Food for the Soul

"...how can we live so that our participation is for the greatest good and the greatest healing for all beings?"

with John Robbins

As a vegetarian, I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of the inside dirt On animal husbandry. But it is one thing to know, it is quite another to feel. The fact that I can 't eat meat didn't protect me from the onslaught of shame and sadness that crashed through my head when I read Diet for a New America. I found it hard to believe that we had gone so far. I cried harder than I had in years.

As John Robbins points out, you don 't have to be an animal activist, or even particularly love animals, To be appalled, horrified, and outraged at what is being done in factory farms all over the country, all day, every day. It is so extreme. The book reads like sci-fi horror; a prophetic warning of the ripening of humanity 's faceless brutality. But the fact is, it been going on for years.

John Robbins surfaced from the Baskin Robbins ice cream family gene pool like some Strange new mutation--the thirty-second flavor who was destined to leave a bitter taste in the mouth of the National Dairy Council. In his two books, the international best-seller Diet for a New America and May All Be Fed, he explains with straightforward clarity the link between our food habits and the health of our planet, our bodies, and our souls.

His manner is filled with the contagious buoyancy of a person who is being true to his conscience. He speaks with an impassioned sincerity--never patronizing, never self-righteous. We interviewed John at his home in Felton, California on June 9, 1994. In his mid-forties he still looks like a schoolboy, his wide blue eyes, elfin face, and Disney smile radiate with a childlike innocence. This is the man at the top of the Meat and Dairy Board's most-wanted list, you wonder? The man they consider so dangerous that they have meetings on ways to discredit him?

He is the founder of the nonprofit organization EarthSave, which concentrates on educating the public about health, nutrition, and sustainable energy consumption. He has spoken to a variety of audiences, including Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sierra Club, the Humane Society of the United States, UNICEF and the United Nations Environmental Program, where he received a standing ovation. Do you know that colon cancer is directly linked to meat consumption? Do you know that you save more water by not eating one pound of beef than you would from not showering for a whole year? Do you know the extent of the suffering involved in factory farming? Once you know, you can never act without that knowledge again. Here is the information, says John Robbins. Now it 's up to you. Bon appetite!

RMN

David: How did growing up in the `heart of the American food machine,' influence your motivation to research and write Diet for a New America?

John: There was a tremendous investment, in my family, to deny any link between diet and health; particularly between ice cream and health. It wasn't just ignorance about the subject, it was a real commitment to denial.(laughter) I understood it, given the livelihood involved, but I could feel the pressure of that denial like a lid on top of me. As I was growing up and reaching out beyond the assumptions, values and world-view of my parents, I encountered a lot of information that was taboo to them.

Rebecca: How old were you when you began questioning those taboos?

John: Very young. I don't know how to account for it, but the fact of the matter is that I seemed to be destined to do this. From my earliest childhood I was living two lives; I was being groomed by my father to succeed him; being trained in the factory, in merchandising and franchising and all the other aspects of the business, and then my inner life was involved in questioning and challenging everything I was being taught.

I couldn't talk to my father about this, or my mother, or my sisters, or my aunts and uncles.(laughter) It was two separate worlds. In one world ice cream made people happy, and in another world, ice cream was high in saturated fat and cholesterol and contributed to diabetes and heart disease.

Rebecca: But that's not something that you could have known as a very small child.

John: No, not the details of it. It was more of a feeling.

Rebecca: You never enjoyed ice cream?

John: I loved ice cream! Did I say that for a moment? Are you kidding me?! (laughter) When people find out that I don't eat ice cream anymore, they get this pained look on their face as if I'm deprived, and I say, "please don't feel sorry for me, I've eaten enough ice cream for ten lifetimes!"

Rebecca: So the style of your inspiration was more of an unraveling process rather than a revelatory flash?

John: There were moments that catalyzed me or where I became aware that I had progressed to a certain point, but I can't pin the development of my consciousness on those moments. For example, in 1960 I was living and going to school in Berkeley. I had been working with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement had become very important to me. I was this privileged upper-class white kid and sometimes I wondered what business I had being involved in this, but then I felt that I had a lot of business because it was such a profound thing that was happening to everyone.

To put this in context, I have to back up a little. When I was in high school and working closely with my dad, I knew only the world of wealthy people and the country club scene, but I did not feel privileged by that. I felt restricted and limited by the fact that I only felt comfortable with what I was familiar with. I would look around at everybody else, and I felt completely disconnected.

And I noticed that at Baskin Robbins, most of the store owners were white and most of the customers were white and that it was basically an upper-class trip - it was a luxury ice cream. And then when I was a senior at high school I was offered scholarships to Harvard, Stanford and Yale because I had been very successful on the debate team. But I chose not to go to those schools because it would have been more of the same - the privileged few.

So I chose to go to the University of California at Berkeley which is a public school and was then fairly inexpensive. I thought, here would be an opportunity to meet people outside the very narrow socio-economic group that I had been in. I had a very powerful desire to understand more kinds of people.

