Authors@google Will Tuttle - The world peace diet - Being healthy and saving the planet

MALE SPEAKER: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming. I am very, very pleased to host Dr. Tuttle to speak at Google today. Dr. Tuttle is the author of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The World Peace Diet. He's an educator, composer, pianist, and a writer. He's a peace activist and a vegan for over 30 years. And he's the recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award. He has a PhD from UC-Berkeley focusing on educating, intuition, and altruism. He's a creator of the World Peace Diet Mastery and Facilitator Training Program. And he has taught courses, college courses, in philosophy, humanities, mythology and comparative religion. He's a former Zen monk and Dharma master in the Korean Zen tradition. He's a co-founder of the Worldwide Prayer Circle for Animals. And he's currently conducting a music, art, and education ministry with his spouse, Madeleine Tuttle, who is a visionary artist from Switzerland. She has her animal paintings and various other paintings on display here if anybody wants to take a look later. And we'll also have The World Peace Diet books for sale here at a subsidized rate. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Dr. Will Tuttle. WILL TUTTLE: Thank you. Thank you so much, [INAUDIBLE]. And greetings everyone. It's good to be with you here, my first time ever in Google. And how many of you have actually read The World Peace Diet, just so I have an idea? Have any of you read the book before? No? All right, good. So I'll just talk for a few minutes here about what I think are the fundamentally essential ideas. And then we can have a short time for Q&A as well. So the basic idea in The World Peace Diet, is that all of us are born into a culture that has a hidden program when it comes to food. And it actually has a hidden underlying practice that is really, in many ways, taboo to discuss. And how many of you would you say have taken time somehow, in some way, to look behind the curtain of our culture's food system? The food system in the United States? Some of you? A few of you have. Some of you probably don't want to do that. It's quite shocking, I will say. But the basic idea is, from my point of view, the greatest adventure I believe we can take as human beings in our culture today is the adventure of looking behind the curtain of our culture's food system, and understanding the ramifications of this for us as individuals, for our planet, for our culture, for future generations. The web of relations that are impacted by our food choices is enormous. And the significance of it I think has been extremely underestimated. There's a basic idea, I think, that all of you are familiar with. In the ancient Greek tradition, there was-- over the temple of Delphi a saying, gnothi seauton. That means "know thyself." The basic idea is that in order for us to live lives of meaning, and purpose, and authenticity, we have to make an effort to understand ourselves. And I think we all understand. Also, if we want to understand ourselves, we have to understand the culture that we're born and raised in. Because in many ways, we live in a culture, but that culture lives in us. So for us to understand ourselves, we need to understand the programming of our culture, the underlying assumptions and the basic mentality of our culture. Because we're like little sponges when we land here on this planet and we start learning, and learning the language, and learning what people eat, and what they do, and what you don't do, and all of that. It's enormously powerful programming. And so to understand our culture, the most powerful way-- and anthropologists understand this. If you want to understand a culture, deeply, directly, quickly look at their food. Because food is the most powerful ritual in any culture. It's the primary way that in any culture the values and norms are passed from generation to generation. It's through the food rituals. And so when we look deeply into food, we're looking really, in many ways, at the core of our culture's underlying assumptions about the nature of reality that have been injected into all of us. That are, in many ways, invisible. So what I'd like to talk about today is, essentially, the ramifications of our food choices. And that they are much more vast than we imagine. Not only the ramifications in the outer world, like the Earth and in our culture, but specifically the ramifications in the inner world. What does it do to us, from the psychological, spiritual, emotional, and these levels as well? So The World Peace Diet, in many ways, is probably the only book, at least in English, that goes into this inner dimension of our food choices in this way. So what I'd like to do I guess is just-- because the basic dilemma I have, in many ways, in putting on a lecture like this, The World Peace Diet is available over here at an amazing price. Madeleine said it's only $5. Normally it's $22. We do have audio books. And we have a special price, actually, on the audio books if you want to get those as well. You can see us afterwards. It's me basically reading the entire book. It takes 13 and 1/2 hours for me to read The World Peace Diet pretty quickly. And I would like to give you as much as I can of that. So what you'll find happening is I'll be speaking faster and faster as time goes on here. There's so much I want to share with you, and there really isn't anywhere near enough time to give this big picture. But the basic idea is to understand somewhat, at least the main part of this puzzle. And the essential idea that's basically unnegotiable is that in the United States alone, right now, by a very conservative estimate, we are killing 75 million animals for food. That is routinely and relentlessly happening every single day. There's no big headline in the New York Times saying, wow, 75 million animals were somehow killed yesterday. I think it is huge news. It's probably the biggest news actually, in our entire culture. But because it's happening every day, routinely and relentlessly like I said, it's just not news. Because this is something that's happening because we, the people, are choosing. We're taking out our wallets and saying, I want the flesh of animals for food. Or in many cases, the dairy products and eggs are secretions of animals. And so we don't realize that this has an enormous impact. By killing 75 million animals a day for food, means essentially that we have put into place-- we have built a massive industrialized killing machine that reaches its tentacles into every nook and cranny of our outer world, from the bottoms of the oceans, deep in to the Amazon Rainforest, and everywhere on this planet. As well as very, very deeply into our own internal landscape of our feelings, and thoughts, and yearnings and mythology within ourselves as individuals and as a culture. So if we begin to understand this, if we begin to understand the ramifications of killing 75 million animals every day for food, we begin to understand, I believe, why we have the problems that we have as a culture. And why we are so essentially inept at solving them. Why we just don't exhibit very much intelligence at all or creativity because of the food. The food program is injected into every one. And basically, when we leave here, we go outside. We see people eating meat, dairy products, and eggs. We have to realize that obviously, the only reason anyone does this is because of the culture they're born into. This culture essentially gives us this as what we are told to do. I remember as a little kid growing up in Massachusetts, I was about maybe seven years old. And