Interview With Will Tuttle, Author Of The World Peace Diet
[Here is an interview posted to Lucid Nutrition, an Austin-based website dedicated to health and nutrition. ]
Voices for Animal Rights: To Become a Vegan
The following excerpts are from an interview by David Horton with Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, for Abolitionist-Online.
This animal thing, some get it, others don’t. Is it lack of compassion or is the prospect of making such a radical change to (vegan) eating ( as opposed to just what you feel like) too much to take on board?
The more I’ve studied this, David, the more I feel that it’s a minor miracle that anyone is able to question our culturally-imposed eating habits deeply enough to go vegan. Across cultures, and across species, all animals take what their parents and culture teach them is their proper food very seriously. What’s true is that our culture’s meals strongly contradict our inherent compassion, so we need early and constant pressure to force us to see certain non-human animals as food rather than as fellow beings we would naturally respect and care about. It’s the example of other vegans, especially vegan communities of one kind or another (even on-line communities), that provides the most powerful psychological and cultural force for healing and liberation.
In your book, you explain how animals have a purpose, how they establish social order and express their natural intelligence. If we don’t acknowledge their sentience and sophistication is it because we eat them and support their exploitation?
Yes, this is a basic psychological mechanism that we automatically engage whenever we find ourselves in a position where we are knowingly harming others. Our natural compassion can’t stand it. So if it’s “food animals,” then we have to psychologically distance ourselves from them, using all kinds of stories that are supplied by our culture’s institutions (religion, science, education, family, government, media, etc.) that these animals were put here by God for us to use, that we’d die in 24 hours of a protein deficiency if we didn’t eat them, that they don’t have souls, and so forth. We do the same thing for “enemies” we think we have to kill in wars – reduce them to mere “insects” or “vermin” in our minds so that we can harm them. Same with people we enslave. In The World Peace Diet I refer to this as our culture’s underlying mentality of reduction and exclusion. It is ritually injected into us through our culture’s daily meals and all the stories surrounding our routine mistreatment of animals used for food.
Chapter 7 is about the Domination of the Feminine and you cite two prime examples: the hen and the cow. “Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them.” Is that what men do when they try to dominate women? Is it the arrogance of our species, the ease with which we are able to disconnect? Is this the biggest mistake of our species?
Yes, I think that this is probably the biggest mistake we humans make. And yes, it plays out in relationships between men and women, and also in many other ways as well. Domination requires disconnection and also reduction. Most women know how it is to be looked at as “meat” and as men, we are taught early on to look at women in that way, as we are taught to look at certain animals as well. I would not say, though, that it is easy for our species to disconnect. We’ve got to remember the ferocity of the programming we endured!! It’s tremendously powerful! From the time we lose our mother’s breast, we are forced to eat the flesh and secretions of brutalized animals two or three times every day, in the most important, relentless, ongoing rituals in our culture: our daily meals. We are taught continually to disconnect the reality on our plate from the reality that it took to get it onto our plate. Yes, we are masters at disconnecting, but only because we have been forced to practice it rigorously and religiously since birth. We could also be masters at connecting if we were taught those skills! The wealthy elite only maintains its power because the masses eat foods of death, disconnectedness, and enslavement, and reaps its own enslavement. We will be liberated when we liberate those who are at our mercy!
There’s more toxins coming into our bodies from animal products than from plant foods. Why?
That’s a big question! Animal foods concentrate physical toxins. For example, the legal limits on pesticides sprayed on crops fed to humans are stricter than on crops fed to animals. All pesticide residues concentrate in the fat, flesh, milk, and eggs of animals, especially the way animals are forced to eat slaughterhouse waste and the feces and flesh of other animals in today’s factory farms. Fish concentrate toxins to an even greater degree, as I explain in my book. On top of all that, there are the heterocyclic amines, carcinogenic substances formed by cooking animal flesh. In addition, there are the basic components of animal flesh: saturated fat, cholesterol, and acidifying animal protein, all three being now understood to be basically toxic to our human physiology. On top of all that, there are what I call in The World Peace Diet the metaphysical toxins: we are eating the vibrations of grief, terror, anxiety, despair, and panic. No wonder the biggest demand for pharmaceuticals is not just for statin drugs, digestive drugs, insulin, and other drugs to fight the physical devastation of animal-sourced foods, but drugs for depression, rage, and insomnia! We become what we eat and what we practice!
All through your book you come back to this one matter of the vital connection we all have with our culture and the natural world in the food we eat. “It all begins with our most fundamental social ritual: eating”. Can you say something about our meals and the way they hold us back?
Our meals of hidden violence are devastating our earth, torturing millions of beautiful and sensitive animals daily, and laying waste the inner landscape of our thoughts and feelings. The wars, diseases, neuroses, and crimes we see around and within us have their genesis in the wars, diseases, neuroses, and violent crimes we inflict on billions of animals routinely and completely unnecessarily. The basic sense of disempowerment people feel to change “the system” stems from their daily meals, which are the rituals that keep us as domineering commodifiers, enslaved ourselves!
I am seeing more and more people “get” the message of The World Peace Diet and begin to share it with others, and this is the foundation of the healing of our world and of our culture and ourselves. We will continue to be merely ironic in our quests for peace and justice and wisdom until we make the connections that are on our plates and authentically come into alignment with our true nature of compassion and share this uplifting and liberating understanding with others. I encourage everyone to teach a community course on The World Peace Diet, and to spread the message of compassion, not just for ourselves, but for all living beings and all future generations. As they say, “We are the ones we are waiting for!”