Download peace of a meatless diet

“THE PEACE OF A MEATLESS DIET”
By eating meat we are taking into our bodies the vibrations of violence, fear,
pain, suffering and death, so how can we be peaceful if this is what our bodies
are regularly absorbing?
Nobel prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer was a late converter to
vegetarianism, but became an avid promoter of the peace of a meatless diet.
He said… ‘even if eating meat was shown to be good for you, I would certainly
not eat it’. Singer has little patience with intellectual rationalisations for
meat-eating: ‘various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their
disciples and followers that animals are nothing more that machines without a
soul, without feelings. However anyone who has ever lived with an animal – be
it a dog, a bird or even a mouse – knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented
to justify cruelty’….. I must say I heartily agree with him!
Tolstoy advocated ‘vegetarian pacifism’ and was against killing even the
smallest living thing such as ants! He felt, as do many others, that there is a
natural progression of violence that leads inevitably to war in human society.
Tolstoy wrote that eating flesh ‘is simply immoral, as it involves an act which is
contrary to moral feeling – killing’. Tolstoy believed that man suppressed,
unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy, and became
cruel by adopting a meat diet.
‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I fail to see why this should apply solely to taking human
lives. One of the great Renaissance mystics, Leonardo da Vinci said, ‘I have from
an early age, adjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I,
will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men’. While
George Bernard Shaw said, ‘While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered
beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?’.
I wonder how many people would still eat flesh if they had visited an
abattoir or a battery chicken farm or even a fish farm? I think most would cringe
with disgust and horror at the cruelty that these animals have to endure. Some
animals are taken away from their mothers at a very early age, and kept in feeding
units so small they cannot lie down or move around, they are pumped full of
growth hormones, antibiotics and tranquillisers and then led off to the
slaughterhouse, some dying before they even reach there. The fear, anxiety and
pain that these animals feel is an energy or memory that stays in their flesh and is
stored in their cellular memory. We as humans then take it on when we eat them.
Calves selected for veal production are taken away from their mothers way before
they would naturally choose independence. The trauma and feeling of loss for
both the calf and the mother is too awful to contemplate. They are then fed on a
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diet of liquid food until they die a miserable premature death. This diet keeps the
flesh white, which fetches a better price on the market.
Battery chickens live a life of misery, never getting to see the light of day.
They are often kept on wire mesh instead of a solid floor to make it easier for
farmers to keep the cages clean. As they are not by nature perching birds, their
legs often become crippled as the wire cuts into their feet. Some resort to climbing
onto the backs of their fellow creatures for relief from their pain and suffering. As
animals instinctively strive to be in the open air, free to move and enjoy nature as
we do, they often become restless and frustrated when cooped up in crowded
cages. Chickens will often peck at each other, resulting in farmers cutting off the
tips of their beaks to prevent them from tearing each other to pieces and many a
bird has to bear the agony of a bleeding and tender beak for the rest of it ‘life’ on
the chicken farm. Even if in some cases the scenario is not quite so bad, none are
good enough to warrant our eating these fellow creatures for the sake of the palate
or our so-called health. These cruel stories are endless as humans remain detached
and on the whole unaware of the process involved in bringing them their neatly
packed supermarket food, already killed, skinned and cleaned.
Health and the meatless diet
It seems so clear when we compare the physiology of humans to carnivorous
animals, that we are not designed to eat meat. Dr Bernard Jensen, a leading
authority and author on colon health, analysed some of the faecal matter that he
removed from a patient’s colon and found that it was over 40 years old! Meat is
fibreless and does not pass through our colon easily. It can get caught in the little
pockets of our typically vegetarian colon, and there it stays rotting and causing
havoc with our health. We don’t have a short smooth colon like the carnivorous
animals. The meat industry has managed to creep insidiously into our belief
systems, offering many clever reasons for flesh consumption. In so doing it has
converted the masses and convinced us that we should be eating meat, and if we
don’t we won’t be getting enough protein. This is simply not true. The protein
from a vegetarian diet is not inferior.
