Silvie+Maryl | Upgrading Minds, Transforming Lives

As an academic and former Zen monk, Dr. Will Tuttle was convinced that someone, some day, would write a book that connected a vegan diet to the internal health of human beings and the planet, a concept that was so evident to him after years of experience and research. But nobody ever did. So, he wrote it himself.

The award-winning book The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony hit number one in Amazon.com shortly after being published, and it continues to spread the message of compassion, kindness and awareness that a plant-based diet implies. HLife sat down with Will for a conversation on this groundbreaking book, one that we believe has the power to transform the way you look at food and to open your eyes to the many ways – social, economic, spiritual, relational, and personal – that eating animals harms the planet and society as a whole.

Part One of the interview is being published today in honor of Earth Day, and we will publish Part Two on Monday.

Maryl Celiz: In The World Peace Diet you talk about the “sophia factor” and the domination of the feminine energy (the female) with relation to a vegan diet. Can you expand on that?
Will Tuttle: Basically, the domination of the feminine principle is the key thing in the whole discussion. It’s what underlies the whole thing and that’s what’s been invisible, and I’ve seen it in my own experience when I was going through academia at UC Berkley. There were so many people who were really into feminism and equality, and yet they would still eat meat and cheese and never think that that was in any way abusing the feminine principle. And back then, I hadn’t made those connections so clearly myself but I still remember that if I would bring it up, there was a sense of reluctance to look at it. I think that’s changing. The key idea is that, the revolution that happened 8,000-10,000 years ago when we started owning animals for food and started to dominate specifically the female animals so we could take their babies from them and try to manipulate their birthing patterns is what I think goes along with the change in the way men saw women. I think, up until that point – and this has been brought up by quite a few anthropologists – women were highly respected, because they did something that men could never do: They could bring forth new life from within themselves. So, there was always this sense of respect for women because of that power that they had. And when men started owning these animals and trying to make them have as many babies as possible and they began to see how they could manipulate the bloodlines and have certain ones that would have babies with more positive qualities, they began to look at women like they look at their goats and sheep. Basically, just as receptacles for the male principle. And, just as the sheep and cows lost respect, women began losing respect.

MC: This goes back to women being bought and sold like property, not being able to vote and all.
WT: And I think that if you look into the earlier mythic traditions – Joseph Campbell brings this up quite a bit -  it is very clear that the divine feminine was hugely powerful. Another point is that there are two kinds of agriculture, and we tend to forget that. We talk about anyone as a farmer – they could be growing corn or vegetables or cows, still a farmer. So, we deliberately kind of cover over that distinction, because plant agriculture, from the beginning, has been something really that’s been celebratory – there’s this sense of working with Nature, you’re working with the natural abundance of the Earth, where you plant a seed and it brings forth a plant that has thousands of seeds, and you plant those and you get ten thousand seeds. There’s this miraculous abundance that comes, and you’re working with cycles of Nature, and with the planets and the moon. This was always mainly women’s work, planting and harvesting, and the ceremonies were always positive ceremonies, giving thanks for the harvest, with this whole tradition of the fertility and abundance rituals. But when the male type of agriculture started kicking in, from the very beginning it was animal agriculture, and it was something that men did, not women. And the animals were always resisting; it was not something that they went along with at all. There was always this element of domination, especially of the females, and of dominating the way that they wanted to live. The female animals didn’t like it, they were always calling after their babies if they were taken to be killed. There was always a sense of going against Nature with animal agriculture.

Silvie Celiz: Is that the what you call the “mentality of domination versus spiritual breakthrough” in the book?
WT: Yeah. The mentality of domination is essential to eating animal foods, especially from animals that are herded. They’re herded, they’re not living wild; you have hunters and at least with that the animals are not living as property, which is a huge change. But the essence of the spiritual traditions always revolves around this idea of the interconnectedness of life, and of kindness, because the Universal spiritual breakthrough is always “what I am as a separate self is a part of something greater”. That’s the great “ah-hah!”, it’s that I’m not just a self that has to struggle against other selves and against the world in this sort of contracted, essentially manipulative kind of way, which is how the self usually feels. It’s realizing that what I am is integral to the whole unfolding of life and that my life is a celebration of something greater, and therefore, it’s just natural that the greatest joy that I ever get is in helping others to be happy as we all share this sense of community, of celebration, a sense of kindness. I mean, there’s never been sages that are selfish, that’s just the opposite, they’re giving because that’s their greatest joy. It’s not like they’re trying to be good – that’s just what they like to do!

