Diet for a New America 25th Anniversary Edition

The Reagan administration has also allowed the Japanese to kill porpoises while fishing for salmon in the U.S. waters of the North Pacific. Over a million dolphins have died in their huge nets, which also trap and kill seals and birds. As a result, organizations like Friends of Animals Inc. have called for a boycott of all tuna and salmon products

Bergh did everything he could to halt this activity, but when he brought the perpetrators to court, the judge acquitted them on the grounds that a turtle was “not an animal within the meaning of the law.”17 Accordingly, ruled the judge, even the barest minimum of protection against cruelty that was afforded animals by the law at that time could not be applied to turtles.18

The official position of the Catholic Church has long been that animals don’t have souls. During a Church council in the Middle Ages a vote was taken on whether women and animals have souls. Women squeaked by. Animals lost.

This is a far cry from the attitude of Albert Schweitzer, who believed the following:

Any religion which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion…8 Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.9

Heartwarming research has been done in which convicts nearing their release dates were allowed to have pet cats in their cells with them. The result? “Of the men who loved and cared for their cats, not a single one later failed as a free man to adjust to society.”6 This in a penal system where over 70 percent of released convicts are expected to return to jail.

You benefit, the rest of humankind benefits, the animals benefit, and so do the forests and the rivers and the soil and the air and the oceans.

our need for meats, dairy products, and eggs have been in error. In fact, it is an excess of these very foods, which were once thought to be the foundations of good eating habits, that is responsible for the epidemics of heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and many other diseases of our time.

But I want you to know. I’m letting the cat out of the bag. I don’t care about their profits. I care about your health, your well-being, and the welfare of our planet and all its creatures.

In the past few decades, the animals raised for meat, dairy products, and eggs in the United States have been subjected to ever more deplorable conditions. Merely to keep the poor creatures alive under these circumstances, even more chemicals have had to be used, and, increasingly, hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, and countless other chemicals and drugs end up in foods derived from animals. The more unnaturally today’s livestock are raised, the more chemical residues end up in our food.

A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it.