We have all been inundated by advertisements that trivialize eating, that reduce eating to a form of amusement or entertainment, to something shallow and commercial... Eating in a hurried or unconscious way, as so many of us have learned to do, is like receiving a love letter from the Earth but never taking the time to carefully read it. 

There is an old story about a man who lived a long and worthy life. When he died, the Lord said to him, "Come, I will show you hell." He was taken to a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but had a handle so long it couldn't be used to reach his or her mouth. Everyone was famished and desperate; the suffering was terrible. After a while, the Lord said, "Come, now I will show you heaven." They came to another room. To the man's surprise, it seemed identical to the first room - a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew, and each held the same long-handled spoon. But here everyone was nourished and happy, and the room was full of joy and laughter. "I don't understand," said the man, "Everything seems to be the same, yet they are so happy here, and they were so miserable in the other place. What in heaven's name is going on here?" The Lord smiled, "Ah, but don't you see? Here they have learned to feed one another." 

Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. The majority of it is used instead to grow livestock feed. There was a time when I would have said that this makes no difference. I would have said that the livestock feed ends up as the meat that people eat, so the land used for livestock is still feeding people. But I have learned something that has changed this perspective. It takes sixteen pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef. It takes only one pound of grain to produce a pound of bread.  

It is hard to grasp how immensely wasteful the feed conversion ration for beef is. By cycling grain through livestock and into beef, we end up with only 6 percent as much food available to feed human beings as we would have if we ate the grain directly. 

Forty-thousand children starve to death on this planet every DAY. 

To feed a meat eater for a year requires three-and-a-quarter acres of land. To feed one vegetarian for a year requires one half acre of land. If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10 percent, enough grain would be saved to feed sixty million people. That is close to the total number of people who die of hunger related disease each year. In a world where a child dies of hunger every two seconds, only an ignorant society can continue to view meat as a status symbol... 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 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. 

Says Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen extremely influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, "While millions of American teenagers anguish over excess pounds, spending time, money and emotional energy on slimming down, children in other lands are wasting away, their physical growth irreversibly stunted, their bodies racked with parasitic and opportunistic diseases, their brain growth diminished by lack of nutrients in their meager diets." 

Throughout the Third World, the production of meat is devastating the natural ecosystems, monopolizing the best local land, undermining the local food supply, and undercutting the efforts of people to become food self-reliant. There are today millions of humans in less developed countries who are living and dying in despair, going hungry while their land, labor and resources are being exploited so a tiny minority of people can eat meat. 

Who Decides What You Eat? 

It is now the 1990s. In front of me is a coloring book found today in public schools. Purporting to teach children how to eat well, it has been supplied to school systems by the dairy industry. I don't know how many states use this particular coloring book, but I know that it is representative of many of the "nutritional education" materials used throughout the United States. I open the coloring book and see the outline drawing of a man's face. "Color Dad," I am told. That sounds fair enough. But look what happens next. 

If Dad drank milk today, we are to draw a "happy face." If he did not, we are to draw a "sad face." If he had ice cream, we are to color his hair brown - if not, blue. If he had butter, we are to color his eyes blue - if not, red. If he had cheese his face is pink, if not green. 

It is unlikely that you had this particular coloring book when you were in grammar school, because this is a recent publication. But it is quite probable that if you went to public school in the United States, you were given similar materials. When that happened, you probably got crayons and began busily coloring away. There is one thing, though, that I am willing to bet you didn't do. 

You didn't raise your hand and say, "Excuse me, teacher, but I have some questions. What are the health consequences of eating a lot of milk, butter, ice cream and cheese? Aren't these all high in butterfat?  And isn't butterfat a highly saturated fat? And don't dairy fats carry pesticide residues at very high levels of concentration? Oh, and there is one more thing, teacher: Who is it that profits from our believing that if we don't eat ice cream, butter, milk and cheese we end up looking terrible, with red eyes, a green face and blue hair?" 

Knowing how malleable and impressionable youngsters are, I have often wondered about the forces that influence our children's thoughts and feelings about different foods... Trusting, when we are young we soak up what we are told. The standard four food groups  are based on American Agricultural lobbies. Why do we have a milk group? Because we have a National Dairy Council. Why do we have a meat group? Because we have an extremely powerful meat lobby.  

What About Chicken? 

Today's poultry inspection systems are nothing like those of even 15 years ago. Six times during the last fifteen years, the USDA has weakened the poultry inspection system. Critics say the fact that comparatively few birds are  condemned today testifies less to the safety of the birds than ot the sorry state of the inspection system. In 1991, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of interviews with eighty-four federal poultry inspectors from thirty-seven processing plants in the five states that produce over half of all American chicken. If the poultry inspectors are to be believed, the chickens available for sale nationwide represent a health disaster.  In fact, sixty of the eighty-four poultry inspectors interviewed said that based on what they observe they no longer eat chicken.... According to these inspectors, every week millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, and marred by lung and heart infections and cancerous tumors are sold to consumers.  They said they are routinely cursed, rebuked, and harassed by company officials or by their own government supervisor if they dare halt a speeding production line to scrutinize questionable meat.  A seven-year inspector explained: 

It used to be that if a bird had a severe contamination, you condemned the sucker. Nowadays my own supervising inspector says, "There can be no more bad birds n your tally. You've had too many." 

Today, there is another issue to consider for those of us who wish our lives to be expressions of compassion. I am not talking about the fact that the animals are killed. I am not even talking about the fact that the manner in which they are killed is inhumane. I am talking about the fact that we don't have barnyard cows and  chickens anymore, we have factory cows and chickens. Virtually every chicken or cow carcass sold in our markets and served in our restaurants is the outcome of a life that knew only deprivation and pain. The factory farm system is so systematically cruel that I have to wonder whether the meat sold in our land today do not carry in their flesh some of the suffering they were forced to endure.  I f we feed ourselves on animals whose existence has been one long nightmare of pain, what will be the outcome of our lives? 
 
The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family. 
Mother Teresa