World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at
12:09 pm
World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Food is our most intimate and telling connection both with the living natural order and with our living cultural heritage. By eating the plants and animals of our earth, we literally incorporate them. It is also through this act of eating that we partake of our culture’s values and paradigms at the most primal levels. It is becoming increasingly obvious, however, that the choices we make about our food are leading to environmental degradation, enormous human health problems, and unimaginable c
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Review by Delisa Renideo for World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
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This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to grow spiritually, who wants to live a conscious and compassionate life, and who wants to contribute to world peace. I have read many books on the topic of vegetarianism, animal rights and animal welfare, spiritual growth, and peace and nonviolence. This book stands alone in its ability to make the connection between all of these subjects.
Will Tuttle, Ph.D. is a rare combination of extraordinary compassion, scholarly research and education, spiritual commitment and wisdom, intuitive insights, and the courage to challenge a worldview which goes back 10,000 years
In this book, Tuttle explores humanity’s relationship with the foods we eat. He points out, very convincingly, that when humans began herding animals, it began to create a consciousness of exploitation which then spread to the control and domination of other humans, as well as animals. So the roots of human’s violence to humans are found in the practice of seeing animals as objects to exploit for our own purposes: for food, furs, labor, entertainment, “sport” and experimentation. The use of humans as slaves and the subjugation of women followed the subjugation and enslavement of animals.
One thing that sets this book apart from any of the others that describe the problems associated with a meat-based diet is the focus on the spiritual aspects of our diet. When we take food into our bodies, we are also ingesting the energy contained in this food. Animals that are tortured and filled with terror and agony as they are killed are filled with this very negative energy. When humans eat their flesh, we are also ingesting this fear and anger. This affects us deeply. We cannot live with peace in our hearts as long as we are filling our bodies with the pain and suffering of other beings.
Tuttle helps us to see that none of us have actually chosen a diet based upon meat. Our mothers fed us meat from our infancy. As we got old enough to understand that we were eating animals, we were told that animals were put here for us to eat, so it was okay. We didn’t question this, any more than we questioned wearing clothes or taking baths. Thus, we absorbed the acceptance of exploitation of animals so naturally that we didn’t know it was happening. And being unconscious, it is hard to recognize the violence that is part of our everyday lives through the eating of animals. Therefore, it is also hard to recognize how insensitive we have become to violence, because we have to protect ourselves from an awareness of the violence we are part of 3 times a day.
This is a very important book for everyone who wants their lives to contribute to more peace in the world, rather than more suffering and violence.
Review by Melanie Wilson for World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
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What would happen if everyone ate with consideration of the damage they are causing the environment and other creatures? According to Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, we would all be vegan, and a lot less hostile.
Tuttle’s hypothesis says that if people really stopped to consider how sacred the act of eating is, the fact that you are literally taking on the energy and life force of another piece of matter, people would be a lot more mindful of their choices. And naturally following from that would be a meat-free diet.
As long as we continue to try to dominate the animals we share the planet with, we will continue to have violence. He takes the idea of reaping what you sow to the ultimate end, arguing that humans live in cramped, ugly conditions with no joy because that is what we force animals to do; we have diets of highly processed, chemical-filled foods because that is what we give to animals; we are fat as we fatten our food unnaturally; we suffer more disease, chronic worry and pain because we give these things to animals.
“Our cultural predicament – the array of seemingly intractable problems that beset us, such a chronic war, terrorism, genocide, starvation, the proliferation of disease, environmental degradation, species extinction, animal abuse, consumerism, drug addiction, alienation, stress, racism, oppression of women, child abuse, corporate exploitation, materialism, poverty, injustice, and social malaise – is rooted in an essential cause that is so obvious that it has managed to remain almost completely overlooked,” he writes.
It’s a powerful, passionate argument, one that many who are already vegetarians or vegans will read and find themselves nodding their heads over. It makes sense that in addition to the environmental damage and the health problems meat-based diets cause on a personal level, eating meat can also cause social ills across societies; it’s just not something a lot of people have expressed this clearly before.
