Instead of reducing our intelligence and compassion by denying and destroying the intelligence and purpose of animals, we could celebrate, honor and appreciate the immense diversity of intelligence, beauties, abilities and gifts that animals possess and contribute to our world. We could liberate ourselves by liberating them and allowing them to fulfill the purposes that their particular intelligence yearn for. We could respect their lives and treat them with kindness, our awareness and compassion would flourish, bringing more love and wisdom into our relationships with each other. We could live in far greater harmony with the universal intelligence that is the source of our life. To do so, however, we would have to stop viewing animals as commodities, and this means we would have to stop viewing them as food.
There is probably no more fundamental and essential teaching given by parent to offspring than how to feed. In finding, preparing, and eating food, adults of every species teach their young both directly and by example. We humans are no exception. In fact, because we are as infants more vulnerable than other animals, food education is even more important to us. The earliest and most basic connections we have with our parents are around food and eating.
Our bodies and minds are conditioned by the most powerful forces in our world (our parents and family) and in the most powerful ways (through our care and feeding) to believe that we are by nature omnivorous, even carnivorous and therefore predatory.
We could not survive without the food our parents gave us, a tangible and consumable expression of their love and caring for us. As we incorporated their food, we partook of them and their values and their culture. At every meal, three times a day, their food became us. Their culture and food became our culture and our food.
Most of us resist being told we’ve been indoctrinated. After all, we live in the land of the free, and we like to think we’ve arrived freely at the belief that we need to eat animal products and that it’s natural and right to do so. In fact, we have inherited this belief. We’ve been indoctrinated in the most deeply rooted and potent way possible, as vulnerable infants; yet because our culture denies the existence of indoctrination, the reality of the process is invisible, making it difficult for most of us to realize or admit the truth. We may be irate that someone would even suggest that our mother’s loving meals and our father’s barbecues were a form of indoctrination.
Our mother and father didn’t intend to indoctrinate us, just as their parents didn’t intend to indoctrinate them. Nevertheless, our old herding culture, primarily through the family and secondarily through religious, educational, economic and governmental institutions, enforces the indoctrination process in order to replicate itself in each generation and continue on.
If the belief has been indoctrinated, however, we feel nervous and irritated if it’s challenged. It’s not our belief, and yet we believe it. So we try to change the subject, and if that doesn’t work, we create a distraction or close down or leave or attack the one who would challenge our indoctrinated belief. We do whatever we can to block feedback or questioning.
We have accepted the belief unconsciously, we cannot defend or support the belief but must remain unaware of any inner or outer feedback that would challenge it. This forced unawareness becomes a sort of armor, dulling the mind and deadening the vital, spiritual spark within us that seeks higher awareness through increased understanding and inner freedom. The price we pay for unquestioned indoctrinated and inherited beliefs is enormous.
By uncritically accepting culturally transmitted beliefs and blindly being their agents, we remain children, ethically and spiritually. Because our mind is conditioned and we are unable to question the conditioning, we find it difficult to mature or contribute our unique gifts. Our song may die within us without ever being fully sung, to the loss of everyone, especially ourselves.
Leaving home is Buddhist shorthand for the spiritual practice of questioning our society’s values and adopting a higher set of values. This is essential to spiritual progress because it brings the maturity that can lead to higher consciousness, greater compassion and ultimately freedom from the delusion of being a fundamentally separate self and the suffering and violence this delusion necessarily causes.
By recognizing and understanding the violence inherent in our culture’s meal rituals and consciously adopting a plant-based diet, becoming a voice for those who have no voice, we can attain greater compassion and happiness and live more fully the truth of our interconnectedness with all life. In this we fulfill the universal teachings that promote intelligence, harmony and spiritual awakening.
By questioning our inherited cultural conditioning to commodify, abuse, and eat animals, we are taking the greatest step we can to leave home, become responsible adults, and mature spiritually and by actively helping others do the same, we return home with a liberating message of compassion and truth that can inspire and bless others. By leaving home we can find our true home, contribute to social progress and help the animals with whom we share this precious earth have a chance to be at home again as well.
Most of us, if asked why we eat meat, will have three basic reasons: we need the protein, everybody else does it, and it tastes good. The first reason is a good example of an inherited belief. We’ve been told from childhood that we need animal protein and we believe it in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
We humans are highly sensitive to social pressure. We are surrounded by a culture of omnivorism as fish live surrounded by water. We like to fit in and be part of the group with which we identify, so we are unlikely to seriously examine the culturally pervasive practice of eating animal foods. Meals carry powerful social significance, and we fear that others might be hurt or offended or not like us if we go against the food status quo. We are aware that by not eating animal foods, we will be seen as threatening and implicitly criticizing the overwhelming majority of people around us who do eat them. Because we naturally want to please our friends, family, colleagues and co-workers and be accepted by them we know instinctively not to question such a primary practice as eating animal foods during the shared meals that are so basic to our relationships.
