Eating for Peace

In looking back through John Robbins' website for his brilliant article on the slave labor ubiquitous in the chocolate industry, I found a talk he had posted some time ago by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mindful Consumption entitled "Eating for Peace". He is an eloquent speaker, and it is a beautiful talk, well worth reading.

It is easy, for many of us, to look upon our fellow beings with the level of compassion that says: you are worthy of life, and I will not eat you. It is also a relatively easy deduction that in this critical time of impendingly-irreversible climate change, making dietary choices that promote rather than prohibit the health of the environment is a pretty good idea. And to those for whom both of these concepts seem difficult or inconvenient, and to all of us, here is the point:
It is a moral outrage that ANYONE, ANYWHERE should have to suffer the pain and despair of malnutrition and death due to starvation when there is a simply ridiculous amount of food on this planet. Yes, there are political and social-instability factors that play into the distribution of global food resources -- but when the largest nations on Earth transform unthinkably vast amounts of inexpensive nutrition into comparatively little product that is not necessary for human health and out of reach financially to all but the top 5% of the world's population simply because of a preference for the taste of animal flesh, then something is terribly wrong. Isn't it?