THE WORLD PEACE DIET
Interview with Will Tuttle, Ph.D. By David Horton

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 eating ( 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.

We are up against a Goliath - how do we bring the plight of farm animals to the attention of others, without getting aggressive about it, without our ‘superiority’ putting people off? How do we connect with animal consumers, with the 99%?

I believe that the most important overlooked key to this change is to change our attitude to others who are not yet vegan and stop trying overtly to change them! Everyone instinctively resists being changed or dictated to! Especially with regard to food!

I think the most powerful thing we can do is tell our own stories about our own conversion process and plant the seeds deeply by living our lives congruently. By that I mean being the kind of people that others would naturally emulate. Being good listeners, kind and considerate in our relationships with others, and so forth. The big light-bulb goes on when people realize that they have been forced by their culture to eat in ways that they wouldn’t choose on their own! That their parents, ministers, doctors, and everyone else were also similarly forced by overwhelmingly powerful social institutions rooted for the past 8,000 years or so in seeing certain animals as mere objects to be eaten. And that this is an obsolete mentality that is destroying our physical health, ecological health, psychospiritual health, and cultural health. Finally, that what we are is consciousness itself—that we were all born into a certain culture and naturally take on the attributes of that culture, but that we are bigger than that, and that we can help heal our culture by discovering what we truly are. And by acting upon that discovery!

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.

A personal question. The changes you’ve made to your life and your attitudes over the past 30 years, how has that gone down with members of your family?

I’m quite happy to say that it has gone quite well, overall. My father had the most resistance to my vegan orientation, but he passed away from cancer about 20 years ago. My mother and sister have both become vegans, and my other sibling, my brother Ed, though a bit of a hold-out, still eating some fish, is supportive of veganism. My spouse Madeleine is also a long-time vegan, and her mother in Switzerland has also become a vegan. I have six nieces and nephews and about half of them have become vegan, and the others are moving in that direction. Many of my family are fundamentalist Christians, so I have continuous proof that kindness to animals is compatible with many different religious orientations.

It is said that animal farming has a bigger carbon footprint than all cars, planes and trucks put together. But that aside, you suggest the cost of clean water represents a major environmental connection to animal farming. You quote the EPA saying that over the past decade 35.000 miles of river in USA have been polluted by large scale feedlots. Are these two facts alone enough to stop meat eaters in their tracks?

I wish they were! The environmental devastation wrought by eating animal-derived foods is so extremely egregious that one would think that as soon as people who say they care about the environment heard about it, they’d at least stop buying and eating all animal foods. Sometimes they do! More often, though, they kind of grumble and bumble and stumble and change the subject. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic! It’s the incredible power of what I mentioned at the very beginning—all beings are deeply hard-wired not to question the food of their parents. It took thousands of years to change to being herders of animals; we will have to change and transcend this animal-herding and animal-eating orientation much more quickly!

You have said that the only way humans will “refrain from committing violence” is if we fear "punishment or retaliation. Animals are incapable of either”. In other words, you’re saying humans are too violent to be trusted around animals?

Actually, I said that “it seems” that this is the only way we’ll refrain from committing violence. Our basic nature is non-violent. We are born into a culture that forces us to eat and act like predators, and function within basically predatory economic and social systems. It’s about awakening to what we truly are and then living in harmony with the truth that we are, not just talking about it.

Back in 1975, you and your brother Ed went on a journey of discovery. To find out “who am I?” It was a time when you renounced security – “We had no idea where our next meal or lodging was coming from”. Then you gave your last $20 to a waitress for a tip. This sort of break through sounds frightening – it isn’t just about animals and it’s more significant than discovering a new diet?

Right, veganism is absolutely not just a food trip or new diet! As I say in the book, it’s nothing to be proud of. It’s our natural human seeing, extricated from the brambles of inherited violence, and looking out on the world and seeing beings to be respected rather than commodities to be used and harmed for self-centered pleasure or profit. It is a breakthrough, and I believe veganism is the essential breakthrough and only breakthrough, actually, that can liberate us individually and collectively. Donald Watson, who coined the word “vegan” in 1944 said, “Veganism is a philosophy and way of life which seeks to exclude all forms of cruelty to animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.” We have to remember that veganism is simply the heart-felt yearning to live a life of kindness toward all others. This is the source of joy, happiness, peace, and fulfillment for us as human beings. It is being loving. Compassion is the highest form of love, and is the ground of wisdom. Veganism, to be lived, is a complete upliftment and healing of our culture. It is a spiritual transformation, and it’s also an ongoing process:

In a story you tell about your youth, you tell how you went fishing, caught a few, and then had to kill them. The repeated slamming of them against the floor to kill them. That was a seminal moment in your life?

Yes! Looking back on it now, 33 years later, I can see that it definitely was a seminal moment in my life. I was quite an avid fisher in my youth, and was always proud when I caught some fish. When I went fishing within the new context of the spiritual pilgrimage that I went on at the age of 22, I suddenly saw fishing in a whole new light, and saw the cold, cruel violence of trickery and deceit as the blinders fell away. I suddenly felt compassion for the fish I was killing! I never fished again and within a couple of months, never ate fish in my life again either.

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!

You mention the paradigm of our culture and the commodification of nature, and how it is now being challenged by vegan and spiritual paradigms. Talk about that.

The hidden core of our culture is the mentality of domination and commodification of other living beings, and of the entire living world. Veganism is the most powerful alternative paradigm, because it’s not just theoretical, it’s solidly practical. It touches every dimension of our life: our meals, our clothing, our entertainment, and ultimately, the way we think about all others in our life. Veganism is the polar and transcending opposite of our Western culture, which will, in a sense, “kill” that violent and oppressive and suicidal mentality and its endless woes, and usher in a new world of undreamt possibilities of peace, justice, sustainability, and wisdom. We don’t have to fight against the old paradigm, though! That gives it more strength! Instead, we are called to focus on the positive changes we yearn to see, and to embody them in our thinking and behavior.

There’s more toxin 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!”

Thank-you David!