I said to my mother, so Mom, the kind of foods we're eating, is this what everybody eats? And we were eating lots of meat, dairy products, eggs, typical meals. And my mother said, yeah, everybody eats this. This is what everybody eats. And I said, OK, thanks. And she came back a little while later and said, well, actually, there are vegetarians. And she said that word in a way that I knew that these people lived on another planet. She said, I've never met one. You'll never meet one either. They're kind of like hypothetical people. Where would they get their protein? They couldn't possibly exist. So that was the reality I grew up with. And my mother was totally right. I never met a vegetarian my whole life growing up. Or even heard the word again. And I think when I was a little bit older-- or around that same age actually-- I was teaching my little-- I was feeding my little sister. She was maybe two or three. My mother said, now make sure she eats her protein. She was in a high chair and I had this little fork and I was putting the food in her mouth. And I remember my mother said, now, make sure she eats her protein. And I knew if she didn't get her protein, she would definitely die within 24 hours of a protein deficiency. And, of course, she didn't really want to eat it. Every time I'd put it in her mouth, she'd go, ptt. She'd spit it out. I was making like an airplane. Here comes the protein. She'd spit it out. So pretty soon I was jamming it down her throat. You got to eat your protein. I don't want to be responsible if you die of a protein deficiency. But the idea here is that essentially, from our families, from every institution in our culture-- religion, education, government, media, corporations-- we are injected with this notion, with these official stories that if we don't eat meat, we'll die. We won't get enough protein or we won't get enough calcium if we don't eat enough dairy. Even those no actual scientific validity to any of these ideas, they are the official stories that are literally forced down our throats in many ways. I know for sure because I did it to my sister. And I'm so glad to say actually that my little sister is now a grandmother. And she's a vegan. And her daughter's a vegan. And her grandson's a vegan. And my mother's a vegan. So they've somehow, at least made some changes in their lives. But to understand the power of this program. And for me, the only way I could ever change was that I had the opportunity right out of college. I left home, basically. I went on a spiritual pilgrimage. I thought, I'm going to try to get to California. And that's where everything's happening. is back in 1975. And I ended up at a community called The Farm in Tennessee, which at that time was the largest hippie commune in the world. About 1,000 people were living there. And they were eating a totally-- what we would call today actually, a vegan diet. They didn't eat any meat, dairy products, or eggs. They said they were vegetarians. And I said, well, why are you doing this? And they said, well, basically there's two main reasons. One is there's a lot of people going hungry and we're feeding the grain to animals while people are starving. And that just doesn't seem right to us. And the other reason is that do you know what these poor animals go through? And I kind of knew because when I was about 13, I'd gone away to a summer camp in Vermont for a couple of years. And so they taught me how to catch my own chicken. How to put her down on the ground, have my axe, cut her head off. Put her through the scald tank and eat the chickens. And we even gathered around every year, a dairy cow who wasn't giving enough milk anymore. And we had a gun and we just put it right here and we just shot her in the head. It was very shocking as a little kid, 13 years old, to not only witness this, but to actually be participating in it. And that's the whole thing. Like meals, we don't just watch adults eating meat and dairy. They make us eat it, too. We're forced to participate in acts of enormous violence and killing. Either eating the flesh of these animals, and then also killing them. But I never thought, even when we killed this cow and it was so shocking, just because the sheer amount actually, of blood that came out of her. I never thought for a moment that what we were doing wasn't right. I knew we were doing the right thing. I knew that God gave us these animals. That they taste good. That if you don't eat them, you will die of a protein deficiency, and so forth. So I knew what we were doing was in alignment with the harmony of the universe. We were meant to eat animals. So I knew there was nothing wrong with it. But I was just shocked at the sheer suffering that these cow-- The second year we were there, this cow. We were trying to bring her up to a place to kill her and she just broke the chain. We were pulling her with a pickup truck and she snapped it. I could see, wow, they really don't want to be killed. I guess that'd be the same for me, too. And I saw how they have to cut their arteries right here. That's really what happens to all animals. I saw all this. I saw directly. The guy said, if you don't cut these arteries immediately, no one will every the flesh. It will be soggy. It will be disgusting. You've got to bleed them out. So as soon as she hit the ground, after we shot her-- and feces and urine were pouring out-- then he cut her head off with this big, long knife. Blood was going all the way-- 20 feet in the air probably, from her heart. Pumping it. And he said, the heart has to pump the blood out or the meat will be soggy. And so I realized, now after being a vegan for 32 years I guess it is-- Madeleine and I have traveled to lots of operations, factory farms, slaughter houses. I just like to see what's actually happening. And the reason that animals suffer so much actually, is that fact. That we humans don't want to eat soggy meat. So you can't just kill an animal somehow, come back a little later, and then cut her up. They have to be hanging upside down by one leg, which they all are-- chickens, pigs, cows, all the animals, whatever they are-- lambs. And then, they're actually-- this happens, and they die by bleeding to death, which is one of the worst possible ways to die. But we don't see that. We just get these sanitized little pieces of flesh in Saran wrap and Styrofoam. And we don't actually know what that poor animal went through. And I saw this in this dairy when I was 13 years old, but I couldn't begin to question the whole thing. It was just so deeply ingrained in me. So what I'm saying is it wasn't until I got to The Farm in Tennessee and there was 1,000 people, probably 200 kids. A lot of them were vegan from birth and they were doing great. They were not dying of a protein deficiency. I saw for my own self, there they were. They were doing just fine. And so like I say, when I asked them why they were doing it, besides the world hunger. He said, well, do you know what these animals go through? The suffering? And he just-- remember, just in a few sentences-- I got this little glimpse of the massive hell realms that we construct for animals to kill 75 million animals a day. These are animals that are stuck away in these stinking sheds where we don't see them. But they're mutilated in horrific ways. They're castrated without anesthesia. Their noses are bashed. Their tails are docked. Their ears are clipped. Their beaks are seared off, just horrible mutilations, and drugs, and violence. It's just an extremely horrific life. And then they're taken off and killed. So seeing that, understanding that, and then having this example of 1,000 people that are just doing great on a plant-based