So, in 1965, I left Los Angeles and went to Berkeley. I immediately became involved in the free-speech movement, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. It was an incredible time to be alive. Openings of all kinds were happening. I took the civil rights movement very personally, and when Martin Luther King was killed in 1968 I felt as if a bullet had gone through my heart too. Any thoughts of business as usual felt just ludicrous and empty.

I had seen in my own family a high level of material success attained - and I had seen its limitations. Within the circle of my family's friends were some of the richest people in the world, who also happened to be some of the most neurotic people in the world.

David: What about your sisters? Were you the only rebel in the bunch?

John: Yeah. My two sisters share a great deal of assumptions and perspectives with my parents.

Rebecca: How do they feel about what you're doing now?

John: It's hard for them. They don't feel comfortable with it - except my father. When I left the business, he was very hurt and that caused a lot of distance between us. He respected me and he knew that I was sincere, but he felt that I was crazy. Here I was with long hair walking away from an opportunity to be extremely wealthy in order to do - what? He couldn't see it, and I couldn't explain it either, in terms that made sense to him.

My uncle, Bert Baskin died of a heart attack in the late `60's. I said to my dad, "do you think there could be any connection between the amount of ice cream that Uncle Bert would eat and his heart attack?" He said, "absolutely not, his ticker just got tired."

Then five years ago my dad's health was very precarious. His cholesterol was almost 300. He had very high blood pressure for which he had to take ten - what he called horse pills - every day, which had serious side-effects which he hated. His diabetes was out of control and he was in danger of going blind or ending up on a kidney dialysis machine or lose a foot to gangrene.

He went to see a physician who told him that the prognosis was pretty grim and that all they could do now was shuffle his medications and make his last years more comfortable. Then the physician said, "but if you are really serious about getting well, there is this book." And not knowing that there was any relation between the two Robbins he took Diet for a New America off the shelf and handed it to my father. I would love to have been a fly on that wall.(laughter)

My father didn't say anything, but he took the book home and read it. After all, he was being told this by the high priest of western medicine! He made changes to his diet and he's gotten tremendous results in his own health. Today his cholesterol is 150. His blood pressure has come down so much that he only takes one blood pressure pills every other day. His diabetes is in complete remission so he doesn't need insulin, his circulation has improved tremendously and he's lost a lot of weight. His golf game has also improved almost ten strokes, which may be the most important to him.(laughter)

We used to argue all the time and I remember him saying to me, "look, you're an idealist, and that's very nice when you're young, but you have to get over it in order to be successful. It's too bad, but that's the way it is." And I would reply that if you don't have your integrity, you don't have anything. Recently he said to me, "thank God some of us have lived long enough to learn a few new things."

Rebecca: So it's been harder for your mother to accept these things?

John: Much. Usually it's the other way around, I know. I think my mother always felt that she was in charge of the food department (laughter) and she seems to feel that I'm saying she fed us wrong.

Rebecca: But you are saying that.

John: No. She did the best she can. My mother always felt that she was in charge of the food department, and she seems to feel that I’m saying she fed us wrong.

Rebecca: Could you describe for those who aren't aware, some of the conditions that you have witnessed that are going on as we speak in factory farms all over America.

John: I could point to the worst places where the conditions are most stressful on the animals, the diet is the most unnatural and the people are the most callous, but I'd rather just describe the industry norms.

Veal calf are male calves born to dairy cows. The females are shunted in one direction on their way to becoming four-legged milk pumps and the males are taken away at birth or the next day. They are baby mammals and they desperately want to suckle, but they're not allowed to. When you look at their faces you see that this is an infant here, you see the innocence and the vulnerability and the preciousness, and then you see the exploitation.

Standard operating procedure for veal calves is to chain them at the neck in stalls or cages so tiny that they can't even take a single step in their entire lives. They stand knee deep in their own excrement wailing and crying for their mothers. The diet which the calf is fed is designed to be deficient in iron.

The factory-farm workers play the edge so that the anemia won't kill the creature before it's four months old which is when its slaughtered, but a lot of them die anyway or go blind because they play the edge and then go past it. The reason they want to do this is because the flesh becomes a lighter color and we've been trained to believe that lighter meats are healthier - it's really just the flesh of a tortured baby animal.

Standard operating procedure for layer hens from which our eggs come from is to cram the into cages so tightly that they can't even lift a wing. The floor of the cage is mesh and their claws constantly get stuck in them. It's totally unnatural.

Broilers - birds from which chicken meat comes - are kept in warehouses and never see the light of day. These are animals that crow under natural conditions and which are extremely sensitive to light rhythms. The industry manipulates their hormonal responses with fluorescent lights which are sometimes on 24 hours a day, other times not on at all, all contrived to get the maximum possible weight gain in the shortest possible time. Part of that process is antibiotics mixed into every dose of feed and sprayed into the air they breathe.

It's the same mentality that is generating the conditions that hogs and dairy and beef cattle are in. Beef cattle are on cement for the second half of their life in the feed-lot and they're penned in so tightly that they can hardly move around. They're implanted with artificial hormones in their ears. We're the only industrialized country in the world that still does that and we do it to 99% of our beef cattle.

Rebecca: What about the conditions that pigs are made to live under?