‘Never mind our physiology, it tastes nice and that’s a good enough reason’, is
often the distressing answer I get! We have been lead to believe that vegetables
and fruit are not a complete protein and therefore inferior. I wonder how the other
numerous herbivorous animals such as elephants, giraffes, horses and cattle
manage to grow to be such magnificent animals if they are eating inferior protein?
The idea that meat has a monopoly on protein and that large amounts of protein
are required for energy and strength are both myths. While it is being digested
most protein breaks down into its constituent amino acids, which are reconverted
and used by the body for growth and tissue replacement. Only 8 of the 22 amino
acids cannot be synthesised by the body itself, and these 8 “essential amino acids”
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are found in abundance in non-flesh foods. Furthermore our body stores amino
acids, so if we don't get a complete set of amino acids in one sitting we will have
stored all we need anyway! A bowl of brown rice and mung beans gives us all the
amino acids we need!
Apparently if you are an ‘O’ blood group, for instance, you were once a hunter and
should therefore be eating meat! This is not a belief I agree with. If we study the
ancient tribes, meat eating was very rare, and then only when there was nothing
else available. The aboriginal people in Australia for instance, were vegetarian
until they were forced into the desert and needed to adapt their diet to survive.
During the process of converting grain to meat, 99% of the carbohydrates, 90% of
the protein and 100% of the dietary fibre are lost!
Since eating begins with our hands and mouths, what do our bodies tell us?
Nature is perfect and never lies!
Physiological comparisons
Meat eater
Herbivore
Human
Has claws
No claws
No claws
No
skin
pores, Perspires through skin Perspires through skin
perspires
through pores
pores
tongue
Sharp front teeth and No sharp front teeth, No sharp front teeth,
enlarged canines for has flat rear molars to has flat rear molars to
tearing flesh
grind vegetable matter grind vegetable matter
Intestinal tract three Intestinal track 10 - 12 Intestinal track 12
times body length so times body length. It is times body length. It is
rapidly that decaying pocketed to extract pocketed to extract
meat can pass through maximum
nutrients maximum
nutrients
quickly. It is smooth from
the
fibrous from
the
fibrous
for easy passage
vegetables and fruit
vegetables and fruit
Strong
hydrochloric Stomach acid 20 times Stomach acid 20 times
acid in the stomach to weaker than that of weaker than that of
digest meat
meat-eaters
meat-eaters
(AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. The Higher Taste.)
As early as 1961 the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that 90 97% of heart disease, a half of the cause of deaths in the USA, could be prevented
by a vegetarian diet. (“Diet and Stress in Vascular Disease”Journal of the
American Medical Association. June 3, 1961 p.806) In 1990 the British medical
journal Lancet reported similar findings. (Ornish Dr Dean “Ornish’s Program for
Reversing Heart Disease” Random House NY 1990) There have been numerous
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links to cancer and the consumption of meat. In 1990 Dr Walter Willet, who
conducted the largest study of diet and colon cancer in history said ‘If you step
back and look at the data, the optimum amount of meat you eat should be zero!’.
(Kolata, G “Animal Fat is Tied to colon Cancer” NY Times December 13, 1990 p.
A-1)
Another area of grave concern is the nitrosamines formed when secondary
amines, prevalent in beer, wine, tea and tobacco to mention a few of the many
sources, react with chemical preservatives in flesh products. Nitrosamines are
labelled ‘one of the most formidable and versatile groups of carcinogens (cancercausing agents) yet discovered’. A shocking animal study carried out by Dr
William Lijinsky of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in which nitrosamines were
fed to animals, found that after 6 months every single animal (100%) had cancer!
(Statement of Dr William Lijinsky, US House of Representatives’ hearing
“Regulation of Food Additives and Medicated Animal Foods,” March 1971 p.132)
Numerous other potentially hazardous chemicals are present in flesh
products. According to Gary and Steven Null in their book entitled Poisons in
Your Body, besides tranquillisers, hormones and antibiotics, some
2700
hazardous chemicals have been identified in animal products. The process starts
way before birth and continues long after death! These drugs will all be present in
the products when you eat them. Sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite are the
chemicals used as preservatives to slow down the putrefaction in cured meat and
meat products. They are also used to give meat its bright red colour by reacting
with pigments in the blood and muscle. Without them the meat would turn the
natural grey-brown colour of dead meat very quickly.
