Turkey + Deer = Love
Bramble was an abandoned roe fawn who was taken in by Geoff Grewcock in his wildlife sanctuary in Warwickshire, England, in 2008; he was three years old when Tinsel the juvenile turkey leaped or fell off a lorry (truck) taking him and many others to a slaughterhell. Put next to Bramble’s pen, Tinsel walked in and settled down between the fawn’s front legs. At once they became inseparable friends. See Love
Editor’s Corner Guest Review-Essay:
Leaving No Stone unTurned
By Judith McCoy Carman
What did David Korten leave out of his important book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community? It is a key so important that if we do not address it and embrace it soon, our vision of Earth Community will remain just that—a vision with no chance of fulfillment.
Are we ready for The Great Turning?
In this significant book, systems-analyst-environmentalist-activist David Korten is imploring us to, and believing we can, Turn from living under the Empire cultural mindset of domination to living in Earth Community. Empire demands that cultures labor under a ruling elite which grows wealthier and more powerful as it finds more ways to exploit all others. Most of the world lives under the Empire model which requires war, the ravaging of nature, and the economic and political control of people and animals in order to maintain power. Earth Community is organized around the principles of cooperation, mutual benefit, and partnership, and develops from the ground up, not from the top down.
Don’t get me wrong. Every chapter of The Great Turning had me applauding. It is a wealth of inspiration that helps us to visualize what Earth Community can look like, to take action to make it happen before it’s too late, and to believe we can do this.
As we go about “saving the earth” from ourselves, we are each struggling in our own
ways to rid ourselves of all vestiges of the dominator model. But, as we all know, nearly all the
systems—economic, educational, scientific, religious, agricultural, corporate, political—that have influenced us from birth, have been based on that model. As we work to transform our own personal worldviews to one of Earth Community, we find we must be constantly vigilant of our own thoughts, vigilant toward any anthropocentric vestiges which we still may unconsciously hold. As we stand with one foot in the new, not fully formed world of cooperation, love, and compassion and the other foot in the current world ruled by the dominator worldview, it is difficult sometimes to discern the source of our beliefs. But it is essential that we do so.
What is the missing chapter—the stone unturned—the last big questioning of the Empire
authority? It is the animal chapter. Animal exploitation, including experimentation, fur farms,
circuses, zoos, rodeos, and animal agriculture spring forth from the dominator worldview that
claims we have a right to force our will upon other species and brutally enslave, confine, kill, and eat them. We can not hope to create Earth Community until we face our complicity, our virtual agreement with this worldview, and put an end to the horrors of animal agriculture and animal exploitation. Einstein and Schweitzer both declared that humanity would never find peace until we ended our war against animals.
In the Earth Community we envision, no women will be stoned, no children will be sold
into slavery, no one will starve because a giant corporation has taken their farmland. Imagine it.
And may we keep imagining it right into being. But can we honestly believe that, while we work with all our hearts to eliminate domination of human beings that it is still okay to dominate animals?
If you catch yourself scoffing, looking down or away, or losing focus, you are not alone. This is the last taboo. It is the taboo, as Will Tuttle puts it, “against knowing whom you eat.” Most of us have never clear-cut a forest, contaminated the sea with an oil spill, caught a million fish in drift nets and thrown half of them back as trash, killed a whale, owned human slaves, stoned or burned a woman to death, or ordered the bombing of millions of civilians, but nearly all of us have gone to a zoo, taken a baby cow’s milk away from him or her, and caused animals to die so that we could eat and wear them. It’s not something anyone wants to think about for very long.
Korten mentions the “trance induced by the prevailing culture” [p. 84]. I submit that there are
multiple trances, and one by one, we awaken from them. May we all awaken from the trance that has convinced us it is okay to dominate, kill, and eat animals.As Korten said in his Summer, 2006 Yes! journal article, “Absent an understanding of the history and implications of this choice [between Empire and Earth Community] we may squander valuable time and resources on efforts to preserve or mend cultures and institutions that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.” [p. 12] The institutions of animal domination cannot be fixed and made “more humane” in any meaningful way.
Jim Mason, author of An Unnatural Order: Why We are Destroying the Planet and Each
Other—A Manifesto for Change points out that the very act of capturing animals and controlling their lives signaled the beginning of the end of what appeared to be a goddess based, egalitarian, community worldview that recognized the sacredness of all life and the importance of cooperation for survival. Out of that age, a patriarchal elite class developed and began to relentlessly expand its territories and wealth with military power. Thus it was that domination of animals became a central building block of ravenous Empire.
