What does this slogan mean? As everyone knows, food is basic to life. We cannot live without it. The drive for food is so strong, it is almost irresistible. We eat to satisfy this strong and natural craving for food. Yet eating is a voluntary, conscious act. In almost all instances, we eat what we want to eat. We choose our food. The point is that we do have control of what we eat yet sadly and unnaturally, for many ages humans have chosen to take the life of other animals in very cruel and violent ways in order to eat their flesh. But all life in interconnected and reverence for life is a hallmark of civilization. Killing animals in order to eat their flesh to satisfy the craving for food can in no way be construed as reverence for life. Such eating is a violent act, hurtful to the animals and destructive to the human psyche. Wholeness and integrity demand compassionate living.

At no time and nowhere has the eating of animal flesh been more prevalent than in the United States today. Our generation of Americans consumes more animal flesh than did our grandparents, and Americans consume more animal flesh than the people of any other country. Because of this enormous consumption, to supply the quantity of animal flesh that is demanded by our large appetite, what is called "factory farming" has come into existence. And because of the huge world wide human population clamoring for animal flesh it is impossible to go back to the old days of the seemingly idyllic pastoral farm where at least the animals roamed free until their ultimate deaths at the hand of the farmer. Not that this way of the past was good. Most of us would not have wanted to be the farmer and have the blood of the animal on our hands. Yet under the factory farming system we try to deny that we have blood on our hands. Nowadays most of us are more removed from the dirty work. Factory farming is the most cruel and violent system of animal exploitation that has ever existed. The entire lives and deaths of the animals are total agony. This system is cruel in every aspect of supplying the demand for animal flesh. It is cruel beyond the words to describe it. It is institutionalized horror for sentient beings. Most of us know something about this.
     IT IS NOT UNKNOWN TO US.

But we try not to think about current animal practices so that we do not have to change our habits, because mostly what we choose to eat is out of habit. We do not want to go through the discomfort of changing a habit. Or, we do not want to deprive our palate of some special taste we think we might like. To try to justify what we are doing, we gladly have fallen for the myths (like the protein myth or the calcium myth) made up by those who profit from animal exploitation. But we know we can get adequate protein and absorbable calcium from a plant-based diet. We are not stupid.
     WE KNOW WE HAVE LET OURSELVES BE MISLED.

We know what goes on in the slaughterhouse, although we do not want to picture it in our mind. We know what goes on in the hen house and we do not want our imagination to put it before us. We know how the people who work in these jobs are brutalized by them. We just are happy it is not ourselves who have to work there. We know that corporations make huge profits from factory farming practices and we know that the people who run these corporations become dishonest, ruthless and irresponsible in their cruelty.
     WE KNOW WE PARTAKE OF THIS.

By choosing to eat animal flesh we are the cause of the violence and cruelty to the animal, and we are consuming the results of the violence and cruelty. We are the graveyard of the dead animal, it lies rotting in our gut. When we eat a tortured animal we are consuming its pain. Its flesh has been charged by its emotions of fear, terror, anguish, anger, resentment and depression. We are ingesting all of this. And we wonder why so many of us are overaggressive or depressed. We are responsible for this violence. We permit it. By it we are turned into violent beings. We cannot be nonviolent under these circumstances.
     AND DEEP DOWN WE KNOW IT.

Today we have more choices than ever concerning our food and we have more knowledge than ever about nutrition. We can talk about peace and nonviolence, but we cannot be nonviolent when we are literally filled with the pitiful cries of the sentient beings we have condemned to death in unspeakable violence and cruelty. Neither will our species evolve to maturity until we give up the cruelty of killing other species for food. Wars will not cease nor will violence visited on humans by other humans diminish until we become nonviolent to animals.
     OUR CRUELTY TO ANIMALS MUST STOP AND WE KNOW IT.

Yes, food is absolutely vital to life and hunger does drive us. But what food we eat and how we get it is a choice we make which is so intimate to our being that it determines who we are. If we are to be nonviolent we must eat nonviolently. Perhaps it can also be said that violence begins with the fork.

Elizabeth Jane Farians
 
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