SC: Being kind is sort of a given when we think of being good and doing what’s right.
WT: But being born in this culture, where we’re eating the mentality of violence and domination, that’s the mentality that might make right that you can somehow get something at the expense of others, because that’s what we’re doing every time we eat animal foods – we’re getting something at their expense. And the feminine wisdom understands this, it’s essentially sophia and prajna in the Buddhist tradition, this idea of an intuitive wisdom that we all have, that from the very core of our culture, from this herding mentality, has been repressed. Because we couldn’t do this to female animals, we couldn’t steal their babies, we couldn’t continually inject sperm into them. And we had to repress that and then we pass it onto our children. And now, we even do plant agriculture in the same way we do animal agriculture: it’s a domination, “we’re gonna take that Earth and we’re gonna get rid of everything and we’re gonna plant those seeds and if anything else comes up, we’re gonna kill it, and we’re gonna take those crops -”

MC: And we’re gonna manipulate their genetics so that we can make more for us.
WT: Right, chemicals and genetic engineering, all of this is just the continuation of that. So, the idea is that when sophia develops, then there’s a sense of the abundance of gardens. And there’s wonderful evidence coming out recently in Cuba and now Russia and some other places where they feed a lot more people with local gardens than you can with mass agriculture – that’s a great lie that’s been told to us, “oh, you couldn’t feed a starving world with these quaint ways, you have to have mass petroleum-based agriculture.” Well, yeah, maybe you do if you’re going to grow a huge amount of grain to feed animals and kill them. But if you’re wanting just to feed the people, local gardens where you get huge amount of food out of a much smaller area, and much better quality, are better in every way. So, I think the domination of the feminine is what’s creating the starvation that we’re experiencing, the inequality that we’re experiencing, the sense of violence that pervades in a way in a lot of the relationships in our culture, because there’s this sense underlying everything that, if I can just overpower someone or outsmart someone – because that’s what we do to animals a lot, outsmart them, by putting these things in the hook when we fish, putting fences around them, whatever it is – we can use some kind of superior capacity to harm others for our benefit. That’s what underlies our whole economic system in a lot of ways, that we can just manipulate people to buy things they don’t even want through advertising.

MC: But doesn’t the domination of the feminine also harm the masculine? You discuss in your book the emotional miseducation of boys. I tend to think that an imbalance in the feminine aspect – whether in Nature or ourselves – has a cost to the masculine. Can you talk about that?
WT: I have a whole chapter in The World Peace Diet that talks about the suffering that men go through growing up. And I remember growing up and there is a certain point where you’re now a “young man”, and then it’s like everything starts changing. And even back then I was into sports quite a bit, and there was this locker room mentality that I was never comfortable with but it was about boys talking about girls as totally sexual objects, pieces of meat, and judging them, ranking them one to ten, on the basis of their outer form. And if you don’t go along with it, you’re looked at as just a nobody. And so there’s this looking at beings as things, as meat, and I think that through this, boys just learn to disconnect from the natural sensitivity that they would have – it’s just not looked at as something valuable. It’s much more valuable to be tough and hard and able to kind of hurt other boys. There are a lot of miserable young boys because they have to disconnect from their natural sensitivity. There’s a book about that called Raising Cain, written by these two Harvard psychologists who spent their whole time working with boys and I quote them some in the book. But they don’t get it – the interesting things is, they go with these 13, 14 year old boys who are having these horrific suicidal thoughts, I mean, these boys suffer so badly. And to build rapport with them they’ll go to McDonald’s and have a burger together. They don’t get the connection at all, I mean, no one does, that it’s the eating of meat that is the driving underlying force behind this suffering. Their answers to the problem are so weak, they say, “well, what we should do is try to encourage boys to be in touch with their feelings.”