Let us take a look at what we have done to animals as a culture within the Empire framework.
Demonstrating our absolute power over them, we put them in zoos; we force them to perform tricks in circuses; we torture them in rodeos; we steal their fur, we confine billions of pigs, chickens, calves, turkeys, ducks, and other animals in conditions so crowded and fouled with their own waste that many of them die before slaughter; we take their babies away and ignore their cries; we castrate, debeak, dock tails and ears all without anesthetic. Human beings kill over 50 billion farmed land animals worldwide annually and an estimated 50 billion aquatic animals.
We may Turn part way, but we will be doing it knowing of our own hypocrisy, knowing
that we are still clinging to one of the most powerful symbols and lusts of patriarchy, and going
forward with a great soul sickness. Without a complete Turn, if we continue to do violence to
innocent animals, we will continue to be off course, and I don’t know how much longer we can
do that. If their children cannot inherit Earth Community, then sadly, I believe, neither can our
children.
We are each, in our own way, at this most critical time, doing what we can to bring Earth Community into being. The simplest, least time consuming, most revolutionary, most culture transforming, and most anti-Empire act any of us can take right now is to stop supporting the war on animals. This means we no longer eat them or steal their milk and eggs. This means we buy only cruelty-free products and refuse to support zoos, circuses, and rodeos. This means we gather them safely and gently into our circle of respect, compassion, and love; into our and their Earth Community. Living in this way expresses “the harmonious fulfillment of our inner seeing,” as Will Tuttle points out in The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony (p. 293).
May we Turn in time. May we leave no stony thoughts unTurned. May we Turn with glad hearts, knowing we have set all beings free from human domination. May all beings be free.
May all beings live in peace.
David Korten
Unset Gems
“Turn, turn from your evil ways; for why will you die . . . ?” Ezekiel 33:11
Our culture is being suffocated by a “taboo against knowing whom you eat.”
--Inspired by Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet
Reminder of Tuttle Presentations
Will Tuttle, musician and author of the best-selling The World Peace Diet, will be giving a mini-course April 10-13 at Krotona Institute, Ojai, California, about sixty miles northwest of the Los Angeles area. Attenders from out of town who wish to be housed on campus must register in advance to insure that there is space in the student apartments in Krotona’s low-cost guest house, where they can do their own cooking. For further information, contact Krotona School, schoolinfo@krotonainstitute.org , or write to Krotona School, 46 Krotona St., Ojai, CA 93023.
Will is also speaking in the Los Angeles area just before this Krotona event. On April 7, at 7:00 PM, he will presenting “Social Justice: Revealing Hidden Connections” at the Sepulveda Peace Center in Culver City. On Sunday, April 8 from 4-6 PM, he will speak on “Healing Our World: A Deeper Look at Food” at Orange Grove Friends Meeting in Pasadena. Check their websites for directions.
Y’all come!
NewsNotes
Food Processor Ends Dairy Contracts
Giant dairy firm Dean Foods has announced that it will be ending its contracts with dozens of dairy farms due to the fall in demand for fluid milk. Milk consumption has fallen 40% since 1970! See Dairy Fall
--Contributed by MFA
Pigeon Shoot Victory
The organization SHARK (Showing Animals Respect and Kindness) announces success in its campaign to shut down the cruel pigeon shoot fundraiser supported by the Alabama Forestry Association. See Kindness
--Contributed by Nancy Campeau
Review: Hippie Food
Jonathan Kauffman. Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. New York: William Morrow, 2018. 344 pages. $26.99 hardcover. (Author pictured below.)
Do you remember the first time you ate such vegan staples as brown rice, tofu, and soymilk? If you memory goes back that far, the chances are it was in the late 1960s or early 1970s, as the famous counterculture of those days was moving with the flow beyond the Summer of Love and acid to permanently affect the lifestyle of millions, and nowhere was this impact felt more strongly than in the way we eat. Before, food was centered in white bread, cow's milk, meat and potatoes, alongside a modest serving of canned or overcooked vegetables. After a revolution as dynamic in its own way as the great civil rights and anti-war campaigns of those days, the keywords were natural and organic, locally sourced, and if not strictly vegetarian or vegan, close to it; the enemy was the great food conglomerates with their factory farms and their highly processed, additive-enriched "plastic"foods. As Kauffman says early on, in those days eating brown rice was a political act.
Kauffman's Hippie Food tells the story of these politics. While the new wave may not as yet have taken the field with total success, it has certainly made a difference, as a glance at the shelves of any supermarket will relate. The same is also true of the rather ironic tribute paid by the demonized food giants as they bought up or reproduced edibles like granola or tofu "meats," and saw to it we had access to bean sprouts and hummus.