On top of this social pressure is marketing pressure that comes directly from the animal food industries. The meat, dairy and egg industries are notorious for aggressively marketing their products, targeting children and health care professionals in particular. It’s well known, for example, that the dairy industry has been providing free ‘”educational materials” to schools for decades that shamelessly promote dairy products. The animal food industries also cultivate cozy relationships with the professional nutritionist, dietician and medical associations by sponsoring programs and studies and in other ways helping them financially. These associations of course repay favors by recommending, or at least not questioning, the practice of eating animal foods.
We are surrounded by media images and messages promoting the eating of flesh, milk products and eggs. Meat-based fast food restaurants are ubiquitous in our cultural landscape and they spend billions of dollars annually in advertising and promoting their products.
As potential consumers, we are all being constantly bombarded with subtle and not so subtle messages to buy their products. The meat, dairy and egg industries’ greatest sales promoters are, of course, our parents, families, neighbors, and teachers as we are growing up, and our colleagues families and friends as we get older.
We internalize this and create a self-image of—of someone who eats normally and enjoys certain foods—that determines our behavior. The advertising industry learned long ago that, while we resist attempts to influence us directly, we are easily influenced when we can be made to identify with a particular image. Once we identify with an image, the industry needs only to manipulate the image to manipulate our behavior.
Thus, social pressure from friends, family and associates together with market pressure from the food and medical industries exert a powerful force on all of us to eat animal foods and curb our awareness of the repercussions of our actions. These influential powers in our lives do not want us to leave home and think for ourselves about what we are eating and the consequences of our food choices. It is the height of irony that amid all this pressure, we may respond angrily to people who question our eating of animal foods with, “Don’t tell me what to eat!” We’ve already been told, and are being told in no uncertain terms, what to eat.
Social pressure is similarly fundamental in promulgating the speciesist attitudes that animals are ours to eat, wear and use. Stereotypes of animals used for food are exceedingly negative, blinding us completely to the intelligence and beauty of pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, fish, and other animals. Social rituals of domination, like rodeos, circuses, and zoo exhibits, all reinforce the daily rituals of domination and exclusion known as meals.
We often find that if we don’t participate in the eating and dominating of animals, we are frowned on and excluded in a variety of ways. …The pressures are nonetheless pervasive and for many of us, simply too daunting to resist, especially coming from family members or colleagues whom we are trying to please.
Besides infant indoctrination and social and market pressure, there is the third factor that drives people to eat animal foods: taste.
In contemplating the taste of animal foods, several things become immediately apparent. One is that we detest eating flesh in its natural state. How ironic! Unlike plant foods, which are often delicious to us when uncooked, raw flesh is basically disgusting to us. It is virtually always cooked and carefully prepared in order to become food for us humans.
Another thing we notice is that we don’t like the flesh if it’s soaked in blood, even if it’s cooked. The main reason animals suffer so horribly in slaughterhouses is that they must be alive when their throats are slit so that their still-beating hearts can pump the blood out of their bodies and partially dry up their flesh. If they were killed by some other means and then their corpses were cut up, the flesh would be so drenched with blood that no one would want to eat it.
One fact we may not ordinarily consider is that the blood-drained and well-cooked flesh we smack our lips over is permeated with the waste products of the cells that make up the flesh. These waste products or urea are inseparable from the flesh, and were flowing into the blood when the animal was killed, to be filtered out of the blood by the kidneys and excreted as urine. In fact, what gives meat its distinctive and apparently appetizing flavor is the cooked urea in the flesh.
A fourth thing we notice about the taste of animal products is that in many ways, the more we disguise them and hide them, the more we like them. …We have to ask, is it really the taste of the flesh and animal products that we enjoy so much? Or is it rather all the plant-based sauces, seasonings, condiments and dressings that camouflage and elevate the taste of the animal products we’ve been pressured into eating?
According to Neal Barnard, MD, “One of the most surprising discoveries in the science of appetite is that tastes require maintenance.” Since our taste cells turn over about every three weeks, he points out that “two or three weeks is all it takes” for our taste cells to forget the taste of animal foods, and that this will eliminate most of our craving for them, because the new taste cells will be accustomed only to the taste of plant-based foods. The craving we have for animal foods is conditioned and maintained by repetition and our typical diet—high in animal fat, animal protein and cholesterol—is fundamentally toxic to our physiology.
Animal foods are salty from urea and added salt and they are usually dressed with strong-tasting tenderizers, sauces, condiments and flavor enhancers. Our sense of taste may become somewhat numbed by the strong flavors, so in the beginning a plant-based diet often seems bland. In a few weeks, though as our taste buds turn over and become more sensitive because they aren’t being chronically overwhelmed by the strong artificial flavors added to animal foods, we become more sensitive to the delicate flavors of vegetables, grains, legumes, and fruits, and all the endless ways of preparing and combining them.