John: Hogs are in individual stalls as adults, and they're in tiered cages, three stalls high. Again, the cages are so small that they can't move. The excrement from the upper stalls drops down continuously through the slots onto the heads of the ones below. Contrary to popular belief, hogs don't like to be dirty and they will never soil they're own bedding under normal conditions.

They also have extremely sensitive noses which enable them, under natural conditions, to root around and actually smell edible roots through the earth. Here, piles of their own excrement build up so that the ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and the other gases give off an unbelievable smell. It's standard for nobody to clean it up for months on end.

David: What do you think is the best strategy for helping animals gain the right to live lives without this kind of cruelty?

John: There are many things that we have to do. We have to learn to respect ourselves and our needs as animals and the entire web of life on this planet. If you expect someone to treat the world well who doesn't treat themselves well, you'll be sorely disappointed, and someone who smokes and pollutes their own lungs cannot be expected to be as sensitive to air pollution from smoke stacks.

A society that looks at a forest and immediately starts measuring board feet, objectifies the forest and sees its value only in terms of how it can be converted into revenue. That same mentality looks at another human being and says, how can I put that person to work for the glorification of my own ego or for the expansion of my own wealth? There's no cherishing involved.

Rebecca: So you're saying that if we can develop greater respect for one another then somehow that will spill over into a greater respect for other forms of life?

John: Yes, and vice versa. I know many people who are not able to love other human beings - they've been too traumatized - but they are able to love an animal, and through that love, are able to learn to relate to others. Maybe they can't be intimate, but they can have a more benevolent relationship with other people than they would have been able to have without the animal.

Rebecca: But some people have extremely intimate relationships with their cats or their dogs, and have a whole different category of thinking for a cow or a pig that's lying on their dinner plate.

John: This is one of the myths that is being perpetrated - that some animals are part of the circle of compassion and others are not. Why do you call some animals pets and other animals dinner? Historically it used to be - and it still is to some extent - that an animal which is destined for human consumption is exempted from the laws restricting cruelty to animals. In other words, you can do anything you want to an animal as long as you're going to eat it - hence the treatment of veal calves.

David: What if you were going to eat your dog or cat?

John: I don't know. It would be very interesting for that to be tested. There are Filipino communities in the United States where they carry on the cultural tradition of eating dogs. Most people who wouldn't think twice about the treatment of veal calves would find it very objectionable to see a dog treated that way.

David: A basic truth about animals is that in order for them to exist they have to feed on other living things. A lot of people have had experiences which have led them to believe that plants are conscious beings. Why, in your opinion, is eating the corpses of plants, more compassionate than eating the corpses of animals?

John: Look at it this way. It takes 16 lbs of grain to make 1 lb of beef. It takes 1 lb of grain to make 1 lb of bread. So, how many more plants are you eating if you eat a pound of beef? Secondly, I've harvested cabbages and pulled up carrots out of the ground and I've been in slaughter-houses and seen the animals have their brains bashed out with sledgehammers and their throats cut - the experiences are not comparable.

David: But don't you think that could be a species bias because animals are life forms that are more similar to us?

John: The animals do everything they can to resist: they fight, they scream, they secrete adrenaline. They have nervous systems with pain receptors and what I would call `souls.' In the middle ages the church had a conference to decide whether animals and women had souls. Women squeaked by with one vote but animals didn't get through.

But animals do have souls and they do want to live. I think that plants have group souls and I don't think that taking an individual plant ruptures the fabric in the same way that the violence of killing an animal does. It is a matter of degree of course, but I really feel that this question could only be asked by someone who has never been in a slaughterhouse.

Rebecca: Also plants literally live on their own death - the compost of their material allows other plants to grow.

John: Right. But the deeper issue here is that we are part of and partake of the bio-community. The question that I ask is, how can we live so that our participation can be for the greatest good and the greatest healing for all beings?

The validity of your question points to the fact that we all do take life to live. It's a spectrum and we are all involved in killing. As soon as you separate the people into violent and non-violent and carnivores and non-carnivores and you stand in one camp and point a finger at the other in a judgmental way - you're creating more violence. I think there's been a great deal of vegetarian evangelism, with a lot of holier-than-thou or more vegan-than-thou kid of stuff. And it's created a backlash because no one wants to be made to feel guilty or ashamed.

I feel that it is less violent to eat plants and of course it's healthier. It's interesting that because you're consuming less plants by eating plants than you would be if you were eating animals, you're allowing more of the biomass of the planet to survive. The ecological impact of meat production is horrendous, and of course the impact of large-scale, agri-business dominated, petro-chemical based, pesticide- saturated vegetable and fruit growing is not pretty either, but it's not as bad.

Rebecca: Say that I'm someone who is reasonably aware of the way factory farm animals are treated. I'm a good person in general and I maybe even do a little charity work here and there but I still eat meat. When I'm presented with this information I say, that all makes sense but there are so many inequities in the world. I have to worry about whether my furniture is made from rainforest wood and whether my phone company is funding political extremists - it's just another thing to think about and it's just too much.

John: There are a lot of people like that. I think that they would like the limited amount of leverage they have to be used effectively for the greater good. And I think we have found an acupuncture point, where with a minimum amount of effort, you get a maximum amount of benefit to the whole system.