It may not be an argument that will convert many meat-eaters, but this is a thoughtful, well-reasoned book that draws on mythology, physiology, religion, science, systems theory and more to get people to think about what they put in their bodies, not just for individual health but for the well-being of society at large.-Sarah White
Review by Thomas Johnson for World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
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Doctor Will Tuttle’s World Peace Diet is unlike any other “diet book” that I have ever read. Books such as Dr. Atkins’ Health Revolution, The Zone, Protein Power, and The South Beach Diet attempt to give the reader guidance on how to lose weight. However, they fail to spell out the psychological health, ethical, environmental, and spiritual implications of their guidance.
The World Peace Diet does give information to the reader on how a balanced vegetarian diet can help someone improve their health and lose weight. However, this book is much more than simply a self help “diet book.” This book illustrates the many dark sides of eating just to lose weight without considering how we ( and other creatures) are affected emotionally and spiritually by our eating habits.The diet books mentioned above include animal foods as well as plant foods.This book does not consider animals, their milk or eggs to be suitable food for humans. Eating animals causes suffering to the humans eating them as well as the animals being eaten.
Dr. Tuttle’s book is based in veganism which is not simply a set of food preferences but is actually a form of ethical vegetarianism. Vegans only eat plant foods and are thereby able to show “Reverence” for all forms of life. In the process they practice ahimsa (harmlessness) and contibute to world peace. No animals or ” animal products” are consumed. This approach to eating is really a way of being in the world and not simply a set of food preferences.
This author brings great compassion and a very scholarly/ethical approach to his writing. At the same time he offers practical suggestions on how to eat in ways that enhance physical, emotional and spiritual health. I recommend this book to anyone interested in improving their own health in ways that also show respect and consideration for all animals and the planet itself!
Review by Charles Patterson for World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
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This book is a unique contribution to understanding the direct relationship between the food we eat and the vast range of the world’s problems–hunger, poverty, disease, war, terrorism, genocide, environmental degradation, and the massive exploitation and slaughter of defenseless animals.
To explain how the ugly reality of the abuse and killing of animals became the centerpiece of our civilization, Dr. Tuttle begins by examining the emergence of our herding culture that began roughly 10,000 years ago in the Near East with the enslavement (euphemistically called “domestication”) of sheep and goats, and later cattle, camels, horses, and other animals, for food, clothing, transport, and labor.
This herding culture introduced a higher level of coercion into human history and led to oppressive hierarchical societies and large-scale warfare never seen before. The enslavement of animals and the intensive animal agriculture that resulted from it injected large doses of ruthlessness, detachment, and socially accepted cruelty into the fabric of our civilization. It also produced assorted ideologies of human supremacy and speciesist attitudes that define our relationship to animals today.
His dedication to his vegan, non-violent worldview suffuses every page of this insightful and important book. The World Peace Diet is sure to help human consciousness move from our present herder mindset, based on might makes right and the exploitation of others, to a more humane attitude toward the earth and all its inhabitants.
–reviewed by Charles Patterson, author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
Review by VeganAnimal for World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
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I have read many, many books on vegetarian diets; ranging from health issues to animal rights issues to environmental issues to human rights issues for slaughterhouse workers (the slaughterers and packers, etc.) to what is best for the planet and the starving human beings of this world. This Book encompasses it all; yet much more eloquently and profoundly than any other book I have read, some of which also cover all the issues surrounding what we use as fuel for our human bodies. I also have met and listened to Will Tuttle lecture at a conference. He is extremely well-educated in all the subject areas; in addition, he is highly informed/educated on the spiritual and/or religious aspect of how what and WHOM we eat affects our psychology/spirituality, etc. I CANNOT MORE HIGHLY RECOMMEND ANY OTHER BOOK – EXCEPT FOR ONE TITLED “THE CHINA STUDY,” which thoroughly explains the health implications of the “Other Animal Whoms” that our society eats and uses for any and all purposes for monetary gain. Don’t get me wrong, there are many good books on these subjects. PLEASE READ AND GET AS MANY OTHER HUMAN ANIMALS TO READ “WORLD PEACE DIET” AS YOU CAN!