Gandhi once said, “The most violent weapon on Earth is the table fork.” Dr. Will Tuttle asks us to consider one of the primary driving forces behind a whole network of problems we face as human beings is the mentality of violence, exploitation, exclusion, and privilege that is required for us to eat animal foods. He contends that our disconnectedness from the suffering of animals is at the very core of the loss of intelligence, freedom, and true happiness saying, “We have to understand that [we are] born into a society that’s organized, at its living core, around animal agriculture and is organized around seeing beings as objects to be used. Cows and chickens are seen as objects that you buy and sell by the pound. So, when we do that for ten thousand years as we’ve been doing, we create an entire society that’s probably the most materialistic ever in the history of the world where we even see ourselves as just matter: my body is all I am and when I die that’s the end . . . the mind gets colonized. Our basic natural wisdom, awareness, compassion, and empathy get repressed by being raised in a society that’s killing literally billions of animals every day for food.” There are many arguments for eating a plant-based diet such as climate, soil, and health. However, Tuttle adds another view for favoring a vegan diet. He proposes that the violence in which we’re participating, in itself, is something much larger than anything else. He says, “We don’t want to look into the suffering of the animals. Dairy products and eggs I’ve discovered have enormous amounts of suffering. It’s not just the flesh of animals but also there’s a lot of slavery and sexual abuse of animals that goes on that we would rather not think about.”