diet, that was it. That was a no-brainer for me. And I've never eaten meat again in my life since that day in 1975. And I heard many years later when I met Madeleine-- she came over from Switzerland- that she actually has never eaten meat again either starting that same month and year. I'm not sure if it was the same day in 1975. And then about five years later, I came to San Francisco. And I learned more about what dairy cows go through and what hens to go through for eggs and for dairy products. So I became a vegan in 1980. I just said, I don't eat dairy and eggs either. And a few years later after that, I went to Korea and shaved my head. Became a Zen monk. Lived in a monastery there. And I found myself, for the second time in my life, in a community that was practicing what we would call today, veganism. Again, they didn't call it that. But there was no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no wool, no silk, no leather. You wouldn't even kill mosquitoes if you could help it. Kind of try to take them outside, let them go. There was this whole idea of trying to live a life as much as possible of kindness and compassion. And they've been doing this. It wasn't this new California hippie idea like I thought it was at The Farm. I realized this is an ancient spiritual teaching. It goes back many thousands of years, really. But in this particular community in South Korea, they have been living this way for 650 years. So when I came back eventually, to the United States, to California. And I got my PhD at Berkeley, and taught college, and so forth. I realized that what veganism is essentially is, is an ancient teaching of ahimsa. The Sanskrit word "ahimsa" means nonviolence. Or I think another way of saying it is compassion. Living my life as best as I can to be an expression of kindness or of nonviolence, or non-harmfulness. And that this is really the foundational wisdom in our society. Not really in our society, but in our species. It's definitely not in our society. But in our species that every religious teaching on this planet, if you go deeply into what the great religions were talking about, you could probably boil it down to one sentence, which would be something like, whatever you most want for yourself, give that to others. This basic idea, whatever I most want for myself, to give that to others. If I want to be loved, then to be loving. If I want to have an abundant life, then be generous. If I want to be free, let other's be free. Free others. But we're born and raised in a culture that basically we don't get that. We are taught, essentially, by the rituals in our lives, by meals and many other ways, too, but I think meals are the most foundational way, to manipulate, control, dominate, oppress, exploit, get what we can, be separate. And I think that now it's the time for us, as a species, and as individuals within our culture, to question the official stories. And the most powerful way I think anyone can do this is to question the food system. Because animals who are abused for food really suffer enormously at our hands. But there's many other levels of this suffering. Actually, when I came back here-- and I'll just finish this little thing up here. So I started with. Madeleine traveling around the United States after teaching college for a number of years, and doing lectures and concerts. I'm a musician also, and composer. I just started getting this vision. And I said, someone's going to write a book that will give the big picture of our culture's mistreatment of animals for food. I can't wait to read it. It will be great to read that book when it comes out. And the years went by and the book never came out. And finally, Madeleine said, Will, I think if you want to read that book, you'll probably have to write it yourself. Which I didn't want to hear, but I spent five years writing the book that ended up being The World Peace Diet. And the basic idea is that besides the outer ramifications of our food choices that people have written books about, like the three big ones are it's not good for your health, it's not good for the environment, and it's not good for the animals who suffer so much because of this. But the inner ramifications of this, what it does to us psychologically and so forth. So basically, what I'd like to do here in the next few minutes is talk about these ramifications. First, the outer ones. The outer ramifications, environmentally-- there's a whole chapter. I really could talk a long time about this. But just to sort of sum it up briefly. We see this. We actually have now, in our 17th year of living full-time in a rolling home, a house on wheels. It's called an RV, with solar panels on the roof. And we get most of our energy from the sun. And as we travel around, most of North America has been-- to me, it's really enslaved. The land has been converted into huge fields that grow primarily two crops, genetically engineered corn and genetically engineered soybeans. That's most of what you see. There's also some other grains. But probably 80% to 85%, to 90% to 95% depending on which grain it is, of this enormous amount of crops that are grown are not fed to people. They're fed to animals who you don't see. They're hyperconfined in these stinking sheds by the tens or hundreds of thousands. But it's an incredibly inefficient system. Environmentally it's devastating. The primary driving force behind global warming, behind species extinction, behind water and air pollution environmentally is this system of animal agriculture. Because it takes so much land to grow all this grain. This land is doused with chemicals, and herbicides, and pesticides, and fungicides, and all kinds of things. So it's a war against nature. No species is allowed to live there except one. So nature's trying to make diversity and we're killing off everything except soybeans. And so all the plants, all the animals, all that runoff into the water creating huge dead zones, beautification of the water where nothing can live there anymore because of all the chemical fertilizers that are used on this land. And then, the animals are very inefficient at converting, essentially very healthy things-- fiber, amino acids, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, all the different fats. The convert that into what? Saturated fat, cholesterol, acidifying animal protein, and huge amounts of sewage, which end up, again, polluting both surface water and groundwater. One large pig operation, for example, creates more sewage than the entire New York City. And yet, it's basically unregulated. These big factory farms do not want to be regulated. And so they're not regulated because the government and the industry is so corrupt, essentially. So we have a situation where massive amounts of direct pollution are being caused, as well as huge amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, both of which are now recognized to be much more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide are being gassed out all the time from animal agriculture. As well as the fact that we're cutting down huge amounts of forest. Already not only temperate forests, but rainforests. Rainforests right now, like in the Amazonian basin, we're losing, by a conservative estimate, about an acre per second of rainforest is being cut down or burned. And the primary driving motivation for that is people want to eat meat, dairy products, and eggs. Because the big cash crop now is soybeans. And this is not soybeans for tofu. This is soybeans for feeding factory-farmed or confined pigs, cows, chickens, and surprisingly fish. Fish eat a huge amount of grain. Most people don't realize that, but I've seen these places. So we're seeing