Excessive amounts of these chemicals are fatal and mistakes have occurred
where too much has been added in the factory and people have died of poisoning!
Even small amounts can be hazardous and warnings have been given by the
United Nations FAO/WHO Expert Committee of Food Additives that ‘Nitrates
should not on any account be added to baby food’. The margin between safe and
not safe is very small. Because of the filthy overcrowded conditions that the
animals are forced to live in, disease is rampant. The Food and Drug
Administration in America estimates that the use of antibiotics saves the meat
farmers $1.9 billion a year, giving them sufficient reason to overlook the potential
health hazards and the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are passed on to meat
eaters. Further poisons such as urea and uric acid are present in the meat from the
trauma of being slaughtered. These join with the animal's blood to contaminate the
flesh further.
In 1972 the United States Department of Agriculture reported that inspected
carcasses passed inspection after diseased parts had been removed. Examples were
nearly 100 000 cows with eye cancer (it is not surprising they did not want to see)
and 3,596,302 cases of abscessed liver. Chickens with airsacculitis, a pneumonialike disease that causes pus-laden mucus to collect in the lungs, are allowed to be
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sold so long as the chickens’ chest cavities are sucked clean with air suction guns.
During this process the air sacks often burst and pus seeps into the meat.
The mad cow disease phenomenon comes as no surprise! Man’s greed and
total lack of reverence and compassion is the underlying cause – it is not
surprising that nature has retaliated in such a way. Over 1 million people in the
UK have now adopted a vegetarian diet as a result of this outbreak. Our “instant,
convenient and detached” lifestyles allow for little thought or understanding of the
violent and cruel ways these gentle helpless creatures are being subjected to.
A peaceful diet
Peace on earth can only be attained if we ourselves live peaceful lives, and how
can we be peaceful if we are eating food that is fundamentally violent. Every year
in America alone, about 134 million mammals and 3 billion birds are slaughtered
and very few people make any connection between this killing and the meat on
their tables. Many great thinkers have adopted a vegetarian diet, such as Henry
David Thoreau, who said, ‘I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the
human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals’. Ethical
considerations have attracted many of the world's greatest personalities.
Pythagoras, famous for his contribution to geometry and mathematics, told
of the many ‘innocent foods available to man’, and said ‘only beasts satisfy their
hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle and sheep and
many wide animals live on grass’. He ate bread and honey in the morning and raw
vegetables at night. He would pay fishermen to throw their catch back into the sea.
Leonardo da Vinci, another vegetarian, wrote: ‘He who does not value life
does not deserve it’. French philosopher Jean Rousseau was an advocate of natural
order and he observed that meat-eating animals are generally more cruel and
violent than herbivores.
The poet Shelley was a committed vegetarian, as was the famous Russian
author Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy advocated ‘vegetarian pacifism’ and was against
killing even the smallest living thing such as ants! He felt, as do many others, that
there is a natural progression of violence that leads inevitably to war in human
society. Tolstoy wrote that eating flesh ‘is simply immoral, as it involves an act
which is contrary to moral feeling – killing’. Tolstoy believed that man
suppressed, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy, and
became cruel by adopting a meat diet.
Mahatma Ghandi, a vegetarian and one of the greatest apostles of nonviolence of the 20th century, stated that ‘spiritual progress does demand at some
stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our
bodily wants’. Surely we have to question the wisdom of this habit, which is
nothing less than an act of violence against the creatures sharing the Earth with us,
creatures that do not have the ability to protect themselves or to communicate with
us. Is it not time to think deeply with our hearts about our actions? If we choose a
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peaceful diet, we will be choosing harmony for our bodies, and our minds will
become stiller and closer to God.