I think that such a person would find their own purpose strengthened and validated if they understood that the ramifications of their food choices are incredible - to the suffering of animals, to the biosphere, to our own health and ability to function gracefully. The good that can come from conscious food choices is profound and by the same token the evil, even unconscious evil, that can ensue from food choices is also dramatic.

You mentioned the rainforest. Every fast food hamburger that's made from rainforest beef represents the destruction of 55 square feet of tropical rainforest. The person you're describing would never go out and clear a rainforest, but they would eat a hamburger, and in effect, by the laws of economics, their hands are on the chainsaws at that moment.

So, I think that alerting people to the consequences of their choices enables them to make wiser choices, ones that are congruent with their desires and heart's purpose.

Rebecca: I find it easy to understand why otherwise conscious people would rather remain in the dark about this stuff.

John: We want to push it away because it is so painful. But we can do something about it. I've seen that when people do face the pain and experience the woundedness of our culture in this regard, they experience a deeply human, clear, thoughtful response to it all that takes them to a greater experience of self. The pain itself can be the trigger for the clarity about who we are, what we will support and what we will not.

David: John Allen talked about how in Biosphere 2, the consequences of their actions were very profound and very fast. If they put toxins down their sink they would find it the next day in their drinking water. We apparently don't see the consequences until way on down the line.

John: We are a near-sighted species, which was fine as long as our numbers were within a certain range. But now there are so many more of us and the impact of what we do is multiplied and then multiplied again by our technological advancement. We are definitely called by the urgency of the situation we've created to a leap in consciousness that is now a survival imperative.

Rebecca: For most people it's only when their own lives are at risk that they are spurred to change.

John: Yes, they hit bottom and then get humble. Whether we as a species are going to make it is still a very open question.

Rebecca: I noticed all the cruelty-free products you have in your bathroom. In your book you don't mention vivisection but I'd like to know your opinion on testing products on animals.

John: In general, I do not condone research on animals. We don't condone research on people who aren't conscious of the implications and show me the animal that has signed a release form. (laughter) It's part of that mentality that exploits.

David: Let's say that the sacrifice of several animals could save the lives of many humans.

John: I'm not a purist and, as I said, in general I don't condone it. I think that 99% of the pharmaceutical research is unnecessary and in many cases, cruel. Whether that one per cent would be valid and would be something I could support remains to be seen.

Rebecca: Can you think of an instance where you would condone it?

John: I can theoretically, but practically speaking as 99% of it is appalling to me I say, let's clean that up first and then we'll talk about the other one per cent and see how that can be done in a way that minimizes the suffering to animals and maximizes the value and knowledge to other beings. The way that most animal experiments are conducted makes for very poor science. The cardinal case is thalidomide. Had we not been so reliant on and therefore so trusting of animal experimentation, we would have gone through far more careful human testing and realized the dangers sooner.

The two primary medicines for childhood leukemia come from the rosy periwinkle that grows in the Madagascan rainforest which is being destroyed. The rainforests are the richest and most elegant ecosystems on the planet. I think that not only are there the medicines of the future there but also the healing agents for our consciousness - and we're just marching in for cheap hamburgers.

The disrespect we have for the indigenous cultures because they are, in material terms, more primitive than we are, is an arrogance that could cost us our lives and one of the most disgraceful and shameful expressions of our culture.

Rebecca: What are some of the general major health differences, evidenced by scientific research, between meat-eaters and vegetarians?

John: The differences are staggering. The average vegetarian lives seven and half years longer than the average meat-eater. But it's not only the length of life, it's the quality. The average meat-eater has a cardiovascular system that is slowly clogging up, the arteries are hardening and tightening, the blood pressure is rising and the circulation is impaired and therefore the flow of oxygen and nutrition to all the organs is being compromised so there is a reduction in the quality of life, of consciousness, of flexibility.

The leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease, the second is cancer. People who eat the standard American diet stand over a 50% chance of dying from hardening of the arteries, whereas vegetarians have a 15% chance of dying from such a condition and vegans less than 5%. When they do autopsies on people who've had heart attacks, they take out what had been stuck in the artery blocking the flow of blood to the heart.

It's usually shaped like a sausage and it's gummy and thick. When it's studied they invariably find the same thing; saturated fat and cholesterol. No one has yet come back from the lab and said, broccoli and brown rice! One hundred per cent of the cholesterol we take into our bodies and seventy per cent of saturated fat comes from animal fats.

There was an interesting study conducted at Cornell. They started out analyzing the life-span of smokers and they calculated the amount of time that smokers smoked a day. They compared that to the decrease in life-span attributable to smoking and concluded that every minute a person smokes, it costs them, on average, seven or eight minutes of life.

Then they expanded the study to meat-eating and its mortality statistics, and they worked out how much time a meat-eater spends eating meat.(laughter) Anyway, their analysis was that every time a person eats meat they lose eleven minutes off their life-span.

Rebecca: What mistakes do vegetarians sometimes make in their food choices?

John: One mistake is to think that if you change your diet, you're now exempt from the laws of living in other ways, as if vegetarianism alone cured everything. It's such a powerful, maverick thing to do, that people sometimes think that that takes care of things. It's a holier than thou mentality which means that people just stop there.

