The Main Goals of The World Peace Diet.

[Words To Inspire Debate.]

Q: What were your main goals in writing the World Peace Diet, and how long did it take you?  Also, what sort of research was required and how did you deal with witnessing the violence involved with the systematic abuse of animals?

Dr. Will Tuttle:

The main goals in writing the WPD were to bring our culture’s routine abuse of animals from the periphery to the center – to write a book that would, for the first time, give the “big picture “ of our routine mistreatment of animals for food, including the health effects, environmental effects, and animal-cruelty effects, but also the psychological, spiritual, cultural, anthropological, and historical dimensions of the picture as well. I wanted to create the ultimate vegan manifesto - a book that would connect all the dots of our unsolvable dilemmas, and show how they all are manifestations of the underlying mentality and practice of routine violence toward animals.  I wanted to help people look more deeply than they ever had into our culture, and thus, into themselves, and through this, to create a foundation for authentic healing, both personally and socially. 

It took a lot of research – I’ve been a vegetarian for 35 years and vegan for 30 and put in at least 25 years of research into the WPD – a lot of my Ph.D. research at U.C., Berkeley, was foundational to the book, back in the 1980s, and besides the outer research of reading thousands of books and articles on our culture, there was the inner research. I spent many thousands of hours in meditation, making an effort to extract my consciousness out of the brambles of conditioning.  I lived as a Zen monk in Korea, at a monastery there that had been vegan since 1350, taking a vow of silence, and meditating from 3 am to 9 pm every day. I realized directly that, at the core, I am not a thing that was born and will die; that what I am is consciousness and that I am essentially free, awake, and of the nature of love, creativity, and joy.

This isn’t something just from books. I feel it is true of all human and non-human beings. We are all sacred manifestations of infinite life, and we are born, however, into a culture of profound blindness that treats us all as pieces of meat, basically.  We forget our essential purity, love, freedom, and peace, and become armored slaves who inflict violence on others because of our conditioning. I realized that the main way our culture enslaves people and the Earth is through getting everyone to participate in eating the flesh and secretions of brutalized animals. The outrage and despair that we all feel at witnessing human violence toward animals is, for me, the fuel that drives vegan activism and deepens my resolve to purify my consciousness of the mentality of exclusion, violence, and materialism that our culture inflicts on all of us, and that is the driving force behind violence toward animals.

[Carolyn Bailey]

I strongly recommend The World Peace Diet to anyone who hasn't read it yet. Dr. Tuttle has an enormous amount to teach, and so much kindness and compassion to share. 

He wrote this book with a genuine wish to share his knowledge and compassion with as many people as possible, and I think it's a life changing book.