a devastation of rain-- and when you cut down an acre of rainforest, like we're doing an acre per second, you're not just cutting down some trees. We're cutting down whole, as you know, ecosystems that took millions of years to develop. The incredibly complex, precious-- it's insane what we're doing. But just to grow soybeans to feed of these cows, and pigs, and chickens and fish, who are then fed to humans, and fed to each other. Huge amount of fish is fed to pigs and cows to fatten them up. So besides that, the other thing is the devastation of the oceans. People don't realize it, I think, it's not really covered. None of this stuff is covered in the mass media very well because, obviously, we have a very wealthy pharmaceutical and food system that doesn't want people to understand these things. But the oceans are being basically, clear cut, in a sense, of species of fish. The largest fishes, like tuna, salmon, many of the other ones, are teetering on the brink of collapse. There aren't many fish left. So for that reason, in the United States now, 2/3 of the fish that we're eating in United States are factory farmed. And it's called aquaculture. I've been to this operations. There's both offshore aquaculture and onshore. They're both environmentally devastating. I don't have time to go into it, but just having that many fish concentrated in one area, huge amounts of feces, lots of chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics are fed to these animals. And then there's also onshore operations, which I have seen those direct These gigantic swimming pools. And I'm looking into them, I just thought there was nothing there but black water. They look like they're just swimming pools filled with black water. But I realized, as I kept looking, that there's actually-- they're packed with fish. And the fish are just crammed in there. And they're swimming in their own feces. And that's why the water's black. And the workers are dumping in lots of antibiotics and so forth. So it's very, very toxic stuff, actually, to be eating. And fish concentrate toxins in their flesh, literally tens or hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of times more than is in the surrounding water for a variety of reasons. Probably because they're breathing the waters as well. So the underlying message here is that environmentally, animal agriculture is devastating this planet far more than anything. According to scientists, there's no disagreement on this. If everyone in the world ate the kind of diet that people in the United States eat, we would need probably between 2 and 1/2 and 3 Earth's to even begin to sustain that. So in the United States, in particular, we're eating way more, in a sense, than our share. There's no greater way to reduce our environmental footprint than to reduce the amount of meat, dairy products, and eggs that we're eating. The amount of water is typically-- again, by conservative estimate, about 30 to 1. In other words, 1 person eating a vegan diet-- excuse me, 30 people eating a vegan diet or 1 person eating a standard American diet in terms of water. It's about 15 to 20 to 1 in terms of petroleum. And it's about 20 to 1 in terms of land and pollution in general. About 20 to 1. So just basically understanding that from the environmental point of view. From the cultural point of view, just briefly, the fact is, as I said earlier, we're feeding most of the grain to animals while people are going hungry. So we have a situation today, which to me, it should be a cause for celebration. Which is the fact that we live on an incredibly abundant Earth. An Earth that can easily support everybody. We're not taught that. We're growing enough food right now to feed between 12 and 15 billion people. Every year we grow plenty of food to feed everybody, twice as many people than we even have. But we have this message coming all the time, there's not enough. There's not enough to eat, people are starving. A billion people are starving or malnourished. That's true, about 900 million. But roughly a billion people. And so in that end of the bell curve, the poorest billion. And then on the other end of the bell curve, the richest billion are also suffering, ironically from diseases that come from feeding most of the grains and legumes that are grown to animals, who then convert it to what I said earlier, to unhealthy substances. So the people in our culture, the wealthy cultures today, are suffering from epidemics as you all know. I don't have to go into this, of heart disease, strokes, cancers of various kinds-- primarily prostate, breast, and colon cancer, diverticulitis, arthritis, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, liver disease, kidney disease. All of these diseases are definitively linked to eating animal foods and diets that are high in animal foods. So this is, again, enriching a tiny minority of people. The bottom line for us, as human beings, it's sowing the seeds of conflict and war. Because you cannot have a situation where you have some people who are literally eating so high off the hog that they're taking most of the resources, most of the land, most of the water. I mean, water has become the new oil. It's very serious, the water shortages. It takes huge amounts of water to irrigate these crops, to feed the animals, to slaughter them. So they're taking a gigantic amount of resources while other people see their babies starving. That kind of inequality and inequity is the driving force behind global conflict and war. Again, which enriches a few people making a lot of weapons. But for us, as people, it's not good. It's not a good idea. Besides the war and violence that is inherent in this whole system. And you've got to remember also, that it's very easy for us in the industrialized countries of the world. We have high-powered economies. We can easily drive up the price of grain and feed it to animals to eat meat, dairy products, and eggs to a point that's too high in the global grain markets for people in less powerful economies to afford. They just cannot afford it and they starve. And it's directly because we are buying it and feeding it to our animals. And they're not going hungry. They always have plenty to eat. So we have to understand the underlying force here. And the other thing that I think is vitally important understand is that in order to be killing 75 million animals a day for food, we have to have a whole army of our brothers and sisters who have to do the work. They have to stand there and stab animals all day. Or electroshock them, or mutilate them. And these workers have the highest rates of work-related injuries. They have the highest rates of suicide, and drug addiction, and alcoholism, and spousal abuse, and child abuse. According to psychologists, they suffer-- it's a new disease. They've just recently put a name to, it's perpetrator-induced traumatic stress disorder. They are paid to be perpetrators of horrific violence. This is work that brings out the worst in them. And they may not be typically violent people to begin with. But after just stabbing animals all day, pretty soon they go home and they start doing the same thing to people, and their families, and communities, and neighborhoods. And so like Martin Luther King said, I think this is one of-- again, the essential wisdoms of ourselves, as human beings. We know this is true. He said, violence anywhere hurts everybody everywhere because we're all interconnected. And what veganism is about, essentially is the same teaching, which is compassion and kindness anywhere blesses everyone, everywhere because we're all interconnected. We understand that. I think in our bones we know that our welfare is