At the diet and health level I see some vegetarians eat a lot of dairy products: yogurt, cheese and ice cream. They substitute dairy products for meat to try and keep their protein levels high. This culture has protein paranoia.

Rebecca: If the health benefits of high protein consumption aren't backed up by medical research, as you state in your books, where did this philosophy come from?

John: The original protein experiments were done on rats and mice. Rats need a lot of protein. Rat mothers milk is 47% protein. Human mothers milk is 5% protein. A baby rat gains weight rapidly on a certain pattern of amino acid balance which is very close to the pattern found in eggs and is approximated in meats and dairy products.

When Francis Moore Lappe wrote Diet for a Small Planet, she was accepting those studies and held the egg pattern as the ideal. She pointed out that if you combine grains and beans and other vegetarian proteins, there's a certain synergistic complementary that develops, and you get an overall package which approaches the egg. It was a landmark book because it showed, even if you accept the egg as the ideal pattern, you do quite well if you combine your proteins.

Since that time she has changed her viewpoint quite dramatically. In the subsequent additions to that book she says that her emphasis on protein-complementary was mistaken. Not that it isn't accurate, but it isn't needed because our protein needs are much lower than we thought. The epidemiological studies are very clear and the biochemistry of the body is much better understood than it was in 1971.

Rebecca: Do you think that the success of the idea that a lot of protein is good for you stems from the belief in many people's minds that bigger is better?

John: Yes, without a doubt. The pediatrician comes in and says, "how's the child doing? Is he gaining weight?" Who cares?! Maybe we're not all supposed to be the same size! Some of us are supposed to be much bigger than the standard norm and some of us are supposed to be much smaller.

Rebecca: In Diet for a New America you quote numerous studies from all over the world which time and again point to meat consumption as a major health hazard, studies conducted by leading medical authorities and health institutions. How is it possible that this information has kept relatively underground. Why don't more people know?

John: You have to understand how the medical establishment works. It's as if there was a problem with people falling off cliffs. At the bottom we have stationed the most expensive and sophisticated system of ambulances in the world, but we do not erect fences on top of the cliff. As a matter of fact, the companies that manufacture the ambulances and the collection of people that drive the ambulances would like to see laws passed that forbid the erection of fences.

There is a built-in investment for illness in the medical establishment. Of course it's not an individual conscious desire on the part of the doctor for his patient to get sick, but the pharmaceutical orientation has developed because it is profitable.

Witness today what the FDA is doing to restrict the availability of herbs and vitamin supplements. The pharmaceutical companies support and endow the medical schools so that the average MD in their four years of medical school gets two and a half hours coursework in nutrition - and even that information is wrong!

Rebecca: There are so many people like your father who are on medications that cause horrible side-effects. How come the medical establishment isn't investing more in education and prevention of illness?

John: There are more prescriptions written for hypertension than for any other condition. They're very often prescribed for older men and the interesting thing is that most of them are blood thinners. One of the consequences of blood thinners in older men is impotence. Then you have a whole spin off from the other drugs that are called into play as a result of this.

If you can invent a pill that will lower blood pressure, even if it has all these side-effects, you can make a great deal of money, but if you teach people how to eat so that their blood pressure will not be high in the first place, it's an uphill battle to make a living from doing that.

So, it's not that people aren't good, it's just that everyone has to support themselves and their families, and how many people are going to be able to live in the genuine service of others given the economics of the situation slides in the direction it does? In a healthy society medical people are paid when their patients are well and not when they're ill.

Rebecca: What are the meat and dairy industries doing to counter the information that is getting through to the public?

John: Oh, a great deal!(laughter) We get transcripts from their internal meetings and one of the major topics at one of their conferences was, what are we going to do about John Robbins?

David: Have you received any threats from the meat and dairy industry?

John: Oh yes, they're anonymous of course, but I know who they're from. They're scared of the truth, but it doesn't matter what happens to me because I'm just one voice who has the microphone at the moment. The truth is the truth.

Rebecca: Are they stepping up their PR campaign?

John: Are they ever! It's a very parallel situation to what happened with the tobacco industry ten to fifteen years ago. As the medical information was finally making its way to the public, the first thing they did was step up their PR and advertising campaigns.

They're trying to confuse the issue. Also, there are people in the FDA who would like to have the power of approving everything that you do and position themselves as arbiter. They say they do it for benevolent purposes to protect the public, but God save us from such benevolence. It's a power trip, and it's just another way of dominating people.

Rebecca: I love the story told by Tolstoy's daughter where her aunt came to dinner and demanded to eat meat so Tolstoy tied a chicken to her plate, gave her a knife and said, "go ahead." The idea of slaughtering an animal is horrifying to most people and yet they have no problem in having others do the killing for them. How is it do you think that so many people are able to eat meat without even thinking about what they are doing, without making peace with the process?

John: How it is that people can be so unconscious? As a culture we don't value consciousness or awareness, we value performance. In schools there is no attempt to educate and show where the meat comes from. Then the industry has an agenda to keep the veil in place and to keep the denial fixed.

