Peace Begins On Our Plates
What we choose to eat has enormous and far-reaching consequences. Eating animals is a habit based on inescapable violence. It may not seem violent to shop in a comfortable, clean supermarket and place neatly wrapped packages of disembodied animal parts in our carts, but every dollar spent on meat, dairy and eggs is a vote in support of terrible violence, cruelty and death.
Animals and people suffer enormously to create food that we do not need to eat in order to be healthy and happy.
Workers in slaughterhouses and other phases of animal agriculture suffer. Slaughterhouse workers are far more likely than any other type of worker to endure physical injury, emotional stress, PTSD, higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse, and higher levels of domestic violence. They are very often some of the most vulnerable populations who are without other job options, forced to do hideous work no one else with other opportunities wants to do. There is no peace in this work.
As large scale farming continues to overtake the food supply, huge corporate farming methods chain individual farmers to uncomfortable and steep mortgages which create states of servitude, require more work for less pay, and result in high stress, depression and desperation for workers. No peace in this kind of business model.
There is nothing bucolic or charming about filthy warehouses the size of football fields with no windows, filled to capacity with chickens, pigs or other unfortunate animals. These thinking, feeling, sensitive creatures are crammed side by side, made to live in extremely unnatural ways in tiny areas they cannot escape, on top of their own feces and urine, with throat-burning levels of ammonia choking the air. The animals often are existing with dead cellmates lying beneath their feet, rotting, adding to the putrid stench. This is abuse, not even remotely peaceful.
What kind of "farm" requires its farmers to wear respirators and oxygen masks to be able to withstand going into these awful places? No peace there.
Animals confined cruelly in these places often literally go insane from the stress of being so crowded, and from having numerous painful mutilations like castration without anesthesia performed routinely upon them. No peace there.
These operations dump enormous amounts of animal waste from massive feces/urine lagoons into nearby fields, often spraying it up into the air. People living nearby, often marginalized and poverty-stricken people, endure higher levels of respiratory disease and cancers than the general population due to having this literal crap blown all over the air, land and water in their areas. Living like this is not peaceful for residents.
No one near these places likes being affected by these hideous "farms." Only the purposely isolated, ignorant consumers who are brainwashed by billions of dollars of deceptive marketing believe that eating this way is somehow humane for animals or healthy for people. Peace, on any level, in this insidious system, is nothing but a marketing ploy. It is not real. It is non-existent.
Eating animals causes disease in humans, since we are not carnivores. We are not even omnivores. We are herbivores, meant to eat plants. When we deny our basic constitutional makeup and insist on eating the wrong foods for our physiology, i.e. meat, dairy and eggs, we get sick.
The leading causes of death in countries with high animal food consumption are directly related to eating animals. Heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, obesity, organ failure like kidney disease and more are caused by eating animals. There is nothing peaceful about dying from any of these. Nor is it any fun to live with these stressful chronic diseases that can take decades to finally kill a person - that is not living; that is dying dreadfully by degrees. No peace there.
Eating animals causes devastation of natural habitats like rainforests, violently displacing natural species who live there, waging war on entire ecosystems to introduce foreign grazing animals or to create mono-cropped areas for growing grains to feed farmed animals. Indigenous peoples find their existence assaulted and sometimes completely obliterated by these practices. No peace there.
Eating animals is part of a system that exerts disrespectful misuse upon precious waterways, creating massive pollution and dead zones.
The misery and violence extend to many areas of life, leaving a trail of destruction and no peace.
But it does not have to be this way. With our diet choices, we can continue to support the violence and inequity inherent in eating animals. Or we can opt for a much more healthy, harmonious, thoughtful, peaceful way of living - better for everyone, human and animal, involved. We can choose to support organic and veganic plant food farmers who care about the impacts of their products. They care about the environment. They care that the food is healthy for humans. They care that their food does not cause suffering of animals.
When we buy these consciously produced plant foods, we remove violence, suffering and destruction from the world. We can actively contribute to peace in the world on many levels, with every bite of food we eat.
Peace begins on our plates when we choose to eat only plants. You are invited to learn how here.
Image Credit:
Clker-Free-Vector-Images