interconnected. The more that we live our lives so that we're aware that the ripples that radiate out from our lives, from our behavior, from our words and actions, what we pay for and buy, that that, instead of causing misery, and terror, and pain, and suffering, and violence to others, to do the best we can that it causes abundance, and sustainability, and joy, and creativity. That that's going to come back to us. Because what I said earlier, whatever we most want for ourselves, we should give to others. Another way of saying that is, whatever you sow, you will reap. Whatever you put out, it will come back. We are born and raised in a culture that does not get that. We pretend that we can sow seeds of violence and have it never come back. And yet, what I believe is the great adventure, as I said earlier, for us to go on is to realize that these animals-- and also the starving people. But in general, especially the animals who we're causing so much suffering to. And it's not just the animals-- the pigs, and cows, and chickens that are suffering. It's also wildlife. We're having right now a mass extinction of species caused by the loss of habitat, of elephants, and giraffes, and wolves, and coyotes, are prairie dogs, and pretty much the entire ecosystems of this planet. The animals are losing their habitat because of this. And so they are suffering as well. So the point is that these animals who we are causing so much suffering to, they do not retaliate. So we, essentially, think, well, they don't retaliate, so we can do whatever we want to them. We can hyperconfine them, mutilate them, kill them, and so forth. We don't realize that our violence towards them always retaliates. It does always come back. It comes back in these ways that we're not aware of it. It comes back as heart disease and physical diseases of various kinds, psychological diseases, cultural diseases, environmental disease. And so I think what we're seeing today is an awakening of our inherent wisdom to realize these interconnections. And actually, begin to understand how the violence does come back. So now, after having talked about some of the outer ramifications, I'd like to talk about the inner ones just briefly. Basically, like I said, in order to be killing 75 million animals every day for food, we have to have a culture where everyone votes for that, pays for that, and doesn't question that. We take out our wallet and pay for that. What kind of a mentality do we have to have? We have been injected with this mentality by our culture. And it's not in our best interest. I think the greatest gift we can give to ourselves, and to our loved ones, and to our culture is to understand these ideas, and to be able to question. Did you see the movie, it was called The Matrix? In the beginning, Neo-- it's been a long time since I saw it. But in the beginning, Neo, he gets captured by these government agents. And they-- in order to track him, I guess they inject a bug into him, or something. And then his friends get it out of him. That's one of the first things they do. And that's what we're talking about. All of us have been injected with this toxic program of seeing beings merely as things to be eaten and used. And it really is far more devastating than we realize. And the greatest gift I think we can give to each other is to help each other get that out of us. Because if we can do that as individuals, we can create a culture that is at a whole much higher level in terms of our wisdom, our ability to live sustainably with freedom, and joy, and compassion. Because the basic mentality is injected into us by the food rituals that we're obliged to engage in just growing up here. Number one it's a mentality a reductionism. The subtext of every meal, what's basically being taught in a meal ritual is certain beings are not beings. Certain beings are merely things. They're commodities. You buy and sell. When you're eating bacon, for example, we're eating pigs. We don't think of it we're eating pigs. We're just eating bacon. Pork bellies are sold as commodities, like you sell-- whatever. Rocks and machines. And so we don't see a pig as a being with interest, with wisdom, with emotions, who loves her babies and wants the best for them and wants to care for them. And lives in a community with other animals of the same species that have complex social relationships. We just see a piece of meat. Can you imagine really, the devastation this does to our own basic intelligence? It's incredible. It just slams-- the basic intelligence of this cultures is wilted and crushed by being raised in a culture where we're forced to see a being as a thing. Merely a thing. So that's the foundation. It's the reductionism and commodification of life. It's also, essentially, a mentality of exclusion. We practice every day, just excluding. I don't care about them. They're just things. We get very good at this. there's an old German saying [SPEAKING GERMAN]. That means "practice makes the master." whatever we practice, we'll get good at. So we get very good at that. Another very important thing I think to understand is that it's also essentially a mentality of elitism and privilege. The subtext of every meal is certain beings are inherently superior. Other beings are inherently inferior. Those who are superior use, exploit, dominate, and control however they want the inferior beings. And the way that is enacted is through eating them. Eating their flesh. Eating their secretions. Dominating, humiliating, destroying them. They're stealing from them in every possible way. Stealing their purposes, stealing their babies, stealing their time, stealing their life, stealing everything. They have nothing. We steal everything. We are the powerful ones. They have nothing. This is what we're taught at a very deep level. Sociologists say the biggest problem in our culture-- and I think this is obvious-- is this massive inequity. We have some people that are so rich they don't know what to do with all their money. Other people can't even get enough to eat. And yet, every meal is reinforcing inequity, inequality, privilege, and elitism. That's the fundamental teaching. How can we expect as a culture to evolve to the point where we actually create the possibility for peace, and freedom, and justice, and equality when every meal-- and meals are our most powerful connection with nature, with our culture, with the universe-- is the opposite of that? We have to look at the food and transform the food. If we transform the food, everything else will go. That's the hardest thing. That's why most people don't want to come to a lecture like this. They're like, I don't want to hear about this. It's too threatening. I may be very smart, but I don't want to look at that. We have to be willing to look, I think, at what's hardest to look at. And that's the great joy, I think, of this whole thing. The underlying message. I'm feeling like-- I'm going to wrap it up here. The message that I feel called to give here is not so much, I think, a negative message. It might sound kind of negative. I'm talking about all these bad things that are happening. But the underlying message really is very positive because we can transform our culture. We can transfer our lives relatively easily once we understand this. If we change our food, we change at the deepest level. That's the fundamental, primal level of indoctrination in our culture, of connection to the Earth. And so what I've just been saying, the reductionism, commodification, exclusion, and predation is another. We're taught essentially that we're predatory. A predator is the exact opposite of what the spiritual-- every religion, the idea of someone who is evolved