07 Apr The Greatest Public Health Crisis of All Time

We are in the midst of the greatest public health crisis of all time. No, it’s not the obesity epidemic or the diabetes crisis or the cancer crisis or heart disease, but the principal root cause of them all: our mass addiction to animal foods.

Consider the data: Our consumption of animal foods is clearly destroying our health. We have a socioeconomic system that has blithely poured billions of tons of toxic pollutants into the environment each year, which have bio-concentrated up the food chain destroying the health of animals. We are then persuaded to eat the flesh and secretions of those animals, thereby becoming chronically ill as we accumulate those toxic pollutants in our fat tissues. The pharmaceutical companies then swoop in to fix us with their pills, completing a nice business racket that is certainly not good for anybody.

Our consumption of animal foods is clearly destroying the planet. We are on track to wipe out almost all wild animals off the face of the Earth by 2026, mainly to support that consumption. As the WorldWatch Institute notes,

“The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future: deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.”

Our consumption of animal foods is clearly destroying the lives of the most innocent among us, nonhuman animals. It is not only the lives of the 70 billion animals that we raise and kill each year before most of them even reach puberty, but also the lives of innocent families in the ocean that we corral and kill using our software Big Data and our hardware GPS technologies. Shame on us!

Yet, even scientists and scientific organizations who have been reporting on the impact of animal foods are still consuming them. Just as Bill Nye indicates in the video above, they make it clear that they are distressed about their continued consumption, but they can’t seem to stop. This is the textbook definition of addictive behavior.

So, what would a 12-step program for animal food addiction look like? Perhaps the following list might work:

1. We admit that we are powerless over animal foods and our lives have become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a higher power can restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the higher power.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to the higher power, to ourselves and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have the higher power remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked the higher power to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all the beings that we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Attended vigils with the Save Movement to make direct amends to those who are being harmed.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our higher power.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other sufferers and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

If you have any suggested changes, please let us know in the comments below. Good luck to us all in these trying, but revolutionary times!