By Will Tuttle,
The World Peace Diet as it appeared in
Peaceable Table
February 2012
It’s heartening to see that the Occupy Wall Street protesters have included widespread industrial animal abuse in their list of atrocities perpetrated by the corporations that have taken over our governments:
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization....They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
A Sleep of Death
As we are awakening to the widespread corruption and inequity that are
devastating our economic, governmental, environmental, and cultural
well-being, I’ve found it to be highly illuminating to look deeply into our
food system and its enormous repercussions that radiate into every aspect of
our lives. As I discuss in The World Peace Diet, our unwillingness
individually and collectively to recognize and take responsibility for the
massive violence required by our food choices is our defining blind spot as
a society. Sowing seeds of enslavement, cruelty, and terror in millions of
animals who are confined and killed daily for food, we also sow the seeds,
unfortunately, of our own oppression and demise. I believe that awakening
from the socially imposed practice of eating meat and dairy products is the
essential requirement for creating a new cultural foundation where equality,
harmony, justice, and freedom are possible.
Paying for and eating animal-sourced foods is behavior that is profoundly
antithetical to our interests on every level, and increasing numbers of us
are realizing that besides damaging our physical health, eating meat and
dairy is devastating our environmental, psychological, spiritual, and
cultural health as well. However, as the Occupy Wall Street statement
implies, animal agriculture serves well to concentrate power and wealth in
the hands of elite corporate interests controlling the
military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex that profit immensely from
disease, environmental devastation, and war.
"If It Eats Like a Cow . . ."
In this, our cultural situation parallels that of a typical dairy farm or
beef feed-lot, and this is where the poignant riddle comes in: are cows
really herbivores or omnivores? They surely seem to be herbivores! We all
know that cows have a digestive system designed for eating grass. They
evolved eating this way for millions of years in the grasslands of central
Asia. Now, however, their diet is quite different. Their owners “enrich”
their diet with corn, soy, wheat, and other grains in order to spur
weight-gain, boost milk output, and increase profits. This diet is unnatural
and causes the bovines to experience digestive distress, including the
unnatural intestinal harboring of toxic E. Coli pathogens that sicken and
kill hundreds of human consumers every year.
However, the riddle goes much farther than this. In addition to grain,
agribusiness scientists long ago discovered that feeding cows animal
protein, saturated fat, and cholesterol dramatically amplifies milk
production, weight-gain, and consequent profits. The result is that for
decades now, cows have been routinely fed diets not of grass, but of grain
that is “enriched” with the rendered flesh and organs of fish, chickens,
turkeys, pigs, and other animals, such as the millions of dogs and cats who
are euthanized every year, and the road-kill and other carcasses collected
by governmental agencies. Besides feeding the cows and steers all this meat
from other species, they have been typically fed the ground-up
slaughterhouse by-products of other cows (internal organs, nerves, brains,
eyes, etc.), effectively turning them not just into carnivores, but into
cannibals as well. This standard industry practice was supposedly stopped
back in the '90s when it was discovered that it caused devastating mad-cow
disease in human consumers of cow flesh. Nevertheless, we know that today,
cows (as well as sheep, goats, pigs, and other obviously herbivorous
animals) are eating huge amounts of meat because it boosts profits for the
industry owners and operators, as well as the banks and financial
institutions investing in the system.
Cows dutifully eat what they’re fed, even when it causes them digestive
distress, cancerous tumors, and many other problems. Their owners feed
bovines fishmeal, slaughterhouse waste, and other animal-sourced foods not
because it is in the cows’ interests to do so, but because they exploit the
cows and use them for their own purposes. They also force many types of
drugs, chemicals, and antibiotics on the cows, again, not because doing so
is in the interests of the cows themselves, but because it is in their
interests as owners and investors to increase productivity and profits.
Ironically, bovines all die very young: beef steers at about eighteen to
twenty-four months, and dairy cow slaves at about four or five years. Though
they would naturally live about twenty-five years, they die hanging upside
down by one leg in slaughterhouses, stabbed in the neck and bleeding to
death, killed for profit by their owners, and for their flesh and skins by
obedient consumers.
Set Up
Do cows ever suspect they’re being ruthlessly exploited, or that the meat
in their diet is toxic and part of that exploitation? Do they suspect
they’re fed meat because doing so benefits their exploiters? After so many
generations of being conditioned to eat meat, cows may think it’s their
natural food. How would they know differently?
Now try re-reading the above paragraph, replacing the word “cows” with
the word “people.”
The pharmaceutical-medical complex rakes in billions of dollars in
profits from people eating diets high in meat, dairy products, and eggs,
people who suffer from and buy drugs to treat the diseases caused by eating
these foods: heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, strokes, obesity,
osteoporosis, kidney disease, liver disease, autoimmune diseases, and so
forth. This same industry brings in even more profits from people who eat
foods sourced from animals who suffer terribly from the terror, frustration,
and agony of modern animal confinement operations. Eating food products
embodying this depression, anxiety, and insomnia, people ironically spend
billions for psychiatric drugs to combat the same illnesses forced on the
animals they eat. Drugging animals and humans, the pharmaceutical complex
gorges on suffering to amass huge profits that enable it to control
governmental bodies, the media, and public awareness. By analogy, the
military-industrial complex profits from wars and policies that feed on
disconnected, frustrated people, and powerful financial corporations steal
people’s homes and wealth as dairy operations steal the cows' babies and
milk.
Awakening
We can free ourselves when we awaken from the cultural food trance and
its official story line—that meat and dairy are natural for us to eat—and
switch to a plant-based way of eating that frees the animals, ecosystems,
and people enslaved by this official story. Like cows, being fed meat and
cheese is not in our interest, but is only in the interest of exploitive
forces. By freeing others, we will attain freedom. By questioning the
official food story and going vegetarian and then vegan, we open the door to
discovering our purpose on this beautiful Earth, and to being able to create
a new world of equality, freedom, and harmony.
May we contemplate deeply the riddle of the cows we dominate for food!
Are they really the omnivores they’ve been forced into being? Are we?
Will Tuttle, educator and composer, is author of the acclaimed best-seller, The World Peace Diet, and is co-founder of the Circle of Compassion ministry. He has been a vegan since 1980. For Will's "My Pilgrimage" story, see W Tuttle and scroll down about two-thirds of the way.
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