spiritually, or ethically, or intellectually, morally, is someone who looks with eyes to help others, to bless, to create a better world. And yet, the predator is one, how can I harm you for my benefit? How can I destroy and take from you? This is the antithesis. And yet, we're taught essentially that we're predators. So why do wonder why we create predatory economic systems? And then the other powerful thing, I think, important to understand is that the subtext of every meal is the repression and domination and exploitation of what I refer to as Sophia. Sophia is the feminine principle. The feminine wisdom within I think all of us, whether we're men or women, we have within us living a feminine wisdom. And that is the wisdom that yearns to protect life. A mother, when she gives birth to a baby, this wisdom just kicks in and she loves that baby. And she wants to protect that little baby. And we want to protect the life of the Earth. We want to protect the rainforest. We want to have a world to give to the future generations. Sophia is the Greek goddess of wisdom, this ancient idea that lives within all of us of a wisdom that is within all of us. And we have to understand that animal agriculture, from the very beginning, it was about men dominating female animals. And today it's the same. It's the female animals in animal agriculture that suffer by far the worst. They're impregnated against their will after 9 months of-- in the case of cows, giving birth to a baby. Whether the dairy's organic or not, it doesn't matter. They steal the baby. They impregnate her again on the *** rack. They steal the baby again. They impregnate her again. And a female cow, for example, that would live normally 25 years. After 4, 5, at the most 6 years on any dairy, organic or not. She's killed because her production starts declining. So this is incredible violence towards the feminine. It's about dominating, exploiting not just female beings, but female reproductive organs-- uteruses, vaginas, mammary glands-- exploiting them. You couldn't have animal agriculture without the complete domination of the reproductive organs and cycles of animals-- pigs, mammals in general, birds, and fish. So what we have to realize is that when we do this on the outer level, we do the same thing on the inner level. That our own feminine wisdom is repressed when we repress these animals. And so we have, today, a culture where Sophia, our natural wisdom that celebrates and protects life, is so suppressed as little children being forced to eat meat, dairy products, and eggs that we have created a culture where we can be doing what I've been talking about. We can destroy the oceans, and no one cares. We cut down the rainforest, and everybody goes, well, so what? Have people starving. Have corporations that, literally, are targeting our children with advertising campaigns that use violence, and ***, and all kinds of things. And we just let that happen. And I think what we're seeing today, which is very positive, is the resurrection, in many ways, of Sophia. We see that Sophia is caring, and kindness, and compassion, and protectiveness. And that, I think, is what's underlying the vegan movement. I think a lot of the movements that we see to protect life is the same thing. So those are some of the main ideas in the beginning of the book. There's this kind of-- trying to zip through a few other main points. There's a chapter that goes into the history of all this, which I think is incredibly important to understand. I don't have time to go into it, but it is in the book. But the basic idea is that we've only been owning animals as property for food. It's called herding. We've only been herding animals for about 8,000 to 10,000 years. So it's a relatively new thing. It was the last revolution I believe this culture ever went through. And it was a revolution of reductionism, of reducing beings to things. And what's happened simultaneously with this revolution, it took thousands of years. It was a very slow revolution, probably took 7,000 or 8,000 years. But by the time historic period emerged, which began like 3,000 years ago-- we see it well in place-- we have a wealthy, elite class that comes out of this. They're wealthy and elite because they own capital. What's capita? Anyone know what capital, where that word comes from-- the root? AUDIENCE: Heads. WILL TUTTLE: Right, head. Yeah, capitalism and capital, it means literally head in Latin, of sheep, goats, cows. They have the wealth. They invented two more institutions. One is-- the ancient Sanskrit word for it is [INAUDIBLE]. That word is translated as "war." It means literally, the desire for more cows. So this wealthy elite that emerged, they learned that if they saw some other guy that had a lot of cows, it was the first get-rich quick scheme. I'll just go attack him. I'll get a bunch of my shepherds and we make soldiers out of them. We attack there. And then, if we win the war-- we had the first wars that ever happened on the planet. If we win that war, then we get rich. We get all that capital. Becomes my capital. And the people who happen to be in that-- affiliated with that rich guy-- now we own animals. Now it's a short step to owning people. So the second institution that was invented was slavery. So now we enslave these people. They become our property. And so they just took the women. They started just impregnating them like they do their cows, and just making as many slave babies as possible. The males, they just castrated them like they did the livestock. And they became slaves that work in the fields. And we had a beginning, of essentially, a very warlike, violent society. Women, also their status was reduced. They became-- unfortunately, bought and sold like chattel property. And this culture spread throughout the whole Eastern Mediterranean, to the Northern Mediterranean, to Central Asia, to Europe, came over here. And then spread from here. It's been spreading over the entire planet. It's still spreading through Monsanto, Cargill, Burger King, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Smithfield Foods, this whole-- I call it the military industrial meat, medical, pharmaceutical, media complex. It's this vast complex. And it gets very wealthy on this whole thing. But it's not good for us-- the people, the planet, the future generations, animals, ecosystems. This is the thing we have to realize. If we're really serious about creating a world that reflects what I believe is our natural intelligence, to understand that the food program suppresses that so much. To question the food program and our intelligence can come back. So there's a lot more in there. There's a chapter that goes into the fact that whatever problems we have in the outer world, we also see in the inner world. And whatever problems that essentially we're doing-- the problems we have in the outer world, we're inflicting on animals. So we have, for example, in obesity epidemic. And what do we do to animals for food? They're sold by the pound, so we just have great technologies in place to make them very fat, very quickly. So we're sowing the seeds of obesity in billions of animals and we get obese. We sow the seeds of osteoporosis and we got osteoporosis. We force these animals to overproduce milk and eggs, and so that sucks the calcium out of their bones. Dairy cows, they say for example, after they kill them-- and only five years old-- the slaughter house workers say they can break their bones in their bare hands they have such severe osteoporosis. Because they're sucking all this calcium out of their bodies for the milk. And so the same thing with chickens. There's a lot of calcium in eggs. So we force these diseases