Philosophy > General AR Philosophy

Agenda for a New America

Part 1
The Politics of Vegetarianism
By Vasu Murti
Author of: They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy

Chapter 7 - Conflict and Hunger

    Competition for food has inevitably led to conflict and this struggle for survival has been a significant factor in the history of organized warfare. In this respect, meat-eating may be regarded as either the underlying cause of armed conflict or at least one of several factors contributing to the exacerbation of a pre-existing problem. The reason why meat, in particular, has created such problems is that the practice of raising livestock requires a much greater use of resources. The basic problem is simply that people are forced to compete with animals for food--a most precarious situation when food is in short supply.

    Half the world's population does not receive an adequate amount of food to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, "Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day," or one child every two seconds.


    Ronald J. Sider, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, points out that 220 million Americans are eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

    The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people--nearly double the entire human population of the planet. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can produce less than 165 pounds of beef.

    In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that protein.-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle." Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.

    Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks, quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel away from the needy and hungry."

    Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:

      "Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything ever experienced before."

      "Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation, experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."

      "In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization--a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species--nearly 25 percent--been malnourished."

      "The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings."

    In the 1970s, United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim said that the food consumption of the rich Countries is the key cause of hunger around the world. The United Nations has recommended that the wealthy nations cut down on their meat consumption. According to Buckminster Fuller, there are enough resources at present to feed, clothe, house and educate every human being on the planet at American middle class standards. The Institute for Food and Development Policy has shown that there is no country in the world in which the people cannot feed themselves from their own resources.

    Moreover, there is no correlation between land density and hunger. China has twice as many people per cultivated acre as India, yet less of a hunger problem. Bangladesh has just one-half the people per cultivated acre that Taiwan has, yet Taiwan has no starvation, while Bangladesh has one of the highest rates in the world. The most densely populated countries in the world today are not India and Bangladesh, but Holland and Japan.

Chapter 8 - Economics and Control


















Chapter 9 - Why Hunger?













Chapter 10 - Meat and Water











            ---Armand Hammer
            Chairman, Occidental Petroleum




Chapter 11 - Violence

    Meat-eating contributes to the fear in the world by putting us in a position in which there is not enough to go around. But that's not all. Meat-eaters ingest residues of the animal's biochemical response to the horrors of the Slaughterhouse. Programmed to fight or flee when in danger for their lives, the animals react to the slaughterhouse in sheer terror. Powerful biochemical agents are secreted that pump through their bloodstreams and onto their flesh, energizing them to fight or flee for their lives.

    Like screaming air rain sirens, these chemical agents produce instinctual panic. Today's slaughterhouses virtually guarantee that the animals will die in terror.

    The Maoris would eat the flesh of a slaughtered enemy in order to possess the enemy's courage and strength. The people of the lower Nubia, likewise, would eat the fox, believing that by so doing, they would be possessed of his cunning. In upper Egypt, the heart of the hoopoe bird was eaten in order to acquire the ability to become a clever scribe. The bird would be caught and its heart would be torn out and eaten while it was still alive. On the other hand, certain Native American tribes would not eat the flesh of an animal who died in fear, because they did not want to take into themselves the terror of such an animal.

    When we eat animals who have died violent deaths we literally eat their fear. We take in biochemical agents designed by nature to tell an animal that its life is in the gravest danger, and it must either fight or flee for its life. And then, in our wars and our daily lives, we give expression to the panic in which the animals we have eater died.


      ---Leonardo da Vinci

Chapter 12 - Historical Comparisons

    According to Howard Lyman, former Senior lobbyist for the National Farmers Union, "Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the beef cartel the biggest hog at the trough."

    The Bible contains numerous examples of conflict situations that are directly attributable to the practice of raising livestock, including contested water rights, bitter competition for grazing areas, and friction between agriculturalists and nomadic herdsmen. The more settled agricultural communities deeply resented the intrusion of nomadic tribes with their large herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. These animals were considered a menace. Aside from the threat to the crops themselves, large herds of livestock caused much damage to the general quality of the land as a result of over grazing.

    It was ostensibly for this reason that the Philistines, whose primary agricultural pursuits were corn and orchards, sought to discourage nomadic herdsmen from using their territory by filling in many of the wells in the surrounding area. One of the earliest accounts of strife among the herdsmen themselves is found in the story of Lot and Abram:


    Abram moved Westward to a region known as Canaan, while Lot journeyed to the east, finally settling in Sodom. Such peaceful agreements, however, were not always possible. There are several references in the Bible to clashes between the Israelites and Midianites. The Midianites were wealthy Bedouin traders who owned large numbers of livestock, as did the Israelites, who brought their herds with them when they left Egypt.