So, McDonalds will tell children during Saturday morning commercials that hamburgers grow in hamburger patches. When I first saw that I thought it was an innocent fantasy, but there's no innocence to it. It's a deliberate and sophisticated marketing ploy, the purpose of which is to obscure the reality that hamburgers are ground up cows, because children are uniquely sensitive to the animal experience. Hamburgers, if they grew on hamburger plants, would be vegetables.(laughter)

We are very self-justifying creatures and if we want to do something we're very good at finding rationalizations to make it seem valid. Everything is done to separate you from the animal experience - the wrappings in the supermarket, the generic looking cuts of meat, the names - pork, beef, lamb.

The experience of being in a slaughter house is so dramatic that it gets us out of our heads, and I'm sure that many people's rationalizations would fall away if they were exposed to that reality. You don't have to be an animal rights activist or a vegetarian, if you see it, to be outraged - to be so grieved and disappointed, because it's so extreme. It's really gone beyond what most of us could imagine in our worst fantasies.

Rebecca: When Native Americans killed a buffalo they conducted a ritual dance where they acknowledged and atoned for that act. Today, in many parts of the world where people hunt for food, there is still that respect for the animal as a sacred and conscious being that is part of the universe's living framework. How do you think we lost that connection?

John: Western civilization.(laughter) Television is an extreme example of removal from feeling experience. All you're doing is looking and hearing, you're not smelling or tasting or feeling.

We've isolated ourselves from nature and our own natures. Until we have communities and families that cherish one another we will continue to play out this hostility.

Ronald Reagan ran on this traditional family values platform, and Nancy Reagan stood up there and encouraged children to turn their parents in! There was a young girl who took Nancy up on it because her mother was selling marijuana. Nancy Reagan flew from Washington to California to have a press conference with this little girl and tell her that this showed that she really loved her mother. The girl's mother was sent to jail, and it turns out that she wasn't even a smoker but was trying to make some money to buy her daughter a tricycle for her birthday, because they were poor.

This is traditional family values where you encourage little children, who are completely out of their realm in issues like this, to do something like that? No. That's the replacement of family values with government values. It's very patriarchal and it's very paternalistic.

To me, the value of the family is something that as a culture we still have yet to discover. What would a person be like who grew up with parents within a society who truly cherished them and who worked at every juncture to support their fulfillment and understanding and growth? We don't know, we have yet to undertake that experiment. I believe that what the human being is capable of is so far beyond what any of us have yet glimpsed.

Rebecca: As you've already mentioned, children are particularly sensitive to the animal. What are the meat and dairy industries doing to hide from the children the moral and biological consequences of consuming their products?

John: They undertake what they call `educational programs' in schools in which materials are provided free of charge. The literature paints an entirely camouflaged picture of the actual situation. All the animals have names like Bessie and are treated with that kind of caring.

The dairy council produces films that are distributed to schools. They have titles like A Visit to Uncle Jim and Aunt Helen's Dairy Farm, and they make it look so idyllic. The animals are just part of the family. The contrast between that depiction and the actual reality of dairy cows who are penned in, not allowed to graze and pumped up with drugs, is outrageous. It's propaganda for the industry and the sad thing is that it's not questioned.

Rebecca: When was the last time that dairy cows were treated like that in America?

John: There are still a few farms left but they simply cannot compete economically with the agri-business' highly mechanized mass production. It's not because the factory farms are more efficient because in most cases they aren't, it's because the factory farms have the clout in congress to get subsidies for what they are doing: to get tax right-offs, to get free water, to get agricultural colleges and the animal farms departments of universities working for them.

In California, the kindergarten children all receive a coloring book from the California Milk Producer's Association. Inside there is an outline drawing of a man's face underneath which there is a question: What did daddy eat today? Then it says: If dad has had his butter, dad is happy, draw a smile on his face; if dad has not had his butter, dad is sad, draw a frown on his face.

Then it asks: Has dad has his cheese today? If so, color his eyes blue, if he hasn't, color his eyes red. Then you are asked: has dad had his ice cream today? Has dad had his sourcream today. Has dad had his cream cheese today? And you end up with two dads. One has blond hair, blue eyes, pink skin, white teeth and a big smile - there is a racial stereotype operating here also if you hadn't noticed. The other dad, who has not drenched his body in fat, has red eyes, black teeth, green skin, blue hair and a big frown.

The National Dairy Council is the single largest supplier of the nutritional education materials used in the public schools of the United States. When I first learned about the Dairy Council from my father, I thought it was a gathering of elders of some kind.(laughter) It's a trade lobby, and it's purpose which is explicit in it's by-laws is to promote the sale of dairy products and specifically higher fat dairy products where the most profit is to be made.

Now what five year old child is going to raise their hand and say, "excuse me teacher, what is being taught here? Who provided us with these coloring books? Aren't all those dairy products the least healthy of the dairy products?"

David: So, you're saying that what was traditionally seen as a public service is simply free advertising to a particularly vulnerable and captive audience. What do you think can be done to counter the nutritional mis-information that children are receiving in schools?