on these animals and we get them. We force many social diseases, psychological diseases. We find the pharmaceutical industry making enormous profits on drugs. Let me close wit this. The three main profit centers for the pharmaceutical industry are huge amounts of drugs for animals. There's over 10,000 different drugs, hormones, antibiotics. Now about 85% to 90% of antibiotics are used on animals, forced on them. And so that's one of their big profit centers is that, drugs to these animals. And the second big one is people eat the flesh of these animals in dairy products and eggs, so they get the diseases that I was talking earlier. So they need medications for cancer, and heart disease, and diabetes, and all that. So they get huge profits there. And then the third one is people are-- the biggest one actually of all three is the profits for people with depression, and pain, and insomnia, and anxiety, and panic attacks, and all these things. And they're eating again, the flesh and secretion of animals that are experiencing, what? Depression, insomnia, pain, fear, terror, despair, anxiety, and so forth. So as we sow, so shall we reap. And yet, we have a tiny, wealthy elite getting very rich off of that reaping of the violence and the whole thing. So there's a chapter that goes into the basic-- it's called "The Intelligence of Human Physiology." What are our bodies actually designed to eat? That's the longest chapter in the book. And again, it's in there. But the beauty of that, I think, is just to realize that all of us have been given the gift of a physical body that doesn't require any animal to suffer to feed us. And yet, we're born into a culture where we're taught, essentially forced, to take that gift we've been given and throw it back in the face of the benevolent creator and say, well, I'm going to stab and kill animals anyway to feed them. And we reap a lot of negative repercussions from that. So to really learn, what are we designed to eat? And again, I could talk a long time about that. So there's many other ramifications of this in other chapters in The World Peace Diet., but that's the basic idea. And I think I'm pretty much out of time here for-- yeah, that's perfect. So I have a few minutes, perhaps, for questions. Perhaps if there are any questions. And also, I just want to let you know that we do have copies of The World Peace-- actually, The World Peace Diet is over here. It's a great price. And it was actually printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. So no trees were cut down for The World Peace Diet. And we have the audio books. We have CDs of music. I play the piano and compose music. And art cards and art prints of Madeleine's paintings. So if anyone wants-- and a sign-up sheet if you want to get on her email list. So we have, also, information about The World Peace Diet Facilitator Training and Mastery Program if you want to understand this more in-depth. We have a whole network of World Peace Diet study groups around the North America-- actually, around the world. There's other cultures as well that are doing this. And the book's being translated into many languages also. So we're not just, in a sense, talking about these ideas. But the idea is to actually try to live our lives in alignment with our own inner wisdom. So that means, from my point of view, if we're eating a regular diet, to move toward becoming a vegetarian. If we're a vegetarian, to move toward becoming a vegan. If we're a vegan, to move toward becoming a vegan educator or advocate in some way, to help spread this idea. Because I think the more we understand these ideas and can bring our lives into alignment with those ideas, I think the better chance we'll have to actually pass a planet on to our children that'll be healthy. And that we'll be able to live healthy and happy lives ourselves. Because the underlying idea, as I said, is these universal understandings, these universal teachings that we are all interconnected. That all life is interrelated. And that as we bless others, we will be blessed. So does anyone have a question briefly? I only have a couple minutes here. And I think if you want to ask a question, you're supposed to go to this microphone. AUDIENCE: Thanks very much for coming and speaking, and for your work. WILL TUTTLE: Thanks. AUDIENCE: My question is-- there are several parts to it. But the basic part is why veganism, in a sense that why does one have to go that far to break free of the lack of consciousness in the current system? So there have been cultures for thousands of years that hunted animals, but did not inflict the kinds of harm that are caused by modern day agribusiness. I've heard of Native American practices of saying a prayer and asking forgiveness from an animal that they had hunted, which has a degree of consciousness to it. Which may not be as nonviolent. Also wondering if there are some people who actually require animal protein for some reason, for particular reasons? People who have chickens at home and get their eggs, for example. It's now part of a larger system. WILL TUTTLE: Right. A bunch of questions there. Most of all of those are addressed in The World Peace Diet. I'm a little concerned on how long I can answer these questions in a short amount of time. But basically, I would say moving toward veganism-- veganism, to me, is a mentality of radical inclusion. It's saying I'm going to include all living beings in the sphere of my kindness and compassion. And it's also, I think, in many ways, coming home to our essential true nature where I look with eyes that see beings rather than seeing things. And I think anything less than that, I mean, it's an ideal. It's a very high ideal. So I just think it's the goal to move toward. You can be living on the outer level of a totally vegan life, like no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no going to the zoo, no going to the circus, not buying leather, all these things. But still, I get angry with people or I judge them, or whatever. That's still not vegan. The ideas is really, I think, a very sophisticated level in a sense to evolve emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually to the point where we're living a life as much as possible of kindness and compassion. So I think that there maybe have been other cultures in the past that did certain things. I'm not sure. We don't know what happened on 9/11. We're not sure-- there's so many arguments about what happened a thousand years ago, 10,000 years ago. People said that people ate a lot of meat in the old days, and there may be some truth to that. A lot of recent research coming out from non-meat-eating anthropologists is that actually cultures that we thought were mostly eating meat actually were not eating mostly meat. They were actually eating mostly plant-based foods. And whether there's a necessity to eat meat, I don't think that's true. I mean, I've talked a lot of doctors and researchers who disagree with that. That there's any human being on this planet that needs to eat meat for any reason. There's nothing in-- animals do not contribute any nutrient that they didn't get from plants originally. All the amino acids, all the vitamins, minerals, fiber, essential fatty acids, carbohydrates, all originates with plants. The only two exceptions of that that we're aware of at this point are vitamin D, which is essentially from the sun, and vitamin B12, which is created by bacteria which normally we'd get in the water. But since we chlorinate it and kill all the bacteria, and perhaps also through foods in general. But essentially, animals don't contribute anything. I mean, the animals tend to concentrate toxins in their flesh, which we're