SC: But how do we do that?
WT: Exactly. All of these problems are insoluble by the experts, because they don’t, in a sense almost deliberately and almost explicitly, cannot see that it is this massive killing of animals and eating of those animals that is the underlying driving power that keeps this cowboy/John Wayne mentality in place, where boys have this role model – we’ve had it now for 10,000 years – of the tough, disconnected man who is capable of violence to get what he wants for himself and for his Lord, whoever he’s serving. That’s how it is. And women are seen as objects to be kept in line, just like you keep your cows in line. It’s this whole thing about being tough, it’s power, control, and somehow in our culture we are taught that this is natural. This is sort of normal. And it is normal in this culture, but the point I’m making is that this culture is really a perversion of our true human nature, that we’re forced at an early age to disconnect through very powerful indoctrination procedures that are mainly the rituals of eating. I mean, the rituals of eating are enormously powerful.

SC: So it’s evidence of a human mental distortion.
WT: It is. Our whole culture, in a way, has elements of being a satanic cult. They didn’t actually kill things in front of me but we had to eat this flesh, and it does something to us. I think, on a very deep level, it’s very harmful to a little boy, a child. I also learned that there are quite a few theories in moral development that agree that we are born and are totally bonded with the mother – we don’t have a self, we are just mom – and then we go through a stage in which we separate, there’s mom, and there I am. And at that stage we only care about ourselves. But then we begin to care about others, we begin to see that others have their interests and I have my interests and we get to start learning to respect them. But whether that stage is actually reached depends a lot on the role models, the parents around you, if they’re caring, if they teach you to care about their feelings and all that. It’s a social learning. But I think that in our culture, we all learn, on a very deep level and sort of non-verbally, not to care about a whole class of beings, by eating their flesh. So, I think that our natural moral development, which would develop into a Universal compassion for all life, gets short-circuited. And adults in our culture are very choosy about what we care about and feel compassionate for. It’s usually just certain ones and other ones we don’t care. And I think this all goes back to these kinds of rituals of eating animal flesh, because satanism is simply a concern for self and not others. I explored it just ‘cause I was curious and it is very interesting, if you read satanic books, all they say is “you can have what you want – just have it all!” It’s not necessarily horrible, it’s “get what you want.”  At the cost of…you just don’t really worry about anyone else, let them get what they want, you get what you want.

SC: There is no consequence, no cause and effect.
WT: Right. Not concerned about the consequences to others – you just want to get what you want.

MC: And ignore that we’re all connected and what happens to the other directly affects the self anyway.
WT: Exactly. So, there’s a hardening that has to take place, and I think that’s what eating animal foods does to us as a little kid, the hardening. You know, on the farm the little kids who are in Future Farmers of America at one point are given the job of taking care of a little sheep or a goat or a pig or something, and they fall in love with their animal, they love their animal and they raise this little animal and they show it and maybe their little animal even gets a prize for being the nicest looking animal. And then they’re told, “now, you will sell your animal to so-and-so and get paid.” And they have it set up nowadays where the kid gets more money than before, and the kid’s like, “wow, I get some money for this!” But the animal is killed, and a lot of times the kid is just devastated when he finds out that they’re just gonna kill this animal. And then the parents say, “this is the way life is, and if you don’t like it, you’re not my son anymore.”  That’s the typical line they get. And that’s what their father did to them and that’s what they do to their kids and so on through the generations. Now we’re more urban, so we don’t have that kind of thing so much, but it’s still the same thing – we’re involved indirectly and nobody’s talking about it, so it’s more just being oblivious to it.

MC: You mention that this is a cultural concept versus a truly natural one. Is this something that we just inherit?
WT: Yeah. I was talking to my mother when I was writing The World Peace Diet and I was saying how this is something that we are all just indoctrinated into, and she used the word ‘inheritance”: “we probably just all inherited it through our upbringing.” It’s not something one can ever blame their parents for – she never wanted anything but good things for me – she wanted to give us good food and good, healthy meat, dairy and eggs and, that’s what she thought was good. It’s that any culture has a powerful drive to replicate itself. And it will do so with the good and the bad things, the things that bring suffering and the things that bring harmony will both be replicated.