Vegetarianism and religion
Traditionally avoidance of meat has been a part of religious practice in nearly all
faiths. Although there are some prescriptions for eating meat in the Old Testament
of the Bible, it is clear that a vegetarian diet is the ideal. In Genesis (1:29) we find
God him/herself proclaiming: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of the Earth, and every tree, in that which is the fruit of a
tree yielding seed: to you it shall be for meat’. And in Genesis (9:4) meat is
directly forbidden: ‘But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall
ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every
beast will I require it’.
Later in the Bible major prophets also condemn eating meat. According to
Isaiah (66:3) the killing of cows is particularly abhorrent; ‘He that killeth an ox is
as if has slew a man’. In the story of Daniel it is recorded that while imprisoned in
Babylon he refused to the meat offered by his jailers!
Many Christians find references to Christ eating meat in the New
Testament. However, close study of the original Greek manuscripts shows that the
vast majority of words translated as ‘meat’ are trophe, brome, and other words that
simply mean ‘food’ or ‘eating’ in the broadest sense. The original Greek word
translated as ‘meat’ is phago, which means only ‘to eat’. The Greek word for meat
is kreas (flesh), and it is never used in connection with Jesus. No passage in the
New Testament refers directly to Jesus eating meat! Interestingly the famous
prophet Isaiah said about Jesus, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,
and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know
to refuse the evil and choose the good’. It is interesting to note the direct
relationship between eating the right foods and choosing a way of life that is not
‘evil’, but filled with peace and harmony.
Leonard Orr, in his book Breaking the Death Habit describes his experience
of the fire ceremony: ‘It was a beautiful ceremony and it got me up early in the
mornings as it was performed at 5 a.m. But I didn’t get the meaning or point of it. I
couldn't feel anything. The truth was that I was still too dead to feel it. I had been a
meat-eater my whole life, and I could not feel spiritual energies very finely. If I
could feel the energy of the Spirit, I would have already given up meat-eating –
dead animals in the body deaden our spiritual sensitivities’. We are what we eat
and there is no getting away from it. Leonard Orr goes on to say; ‘you can eat
meat for 25 - 50 years before it kills you through heart attack or cancer – getting
rid of the physical and energy body pollution faster than we take it in, is what I
call the spiritual purification game. The more we win this game on a daily basis,
the more often we can live in the Spirit, and the more control we have over our
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lives. When we loose the spiritual purification game, we move towards ageing and
death’.
Meat and the environment
Killing animals for food is one of the most environmentally destructive practices
taking place on earth today and if people adopted a vegetarian diet many
environmental problems would be alleviated. The meat industry is linked to
deforestation, desertification, water pollution, water shortages, air pollution and
soil erosion. As Neal D Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for
Responsible Medicine, says: ‘If you are a meat eater you are contributing to the
destruction of the environment, whether you know it or not. Clearly the best thing
you can do for the Earth is to not support animal agriculture’. As Jeremy Rifkin
warns in his widely read book Beyond Beef: ‘Today, millions of Americans,
Europeans and Japanese are consuming countless hamburgers, steaks and
roasts, oblivious to the impact their dietary habits are having on the
biosphere and the very survivability of life on earth. Every pound of grain-fed
flesh is secured at the expense of a burned forest, an eroded rangeland, a
barren field, a dried up river or steam and the release of millions of tons of
carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane into the skies’. (pease put this in
bold steve – thx)
Forest destruction
According to the Vegetarian Times, clearing land for beef cattle ranches causes
half of the annual destruction of tropical rainforests. Each pound of beef made
from Central or South American cattle costs about 55 square feet of rain forest
vegetation! In America alone about 260 million acres of forest have been cleared
for a meat-centred diet. About 40% of the land in the western United States is used
for grazing beef cattle. This has also had a detrimental effect on wildlife as it has
forced deer and antelope out of their natural habitat. The same is applicable here in
South Africa. I recently visited a farm near the Botswana border and was horrified
at the destruction caused by cattle grazing. The farm was virtually a desert.