John: I think people have to be willing to educate themselves and then speak to our children. It's our duty as adults to see to it that our kids aren't lied to. It's particularly abhorrent when we come across this in schools because we put our trust in the educational system as a means of liberating us from merely commercial agendas.

EarthSave, which is a group I founded, has a program called `Healthy People, Healthy Planet', and we go into schools and talk to kids and teachers and the food service people. The idea is to educate kids and make other options available in the cafeteria like vegetarian, no cholesterol, low fat foods.

Our two pilot programs have been in Madison, Wisconsin and in Santa Cruz, California. We have had vegan options available in every public school in the county and we are learning how to work with the bureaucracy and the board of education. After we were at Santa Cruz High School, over 500 of them signed a petition demanding that the cafeteria serve our meals and saying that they would buy the food.

The other part of it that is very difficult to overcome is that the USDA supplies six billion dollars worth of free food to schools - mainly ground pork and ground beef. If you want to serve high fat and high-salt cheese in schools you can get it free from the USDA, but if you want to serve low fat and low salt cheese you have to pay for it. It's the same with milk.

So the more impoverished school districts which tend to be in more minority communities are most at the mercy of what's called the School Lunch Program. It's positioned as this generous activity of government, but what it really is is a guaranteed market for the worst products of these industries that control the USDA program and who get a very fine price from the USDA for these foods that they can't sell anywhere else.

The result is that American black communities have the highest rates of high blood pressure, obesity and heart disease in the world.

Rebecca: Are you finding that the children you are talking with are, in general, more aware or less aware about nutrition and ecology than their parents?

John: Some of them are more aware and others are less. The ones who are prisoners of the television are not, but the ones who are waking up - and there is a certain percentage of every generation who will wake up no matter what you do to them - are extremely committed.

At EarthSave we work with local support groups in many communities and gather ongoing updates in environmental and health concerns. We focus on a transition to not simply a sustainable society, but a restorative society. Another EarthSave program is called Y.E.S, Youth for Environmental Sanity. This is a group of youngsters who travel the country speaking to high school assemblies. They speak in about thirty states a year and they do about ten summer camps around the country. My son is doing one in Singapore right now. They reach hundreds of thousands of young people.

The feeling I get is that there are colossal powers at work in the world that mean us well. Perhaps they're sending in some new troops. Why would someone like me be born into the family that I was born into? I see it as something of a practical joke but there is also a power to working from within.

Let's say you have a fulcrum and a teeter-totter and humanity is on the bell curve. To accomplish change, some people try to become as pure as they possibly can; they won't drive a car, they won't eat anything that has a face, they recycle everything, and they push their personal lifestyle to the max.

Rebecca: People who have become so pure that when they are exposed to any pollution whatsoever, they immediately get sick.

John: Right. They do have a role to play, but they are disconnected to a certain extent from the process. Others of us feel that we will create more change if everybody moved six inches rather than a small group of people moved to the extreme edge. So, how can we accomplish that? You're not going to do it from the edge - if you challenge too high a percentage of people's assumptions, you lose credibility and become seen as a fringe phenomenon.

Some of us, born within the culture, stay within it even when part of our hearts and psyches see through it completely, in order to play a role in the turning.

David: How do you, or do you, think it is possible to solve the world hunger crisis?

John: The first thing is to recognize that it exists and to stop shutting it out. As a culture we have to move away from valuing a meat-based diet as a reflection of prosperity because there is not enough to go around - it takes too great a toll on the agricultural base to be shared.

The problem is that when some people do become aware of the scarcity their reaction is, there's not enough to go around therefore I'm going to get mine. They say, "I'm sorry if the animal has to be killed or tortured or people have to go hungry but my primary imperative is to survive." That state of consciousness is a reflection of the level of fear in the world.

Rebecca: I imagine that it would be extremely hard for you to continue your work without hope, but you must also have dark moments when you are reminded of what you are up against. Are you optimistic about the future of humanity?

John: No. Optimism for me tends to wane very quickly, and it fluctuates with pessimism in a cyclical manner. If I depended on optimism for my work, I would burn out very rapidly or feel like a hypocrite.

David: What do you depend on then?

John: [Long pause] Love. Look at the human being. We can produce a Hitler, but we can also produce a Mother Theresa. The moral spectrum of humanity is vast. You begin to feel, "Well, if I don't take responsibility, who will? My parents? Bill Clinton?" (laughter) We'll all die waiting.

Rebecca: What are some of the less obvious environmental consequences of the meat and dairy industries?

John: It takes thirty-nine times more energy to produce a pound of protein from beef today than it does to produce a pound of protein from soybeans. It takes twenty-two times more energy to produce protein from beef than from corn or wheat. So people who are deriving their protein from plant sources are in effect consuming far less energy than those who derive their protein from animal sources.

The average pound of beef in the United States takes 2,500 gallons of water for its production. That isn't to say that the animal drinks that much, but it's involved in the watering of the crops that the animals eat, and the animals eat a lot more crops than we would if we were simply eating plants ourselves.

In California, which is a relatively dry state by national standards, the situation is worse. The average pound of beef there requires 5,214 gallons of water, according to the agricultural extension of UC Davis. In the same study they also analyzed how much water it takes in California to produce other agricultural crops. Apples take 49 gallons per pound, lettuce takes 23 gallons. Over half the water in California goes to beef and dairy production, and they still have to import most of their beef from other parts of the country.