How did we get there? The major chapters of this book trace the influence of George Ohsawa and "macrobiotics," which, whatever one think of its division of food into yin and yang substances, promoted vegetarianism (with occasional exceptions), "natural" preparation, and the importance of whole grains. Frances Moore Lappé (incidentally a graduate of Quaker Earlham College) and her 1971 Diet for a Small Planet was immensely change-making by inculcating the simple idea that world famine, so loudly proclaimed by doom-sayers of the era, would not arrive because of a real shortage of all food, but by poor distribution, above all by the highly disproportionate and wasteful consumption of grains, not directly by humans but by livestock.
There were the examples of back-to-the-land vegetarian communes like Stephen Gaskin's The Farm, moved from California to Tennessee. Samuel Kayman, influenced by Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring, pioneered and published about new-wave organic farming in New Hampshire. By the early 1970s, at their peak over a hundred countercultural agricultural communes dotted the landscape. Then there were the famous restaurants like the New Riverside Cafe in Minneapolis and the Moosewood in Ithaca, NY, bringing then often-unfamiliar foods like sprouts, tofu, brown rice, whole-grain bread, and organic everything to the masses, while often producing resources like the popular Moosewood Cookbook, or inspiring a manual like The Whole Earth Catalog, found in some corner of virtually every hippie or "with it" household.
To be sure, much of this was not truly new in the 1960s, as earlier reviews in The Peaceable Table of histories of vegetarianism have pointed out, and as the author of Hippie Food acknowledges. In the nineteenth century Sylvester Graham, inventor of the now much-debased graham cracker, vociferously promoted simple, whole-grain food, and John Harvey Kellogg, who invented granola and corn flakes, inspired the Seventh-Day Adventists who carried the vegetarian message through their churches and hospitals to innumerable American cities and town. So did other progressive individuals and organizations, and the fortunes of the cause waxed and waned and waxed again in the now-legendary Sixties.
Nonetheless, Kauffman (pictured) is entirely right in thinking that something really new happened then as well, and it is that happening, and the others only indirectly, that brought us to where we are today. Not only did the hippies cause the new foodism to break out of restricted religious or cultural enclaves to appear in restaurants and supermarket shelves everywhere, they made it part of a whole new mentality that swept across the land, despite holdouts. Without ever quite saying so, brown rice and sprouts were at one with being feminist, anti-war, anti-segregation, and meditating. So it is still. More and more (though not yet everywhere or for everyone), being vegetarian or vegan is "cool" rather than something for which to apologize.
It is worth mentioning, especially in light of current events, that as with many "culture war" victories, the food change came very little through explicit legislation unless after the fact, and far more by changes in mentality. When change is upon us, what was once accepted (like smoking or closeting homosexuals or explicitly restricting roles for women) just gets fewer and fewer thumbs up from aware people, who find themselves thinking and living differently as the time for the new rolls in. Often businesses, who know where their customers are at, like cookbook publishers, restaurants, and supermarkets in this case, are way ahead of courts and legislatures in making the change visible, and pave the way for timid politicians to follow when the highways are safe.
If you want to know more about how it happened then, and is still happening, read Hippie Food. Highly recommended as a well-written, entertaining read, and giving information every food activist should have.
--Robert Ellwood
Pioneer: Lewis Gompertz, 1784 - 1861
Lewis Gompertz was born in London into a Jewish family of considerable wealth from the diamond trade, wealth that was to be a blessing for animals. As Jews the sons were barred from the universities (the daughters were of course barred due to gender), but the children seem to have been well educated at home, with stress on questioning received ideas and thinking for themselves.
Lewis entered history in 1824 at age forty, when his book Moral Enquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes appeared. This amazing work (now in print again but at exorbitant cost) essentially presents the animal-rights position, though the term had not been invented yet. His basic conviction was that it was morally wrong to exploit or kill any animal for human purposes. He rejected not only slaughtering an animal to eat her flesh, but taking a cow’s milk and using the skins of animals for human products (unless the animal had died naturally). His diet followed his principles; he refused to ride in any horse-drawn vehicle; he did wear leather shoes because of the lack of viable alternatives, but was distressed at having to do so. (He was also sensitive to human wrongs; he decried the exploitation of workers in early capitalism, and the subjugation of women, among other evils.)
