With the Covid crisis in early 2020, the vegan movement clearly had a golden opportunity to champion the rights, freedom, and sovereignty of not just individual animals, but of individual humans as well. This would have been an enormously valuable contribution to the well being of society during that dark and challenging time.
Yet the vegan movement, similar in many ways to the political left, revealed the extent to which it had been infiltrated and captured by the seductive power of wealth and narrative control. Unable to maintain a vital inner connection with the core values of vegan living, many vegans allowed the rampant fear porn gushing from the media, government, and medical authorities to sweep them into unquestioning compliance, and, ironically, into championing the virulently anti-vegan pharmaceutical-medical- chemical complex.
Equally incongruous, many of us demand respect for our own sovereignty, and rightfully organize and work to educate others about the importance of health freedom and of all our inalienable rights, while at the same time destroying the freedom and sovereignty of animals by failing to question prevailing cultural narratives. We blithely purchase and consume the flesh and secretions of terribly abused and enslaved animals who are reduced to mere livestock property status, thereby directly inflicting brutality and tyranny that are much more severe than that against which we are fighting. As health freedom advocates, we justifiably rebel against being viewed as mere exploitable livestock by the globalist plutocrats managing pandemic and climate narratives, and yet we act in a similar manner ourselves with regard to animals, reducing cows, pigs, chickens, and others to mere exploitable property status. How is it possible that we fail to see that by purchasing animalsourced foods and products, we directly cause the destruction of the sovereignty of others, the very sovereignty we prize so much for ourselves?
It is clear that the animal liberation movement is called to embrace the movement for human freedom, and that this medical-health freedom movement is similarly called to embrace the animal liberation movement. It is the same basic effort, and the ruling class that profits and benefits from the exploitation of animals also benefits from the exploitation of humans. These plutocrats control not only the social, governmental, and media narratives, but also control, through infiltration and predatory philanthropy, what would be the opposing narratives, thus ensuring the ongoing reliable and profitable exploitation of both animals and humans.
For example, the animal agriculture-medical-chemical complex has for decades captured governmental agencies and legislative bodies to the extent that, in the U.S. (and similar scenarios exist in many countries), we have a massive system of government subsidies that drastically and artificially reduces consumer prices for meat, dairy products, and eggs. This promotes the exploitation not only of cows, pigs, chickens, and other livestock animals, but the exploitation of us humans as well, as our physical, psychological, environmental, and cultural health is sabotaged, increasing the profits and control of the same powerful industries, and the bankers and asset managers in the background. While animal sourced food production in the U.S. receives billions of government dollars annually in subsidies, price supports, income assistance, emergency assistance, commodity loans, direct payments, allotments, tax breaks, rail and feed subsidies, grazing privileges, the dairy export incentive program, and other governmental services, less than one percent of government subsidies goes to the production of health-promoting vegetables and fruits.
This is not accidental. By severely lowering the market price of animal-sourced foods, the ruling class encourages the U.S population to consume over 200 pounds of meat per capita annually, twice the global average and virtually the highest in the world, guaranteeing the U.S. having the world’s most expensive (i.e., profitable) medical system, and arguably one of the most disease-ridden populations as well. If we are eating animal sourced foods, we are being exploited, and all of us are harmed by the toxic poisons and excessive medical costs involved, with medical procedures being the leading cause of bankruptcies. Additionally, these immense government subsidies enable U.S. meat, dairy, egg, and feed grain producers to flood Latin American and other international markets with low-priced products that put local farmers in these other countries out of business, directly driving hunger, displacement, and immigration pressures on U.S. borders, further propelling the plutocratic agenda of cultural expropriation, both at home and abroad.
If we fail to see the interconnected nature of animal and human liberation, we become merely ironic in our quests for freedom. Enslaving animals for food, our health is harmed on every level, inevitably eroding our freedom. Liberating animals, we can rescue our world from the narratives, traditions, and embedded levers used by the ruling class to propel their agenda of unbridled domination.
Looking at our critical cultural situation, how will we be able to successfully awaken the hearts and minds of the masses of people who are sufficiently poisoned and wounded that they care neither for animal freedom nor human freedom, but seem content to eat and exploit animals as livestock, and to allow themselves to be similarly exploited and oppressed? To approach this question effectively, we are called to a deeper understanding both of our culture and of ourselves.
Excerpted with permission from Food for Freedom: Reclaiming Our Health and Rescuing Our World by Dr. Will Tuttle (Middletown, CA: Karuna, 2024).
Dr. Will Tuttle, visionary author of the acclaimed best-seller, The World Peace Diet, published in 17 languages, is a recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award and the Empty Cages Prize. He is also the author of several other books on spirituality, intuition, and social justice, as well as the creator of online wellness and advocacy programs. A vegan since 1980 and former Zen monk, Will is featured in a number of documentaries and is a frequent radio, television, and online presenter.
