How Did We Get Here? Is It the Food? Yup…

I seem to think a lot about compassion these days. Perhaps it’s the desperate need for empathy that I see all around me. Perhaps it’s the apparent loss of it by so many who see kindness as a weakness, not a virtue.

We see cruelty each and every day in so many ways and yet, we seem immune when it happens to people we don’t know; to people living far from us; to creatures we do not consider. We see so much of it that we become numb to it.

We are humans designed to commune together; to share joy and grief; abundance and want. So what is this about?

Ah, I am so glad you asked. You did ask, right?

My Asian teacher once told me that cruelty and violence was the result of not eating vegetables. I thought him to be simplistic and naïve. But these many years later; years of doing what I do, I understand what he meant.

He was right. He used to say that our modern way of eating created a hot energy in our livers, according to the princi0les of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The liver governs the emotion of irritability and anger. If left unchecked, we explode in rage.

Much of what we see around us can be attributed to what and how we eat. The way we live has robbed us of our humanity and our reason. Place the ugliness of the political climate on top of this and you have the society we see around us.

We live in a world where the killing of animals for eating enjoyment is legal, normalized, industrialized and largely kept from our sight. Paul McCartney famously said that if slaughterhouses had windows, we would have no trouble convincing people to stop eating meat.

Billions, with a ‘b’ is an unfathomable number and yet billions of animals are bred, cruelly confined and slaughtered so that our collective diet remains convenient…and profitable, always profitable. The violence done is defended as natural, necessary and rational.

At the same time, we read snarky articles in a respected publication like New York Magazine talking about the demise of veganism, based, of course on a 12-year-old debunked study that stated that 84% of vegans or vegetarians no longer are (in fact, the numbers are nearly reversed.  People who chose a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle in the 90’s are still at it today). Oh, and the article reports that vegan restaurants are closing. Interestingly, fully 80% or more of new restaurants that open in NYC close within five years, but it was vegan spots that the author took delight in reporting about closures.

Even more interesting is a mean-spirited article was written by a journalist who takes great pride and care in posting carefully curated images of the dog she claims to dearly love. So I guess that’s the only animal worth fighting for?

I guess living a compassionate life is suspect unless your feelings are only for dogs.

I think what I find the most upsetting about our seeming loss of empathy; our penchant for snarkiness when reporting on compassionate living is the fact that we have lost sight of the most basic reason to live on our planet. Are we not here, as humans, to reduce suffering where we can? To help lift another being up? Are we not here to take care of each other? To have each other’s backs?

My mother used to say that we were put on this planet to serve others, to try and make the world better than we found it for future generations, who will look back and wonder what we were thinking when they see what we did and how we treated the most vulnerable among us…animals who have no voice of their own.

We live in a time when it seems that human empathy is a liability. Kindness is seen as weak, sometimes ridiculed or even punished; where our hearts are optional in the face of business, profit and convenience.

We can turn this ship around though. And we have to begin by understanding that what we choose to eat greatly influences how we move through the world.

From the primal: we just feel lousy because of the food we choose, so we are cranky; to the more ephemeral: our livers are over-taxed by saturated fat so we become enraged quite easily.

Whole unprocessed plant foods, on the other hand, are nutrient-dense, natural and deeply nourishing, providing us with the nutrition and life we need to sanely navigate this wild world at this most interesting moment in time. We need strength and clarity to see what we are doing: slaughtering billions of creatures needlessly; becoming numb to what we see around us, losing our empathy in the process.

We need whole foods to nourish us through these times so that we can leave a legacy of kindness and compassion for future generations; not one of violence in the name of profit; a compromised planet and a numbness toward the suffering of those around us.

It’s time to lead with our hearts, minds and souls…and it begins in the kitchen.