He was a prolific inventor, especially coming up with ideas to facilitate animal-free transportation, such as a primitive bicycle that operated rather like a skateboard. It could be steered, but had no brakes or pedals. Some of his many ideas are still in use today.
The same year that Moral Enquiries appeared, he joined other leaders in forming the [R]SPCA, the world’s first organization for animal defense, chaired by the devoted Rev. Arthur Broome. The group soon launched ambitious programs, particularly that of monitoring and pressing for the prosecutions of cases of animal abuse that violated Parliament’s recently-passed law against the mistreatment of large animals, referring especially to horses, donkeys and cattle. But donations proved inadequate to cover the expenses involved, with the result that the Rev. Mr. Broome was thrown into debtor’s prison as the party responsible for the society’s large debts. Gompertz and another member, firebrand Member of Parliament (MP) Richard Martin, paid the debt out of their own funds to get him released.
Gompertz was elected the next president, and worked tirelessly for the cause. “For six years he personally pursued unrepentant abusers of animals. He wrote letters, raised money, attended police courts, and engaged in public debate. . . .” During his tenure, the Society’s finances stabilized somewhat, but the British population in general had little sympathy for animal suffering, and donations continued to be uncertain (until young Queen Victoria made it the Royal SPCA.)
Unfortunately, serious differences of opinion surfaced among the members, and the group fractured twice. The second of these splits was truly catastrophic; it amounted to an ouster of Gompertz. Some of the Christian members of the group were upset by his “Pythagorean” doctrines, especially his refusing to eat meat and his generally regarding animals with the respect they felt due only to humans. One member proposed a motion that the society’s purpose statement read that it was run on “Christian principles” and rejected “sects,” clearly referring to Gompertz’ Judaism as well as “Pythagoreanism.” This small-minded motion passed, and Gompertz had no choice but to resign. The only consolation to be found in this shameful proceeding was that the devoutly Christian Wilberforce (the anti-slave-trade MP), some Quaker members, and wealthy donor the Countess of Shaftesbury supported Gompertz, and apparently joined the new group he formed, the Animals’ Friend Society.
For several years, this group was more active and effective than the original SPCA. Gompertz was obliged to resign in 1846 due to his beloved wife’s terminal illness, but in 1852 he published another book, entitled Fragments in Defense of Animals. He continued his inventing.
He died at his home in Kennington, London, in 1861, age seventy-seven. --Editor
Recipe: Milanese Green Beans
⅔ C. brown rice
1 ½ C. water or veggie broth
1 lb. green beans
Juice of ½ small lemon
½ C. grated Parma
1 T. vegan butter
1 or 3 cloves garlic, minced fine
2 T. chopped parsley
Roasted sunflower seeds
Put the rice on to cook. Snip the beans and steam for about 15 minutes. Place in saucepan; add the parsley, vegan butter, and garlic; simmer for about 5 minutes. Add lemon juice and Parma; simmer for a few more minutes, stirring; add a little water if needed. Serve on a bed of rice and top with the sunflower seeds. This is an unusual and delicious main dish.
--Sonya Richmond
(veganized from her 1965 cookbook International Vegetarian Cookery)
Note If Parma is not available in your area, it’s worthwhile ordering it online, from Parma! Also available from Amazon.
Poetry: William Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807 - 1882
from The Song of Hiawatha
. . . . At the door on summer evenings
Sat the little Hiawatha;
Heard the whispering of the pine-trees,
Heard the lapping of the waters,
Sounds of music, words of wonder.. . . .
Saw the fire-fly, Wah-wah-taysee,
Flitting through the dusk of evening,
With the twinkle of its candle
Lighting up the brakes and bushes,
And he sang the song of children,
Sang the song Nokomis taught him:
"Wah-wah-taysee, little fire-fly,
Little, flitting, white-fire insect,
Little, dancing, white-fire creature,
Light me with your little candle,
Ere upon my bed I lay me,
Ere in sleep I close my eyelids!". . . .
When he heard the owls at midnight,
Hooting, laughing in the forest,
"What is that?" he cried in terror,
"What is that," he said, "Nokomis?"
And the good Nokomis answered:
"That is but the owl and owlet,
Talking in their native language,
Talking, scolding at each other."
Then the little Hiawatha
Learned of every bird its language. . . .
Of all beasts he learned the language,
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How the beavers built their lodges,
Where the squirrels hid their acorns,
How the reindeer ran so swiftly,
Why the rabbit was so timid,
Talked with them whene'er he met them,
Called them "Hiawatha's Brothers." . . . .
--modeled on an Ojibway hero. Drawing by Susan Jeffers