    Livestock require vast areas of land for grazing. They also need water, which has never been abundant in that region of the world. The strain thus placed on the land's resources is mentioned in Judges 6:4: "And they encamped against them, and destroyed the increase of the earth."

    The depletion of resources created by the people arid livestock moving into this territory is described in Judges 6:5 by a singularly appropriate simile: "For they came up with their cattle and their tents, and they came as grasshoppers." Another passage informs us that after a particularly vicious battle with the Midianites the Israelites augmented their herds with the livestock of their slain captives. This included 675,000 sheep and more than 72,000 beeves.

    A strikingly frank reference to the casual relationship between flesh eating and war, in terms of land use, is found in Deuteronomy 12:20: "When the Lord thy God shall enlarge thy border, as he hath promised thee, and thou shalt say, 'I will eat flesh,' because thy soul longeth to eat flesh; thou mayest eat flesh, whatsoever thy soul lusteth after." (See also Numbers 31:32-33)

    A similar straightforward reference to the relationship between flesh eating and war can be found in Plato's Republic. In a dialogue with Glaucon, Socrates extols the peace and happiness what come to people eating a vegetarian diet: "And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them."

    Glaucon remains skeptical that people would be satisfied with such fare. He asserts that people will desire the "ordinary conveniences of life," including animal flesh. Socrates then proceeds to stock the once ideal state with swineherds, huntsmen, and "cattle in great number." The dialogue continues:

      "...and there will be animal's of many other kinds, if people eat them?"



      "Much greater."


      "Quite true."

      "Then a slice of our neighbor's land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?"

      "That, Socrates, will be inevitable."

      "And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?"

      "Most certainly," Glaucon replies.

    Critics of Plato, reading the rest of the Republic, have complained that what Plato gives us is a militaristic or proto-fascist state, with censorship and a rigidly controlled economy. Plato would hardly disagree with these critics; what they have overlooked is that the state which he describes is not his idea--it is merely a consequence of Glaucon's requirements which Socrates himself disavows. Greed for meat, among other things, produced the character of the second state Plato describes.

    The history of the European spice trade would seem to suggest that there is indeed a relationship between war and large-scale consumer demand for foods not required by what Plato refers to as "natural want." Spices were of vital importance to meat preparation before the process of mechanical refrigeration was developed in the 20th century, meat was usually preserved by the process of salting. Using various combinations of spices to offset the saltiness of meat, thus making it palatable, became a popular practice in medieval Europe.

    The demand for spices was a significant factor in European colonial endeavors. Competition intensified, contributing to the exacerbation of serious disputes that already existed among various European nations. Efforts in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Dutch, Portuguese, English and French to expand their spice trade resulted in warfare, as well as the subjugation of native peoples by these imperialist powers.

    Shepherds have traditionally been depicted in both art and religious and secular literature as a peaceable lot. However, there were inevitable disputes between farmers and shepherds over territorial rights. This Situation was aggravated by the fact that sheep posed an even greater threat to the land than cattle because they clipped grass closer to the ground, sometimes tearing it out by the roots. The Spanish sheepowner's guild known as the Mesta dominated Spain's political affairs for several centuries (AD 1200-1500) and was the source of much internal strife within that country.

    The Mesta's sheep not only destroyed pastureland by overgrazing but were also allowed to rampage through cultivated fields. The peasant farmers could hardly expect the monarchy to rectify this injustice since sheep raising dominated medieval Spanish commerce and was the government's principal source of revenue during this period.

    There was considerable animosity among shepherds, cattlemen and crop farmers in 19th-century America. The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged more people to settle in the West. The very nature of livestock raising in the United States at that time required vast areas of land for grazing and moving the animals along designated trails to their final destinations. Hence the proliferation of farming communities became a serious threat to the livestock industry. This situation became worse when the farmers put up barbed-wire fences, a practice that began in the 1880s.

    Aside from the conflict between livestock herders and farmers, there were bitter feuds between cattlemen and sheepmen, including such conflicts as the "Tonto Basin War" in Arizona, the "Holbrook War" in Montana, the "Blue Mountain War" in Colorado and the "Big Horn Basin Feud" in Montana.



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