And we're told to turn off the water when we brush our teeth or when we're shaving! (laughter) But if these aren't just little gestures to make ourselves feel better--like wearing a "Save the Whales" button--we have to ask, "Where is our real leverage here? Where can we save the most water?"

In California it takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. Now, if you were to shower seven days a week and your average shower used two gallons a minute and you took seven minutes per shower, you would use roughly a hundred gallons of water a week. This comes out to 5,200 gallons of water a year. This means that in the state of California, you would save more water by not eating one pound of beef than you would by not showering for an entire year.

Rebecca: And roughly how much beef does the average meat-eater eat a year?

John: In the United States, the present per capita consumption is sixty-three pounds of beef a year.

Rebecca: You've written about how some of the chemicals and hormones presently used in dairy and meat production take a generation for their effects to be fully realized, and you cited incidences of premature sexual development in children. What do you think we have to look forward to as a species if we don't change our eating habits?

John: We'll end up in the direction we're headed. (laughter) You're referring to the earlier and earlier menarche of females. In traditional cultures, girls get their first periods at around 16 or 17 years of age; in the United States, on average, girls begin menstruating at the age of 11.

Early menarche has been shown to be related to animal-fat consumption, which throws off the estrogen cycles in the body, and it's also been related to the hormones in the animals products. The statistics show that the earlier a girl begins to menstruate, the more likely she is to have breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or uterine cancer. The earlier a young man enters puberty, the more likely he is to get prostate cancer. These are all hormone-related cancers.

The reliance of agriculture on pesticides is the equivalent of crack addiction. There's an immediate rush. For the short term it feels better, but in the long term it's reinforcing a destructive cycle. The first time that the farmers sprayed the infested plants with DDT, it seemed like a miracle. The first time someone shoots heroin--oh my God, the relief! It seems like a panacea. But the wisdom is to learn what the longer-term consequences

We found that the bugs develop resistances very rapidly. Meanwhile, you’re scorching the soil and destroying the microbial population, which leads to soil erosion and to poisoning everyone who partakes. The average breast milk in the United States is so contaminated with pesticide residues that it would be confiscated by the FDA if you tried to ship it across state lines.

Rebecca: There seem to be a lot of people who abuse their bodies and eat junk food, and nothing seems to happen to them; they still function reasonably well. Do you think there could be some adaptation going on to the environmental pollutants?

John: No, I don't. I think a lot is happening to those people. People who are breathing very polluted air are very challenged and stressed by that. Their immune systems, kidneys, and livers are doing everything they can to detoxify, but there are limits to what the human being can handle. They may not have cancer yet, but their whole appreciation of the human experience is a fraction of what it could be.

David: Have you ever had an experience with psychedelic plants that influenced your perspective?

John: I was a child of the sixties, and I definitely participated. They say that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. Well, I have wonderful memories of the sixties, I took LSD for the first time in 1965. I had never had any psychoactive substance before, and it changed my life. It showed me that I was an ant, and it made me humble.

It also showed me that what we take into our bodies--even if it's just a few micrograms of a chemical--can change our consciousness dramatically. It also made me an environmentalist. I saw that everything is connected.

I didn't take LSD very much, because it was so overwhelming. Shortly thereafter, I took mescaline a few times and had wonderful experiences in nature.

In the early eighties a friend of mine talked to me about MDMA. I had had concerns about LSD. I had seen some people get very scattered, and I felt that it sometimes forced a premature opening on a psyche that wasn't ready for it. MDMA seemed to be kinder. I was a practicing psychotherapist at the time, and I began to use it in my practice. I administered it to hundreds of people--while it was legal. After it was made a Schedule I drug, I couldn't justify the risk of continuing its use.

David: What kind of results did you achieve with MDMA?

John: Oh, it was incredible! I saw extraordinary transformations. What a terrible shame that a tool so valuable to people was taken away! When a couple were fighting and stuck in a pattern that both were in despair about but neither could change, suddenly they had the ability to see and go beyond that pattern. They'd have to work it all through, of course--the drug alone didn't do anything. But it gave them the will to change.

It made me feel that our policy toward drugs is criminal. I see the drug war as a serious erosion of our civil liberties. We don't have freedom of religion, because some of these substances genuinely do activate religious experiences and are true sacraments.

Rebecca: Your experience as a therapist must be useful in dealing with the resistance to your present work.

John: Yes. Self-inquiry is indispensable to social action. If you want to have an impact on the outside world, you have to go that far inside, too.

David: What do you think happens to human consciousness after biological death?

John: I think it celebrates.

David: What is your perspective on God?

John: Well, I'm not into the old man with the white beard. The sense of spirit that enables us to be more present and more honoring of our interconnectedness--to me that's the action of the divine. The surrendering of the individual self, the ego self, into the greater universe is my spiritual practice.

Some people find th is type of discipline restrictive, just as some people find being a vegetarian a limitation. I find it an honor. And when we learn to honor ourselves fully, we end up honoring each other. It just turns out that way.

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