of animals, we eventually reap in our lives.
Because it is a taboo to say this or make this fundamental connection in
our herding culture, we can go to church assured that we will not be
confronted by the discomforting entreaty to love all living beings and to
use none of them as things.
This taboo against speaking about our treatment of animals for