getting when we eat them. As well as the meta-- the whole chapter called "The Metaphysical Toxins of eating terror, and fear, and pain. So I wouldn't say that anyone-- I mean, if I'm convinced in my mind that I'm not going to be healthy unless I eat something, then sure. I mean, I could convince myself that I was sick so I could tell my mother, I don't feel good today. I don't want to go to school today. And pretty soon I felt terrible because I didn't want to lie to her. We have to realize that the placebo effect is very powerful. What our minds believe will be the reality. But I think we should, instead of looking at the past to determine our behavior, why don't we look at the future, see the kind of world we want to build, and move forward, move toward that? We can feed everyone on a plant-based diet on a fraction of the land, with a fraction of the pollution. Let's do it. Why do we have to look back and say, well, they did this. People look at animals and say, well, the animals eat meat. But we don't say, well, no animal is building computers. But we're building computers. We don't have to look to these other things. The idea is to look ahead and look what we want to create. And we can always find rational-- I have a whole chapter, actually, in The World Peace Diet of dealing with all the rationalizations and objections that naturally come up when people hear these ideas. Oh, we have certain ones that are told to us. Jesus ate meat, so it must be OK. The Indians-- oh, they were very spiritual. They ate meat, so it must be good. Or plants have feelings, too. If you eat your carrots, I eat my cow, it's the same thing. They all have feelings. There's certain standard objections that just keep our Sophia repressed. So the idea is-- and the other thing I'll just mention, which I think is fascinating. Have you head of Joseph Campbell, the well-known mythologist? He gave a fascinating series of interviews to Bill Moyer back in the '80s, I think it was. And it was so interesting because I used to teach college classes in mythology, and I read a lot of Campbell's books. At one point Bill Moyer asked him, he said, so, Joseph. Human beings seem to be the myth-creating animal. We create myths. We create these stories that tell us how things happened and why they happened, and all of that. What is the main reason? If you could say, what is one main reason that human beings create myths, what would it be? And Joseph Campbell said, the one main reason that human beings create myths, these stories that explain reality, was to rationalize and justify killing animals for food. I went, wow. Because this is something that's always been very hard for us to deal with. And we've created an elaborate land of milk and honey, and Krishna and the Cow, and all kinds of things to explain and rationalize this behavior. But I think we can get beyond that level. Thank you. It's a great question. Really appreciate it. AUDIENCE: With your permission, I'd like to look back to the past again if you don't mind. So you mentioned that herding agriculture is a relatively recent invention, and has a lot of not very positive effects on human health, and welfare, and so forth. There are actually a number of anthropologists who have looked at agricultural more generally, like Jared Diamond, and so forth. And basically, concluded that it was a terrible idea. That not just animals, but agriculture in general, cereal grains and so forth. And I'm just wondering what your feeling is about that, the general aspect of pre-agricultural versus post-agricultural health not just looking at animals. WILL TUTTLE: Yeah. That's a great question. Basically, these people that are writing this, I don't think they have The World Peace Diet view. They're meat eaters. Jared Diamond's a meat eater. And so there's a tendency to look at things from that perspective of, we're meat eaters and this is how we see it. And to sort of say all agriculture is sort of bad. It's unnatural. We should go back kind of to living just gathering like people did. But I think, basically, there's two kinds of agriculture. They're very different. And we have a tendency to just-- someone says, I'm a farmer. Oh, you're a farmer. What kind of a farmer? Because there's plant agriculture's and there's animal agriculture. And from the very beginning, plant agriculture was essentially women's work. And it was work that was working essentially with nature. I mean, you plant something and this miracle happens. You plant one seed and a thousand seeds come. And then you plant one of those and a thousand more. Working with the abundance of nature. You're working with cycles of nature. And with the essential abundance and fertility of nature. Whereas, with animal agriculture, was essentially men's work. And the animals were always fighting back. They were always resisting. They did not want to be killed. They did not want to have their babies stolen. They did not want to be *** and impregnated against their will. So men had to violate them. They had to hit them. They had to *** them. They had to hold them down and brand them, just incredible violence. And so we created a culture mainly of meat-eating where the grains-- we're feeding the grains to these animals. But all of us know, if we were to go-- anyone who goes into a well-tended and loved garden of vegetables, it's a wonderful place to be. I mean, it's beautiful. There's biodiversity. There's like happening there. Any one of us went into a slaughterhouse, it's like, let me out of here. It's a horrible, terrible thing. So I think we have to realize that these are fundamentally different ways of agriculture. And I think that we are here, personally, to work in harmony with nature, to create gardens. And the new forms of gardening that are developing-- veganic gardening where we use no animal inputs at all, food forests, which-- there's some people in Canada, we were just visiting them, and other places that are building these food forests where you're growing huge amounts of food. And it doesn't even look like it's anything there. They have didn't fruit trees and then other vegetables, and flowers, and things just all going together and creating these ecosystems. As we understand these things more and more, we realize we can grow enough food to feed everyone on a fraction of the land. If people ate a plant-based diet, we could have forests coming back. We could have the rainforests coming back. We could have the oceans coming back. We wouldn't need to kill fish. Cows, for example, are eating more fish in the United States than human beings are because we're feeding the fish to the cows, so they'll give more milk. And it's an incredibly violent, devastating project. And we're doing plant agriculture the way we do animal agriculture. Since we're an animal agriculture society essentially, we do plant agriculture with monocropping and violence, with all these chemicals, and herbicides, and fungicides. It's a war against nature. We're killing everything else. We don't want any other animals. Any black birds, we try to kill them off. So we're looking with the lens of animal agriculture at all agriculture. And you're right. I mean, he's right. It's terrible. But that's because we did animal culture. We didn't do plant agriculture properly. And I think we have the chance to do that. But much love to you all. Thanks so much for being here, and I'm happy to sign books if anyone wants to get a book, or an audio book, or music, or cards, or anything. It's a great deal. I mean, you can't go wrong. And yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions anybody has also. So please stay around. Bunch of love to you. Thanks, again. Thanks for coming. Thank you.