McDonald's and Compassionate Cuisine
In a vegetarian video from the 1980s, a psychologist says that small
children play with stuffed animals, toy animals, watch animal cartoons on
television, and can identify more closely with the animal world than with
the adult world. She says many young children freak out when they learn
where meat comes from, and if left to their own, most children would be
vegetarian.
Perhaps thinking along these lines, McDonald's advertising tells children
hamburgers grow in "hamburger patches." The real truth (factory farming,
slaughterhouses, bloodshed, etc.) is not as pleasant. Geoffrey Giuliano
worked for an ad agency in Toronto, Canada portraying McDonald's advertising
figurehead Ronald McDonald for "basically a year and a half," travelling to
personal appearances for "The Ronald McDonald Safety Show." A statement
dated "Fall/Summer 1990" in which Giuliano decried "concerns who make their
millions off the murder of countless animals and the exploitation of
children for their own ends" was submitted on behalf of the plaintiffs in
the 1991 London McLibel case.
In an interview he gave in London some years later, Geoffrey summed up his
negative experience playing Ronald north of the border. "There's no question
that I was manipulating these children. I was a highly paid, highly trained,
highly polished actor. Every show was a performance and I had a mandate to
get that message out there, and yeah, it was not too hard - anybody can
manipulate a child. I just went home one night, and I said, 'I cannot do
this, I can't live with myself if I continue to do this.'"
The author /actor has spoken widely regarding his turbulent term as the
McDonald's clown and the shadowy ethical implications of factory farming and
animal rights for organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals (PETA). Giuliano has been an ardent vegetarian abstaining from meat,
fish and eggs since 1970. In 2001 Giuliano published the book, Compassionate
Cuisine, authored by then wife Vrinda Devi.
Geoffrey Giuliano's words about "the murder of countless animals" and his
campaigning for organizations like PETA as well as his wife Vrinda Devi
authoring a book entitled Compassionate Cuisine, all indicate that Krishna
devotees are vegetarian first and foremost based on compassion for animals,
rather than because certain foods cannot be offered to the Deities and that
animal rights organizations like PETA are tolerant of and willing to
cooperate with those who are not yet strictly vegan.
"...the murder of countless animals and the exploitation of
children...There's no question that I was manipulating these children," said
Giuliano. "...anybody can manipulate a child."
Giuliano's words bring to mind the words of musician Michael Cassidy
(Mangalananda dasa), in the late '70s, reflecting the words of his spiritual
master, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896 - 1977), decrying the
modern secular public educational system as "spiritual slaughterhouses":
"As a child I had no knowledge
"No way to understand
"My father kept me sheltered
"He would hold me in his hand
"You know I was protected
"With no threat from anywhere
"I drank my mother's milk
"And I didn't have a care
"But it didn't last forever
"I was soon sent off to school
"Where the teachers gave me poison
"And I drank it like a fool
"They said that Mother Nature couldn't give us what we need
"That explained the factories, the smog and dirty streams
"They pointed to the charts to show the population boom
"To justify the murder of their children in the womb
"They gave us all the facts explaining economic war
"Like a fool I listened, I won't listen anymore!"
Go on to: MEAT: Root Cause of Endless War, Distinct Threat to Humanity
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