Agricultural inefficiency
Approximately HALF the world's grain is fed to animals that are later slaughtered
for meat. It takes 16 pounds of grain and soybeans to produce 1 pound of feedlot
beef. If people would live off grains and other vegetarian foods it would put far
less strain on earth's agricultural lands. Twenty vegetarians can live off the same
amount of land as one meat eater! Eighty per cent of corn and 95% of oats grown
in America are fed to livestock. Fifty-six per cent of all agricultural land in the
USA is used for beef production; 1.3 billion people could be fed with the grain and
beans that are fed to the livestock annually.
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Soil erosion and desertification
This is one of the devastating effects of animal farming. Overgrazing and intensive
grain farming for food are causing deserts that need never have been. Over the last
couple of centuries America has lost about two-thirds of its topsoil. According to
Worldwatch Institute (1986) one pound of beef from cattle raised on feedlots
represents 35 pounds of topsoil!
Water pollution and depletion
About 50% of the water pollution in the USA is linked to livestock, and it is no
different in the rest of the world. Pesticides and fertilisers used to grow animals
food run off into rivers and dams and eventually out to sea. They also pollute
ground water. There is a huge amount of chemical runoff from pesticides used in
the feedlots and holding yards, as well as excrement and urine that pollute the
water making it unfit for us to drink and disturbing the delicate ecosystems in the
rivers and waterways. According to a German documentary film by Wolfgang
Kharuna, this waste is apparently anywhere between 10 and 100 times more
damaging that domestic sewerage. Nitrates evaporating from open tanks of animal
waste in the Netherlands have caused extremely high levels of forest-killing acid
rain.
Worldwide the livestock industry uses huge amounts of fresh water – a
diminishing resource and in many places in very short supply. In the USA 50% of
the water consumed each year is used in the animal industry. Feeding the average
meat eater takes 4 200 gallons of water per day, versus 1 200 gallons for a person
following a lacto-vegetarian diet. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound
of wheat and 2 500 gallons for a pound of meat!
Air pollution
Use of fuel and burning of oil in the production of animals foods results in huge
amounts of unnecessary carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, one of the
main causes of global warming. The burning of tropical forests for land clearing
for grazing is another source of pollution that need not occur. In the USA the use
of petroleum would drop by 60% if people adopted a vegetarian diet. That in itself
is a HUGE factor in the global warming equation! The meat industry is also
responsible for large amounts of methane gas, which is produced directly by the
digestive process of cows. This gas traps 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Conclusion
An excerpt from For the Common Good, a book written by World Bank
economist and philosopher John B Cobb, says it all so clearly: ‘If a simple
and healthful change in eating habits along with localisation of most food
production and a major shift toward organic farming were to take place over
the next generation, food production and distribution could be weaned from
their current heavy dependence on fossil fuels. In the process, the enormous
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suffering now inflicted on livestock would be greatly reduced’. It may be an
idealistic way of looking at things, but it's so appealing and fundamentally
true. If people worldwide adopted a vegetarian diet, there would be fewer sick
people and our planet would be far healthier. There are 800 million hungry
people in the world today, and every 2 seconds a child dies of malnutrition.
Sixty million people die every year in developing countries from starvation.
This need not be the case if people lived consciously and adopted a vegetarian
diet.
We need to go beyond the culture of eating animals and transform our
thinking to a level of consciousness that allows us realise that we are not separate
from each other, from animals or the earth. The presumption that we are superior
and dominant and therefore separate, thereby giving us the right to use and abuse
all for the sake of a self-centred indulgent lifestyle, has to change if we are to live
in peace and ascend to a God-centred consciousness.
References
1. Cremo M, Goswami M. Divine Nature. Australia. The Bhaktivedante Book
Trust, International 1995, 1998.
2. Yoga Mind and Body. By the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre (no, there are no
specific authors,) 1996 Dorling Kindersley Ltd., London.
3. Orr L. Breaking the Death Habit. Printed in USA, Berkeley CA. Frog Ltd,
1998.
4. Gaywood E. Vegetarian, Vegan and Raw Food Recipes Durban:
5. The Higher Taste. Based on the teachings of his Divine Grace A C
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. The Bhaktivedante Book Trust. Australia,
McPherson’s Printing Group.
6. Diet for a New America. John Robbins. Publisher H J Kramer
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