SC: If we inherit this, what can we do to modify it?
WT: I believe the spiritual path for any human being doesn’t really begin until that person starts to question the programming of their culture. And the programming of their culture may be good, but until we begin to sort of see that what I am is a being, not just a programmed entity or thing that is just reenacting whatever rituals the culture has given me to reenact, there won’t be any direct intuitive awareness of what is natural and what is true/authentic for me as a being. That’s what I think veganism is really about: Questioning the underlying assumptions of our culture and then connecting with what is really, authentically true for me as an expression of life. I think that when that is actually happening, we are naturally drawn toward a plant-based diet because we make these connections – we begin to see the violence that is caused, the suffering of the animals, of the people that have to do the killing, of the people that are starving because they can’t get grain that is being fed to the animals, of the ecosystem, of wild life – such a massive amount of suffering that results from choosing animal foods, that anyone who is beginning to awaken to their intuition, which sees the oneness and unity and connectedness of life, begins to spontaneously see that this is not behavior that is going to, in any way, help them in their life to further spiritual growth, to further their quest to contribute to the development of their culture.

MC: Which is what we all want to do, deep down inside, to grow and contribute.
WT: I think that the underlying drive for all of us, when we really get in touch authentically with what it is, is to find our unique way of blessing the world. And when we find that, our life is great. It may not be easy – we may have challenges and difficulties or whatever – but there’s an underlying sense of meaning. ‘My life is worthwhile and I respect myself because I’m making a contribution.’ And I think that’s the big problem with eating animal foods, that since we’re not respecting those animals, not respecting those beings – I mean, to hyper-confine, and steal and mutilate these animals and not care – it undermines our own self-respect. And people who don’t respect themselves are exactly what you want to have if you want to have a culture that you can control, where they will buy what you want them to buy, where they won’t question what you tell them is true. If people have low self-respect, they want to be fulfilled by consuming. So this is why eating meat is really the hidden, underlying driving force behind the real religion of this culture, which is consumerism. The religion of this culture, essentially is, “you will find happiness if you can find the perfect combination of products at Walmart.” And if you can add in the right spouse, and the right house, and the right whatever, the idea is that everything becomes an object to be somehow acquired. And that comes from low self-esteem. Because people who are in touch with their own self-respect aren’t trying to get a lot of stuff, they’re happy how they are, very happy just looking at the beauty of trees and birds, just having relationships that are rich in meaning, and they’re not gonna be craving to buy things.

SC: People who have a normal sense of esteem and respect don’t need to be defined by external things, and they also don’t stand for things that are wrong.
WT: When people tell lies, people with self-respect and esteem are gonna question that, they’re gonna say, “wait a minute, that’s ridiculous. What do you mean that we have to go to war to liberate those people who have never even tried to attack us?” I mean, they wouldn’t stand for it. They wouldn’t be so easily manipulated. That’s why I think veganism is really profoundly subversive to our culture, because it challenges this norm. But the beauty of it is that it’s not something that’s aggressive – there’s no violence involved. We’re not trying to hurt anybody, it’s basically just going in another direction and creating communities of connectedness and kindness. The beauty of veganism, I think, is that, deep down, we all know that it is our true nature. We’re not trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. No one, when they see a little squirrel, thinks, “oh man, I just wanna rip that thing apart!” That’s not how we are, that is so perverse! You have to really brutalize someone to get them to really think that way. We have this horrible war in Iraq and these other places, and people are getting traumatized and having nightmares and committing suicide after returning. The thing is, if we were naturally violent, and we enjoyed brutalizing other human beings, we wouldn’t be traumatized. But we are not that way. We have been given the gifts of bodies and consciousness that thrive on kindness, mercy, tenderness, creativity, love and caring, and that’s what we love. That’s it. Food is the place where it’s just twisted. I don’t know how it started, who’s behind the whole thing – that’s a whole other question – but there is definitely a wealthy elite that is able to maintain control over massive numbers of people because of this system. That’s a whole other dimension of this thing.