Dr. Will Tuttle wrote a fabulous article for One Green Planet in which he discusses the fact that the Occupy Wall Street movement has included industrial animal abuse in their list of concerns. While we wrote about that exciting phenomenon in a recent post, we want to highlight his article for another reason – culture.
In this article, Dr. Tuttle talks about the fundamental cultural change that needs to take place in order for us to create a truly peaceful and just world. He focuses on the plight of cows in industrial agribusiness and connects that with the pharmaceutical-medical complex in what he calls, and what truly is, a poignant riddle.
We love this article because it focuses on cultural change and asks what is it about our culture that perpetuates violence, abuse, and exploitation? We at CtD believe that we need to fundamentally change culture to promote the health and well-being of ALL. We believe that we need to challenge norms, or standards of behavior, that fuel violence and exploitation. We need to replace these norms with new, healthy, positive norms. Dr. Tuttle promotes this when he states:
We can free ourselves when we awaken from the cultural food trance and its official story line—that meat and dairy are natural for us to eat—and switch to a plant-based way of eating that frees the animals, ecosystems, and people enslaved by this official story.
What stories have we been told? What stories do we buy into? And who profits?
