John Robbins

Eating for Peace

by Thich Nhat Hanh

A talk by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mindful Consumption

All things need food to be alive and to grow, including our love or our hate. Love is a living thing, hate is a living thing. If you do not nourish your love, it will die. If you cut the source of nutriment for your violence, your violence will also die. That is why the path shown by the Buddha is the path of mindful consumption.

The Buddha told the following story. There was a couple who wanted to cross the desert to go to another country in order to seek freedom. They brought with them their little boy and a quantity of food and water. But they did not calculate well, and that is why halfway through the desert they ran out of food, and they knew that they were going to die. So after a lot of anguish, they decided to eat the little boy so that they could survive and go to the other country, and that's what they did. And every time they ate a piece of flesh from their son, they cried.

THE PIG FARMER: A Story of Transformation

By John Robbins
[NOTE: Mr. Robbins' column items will appear regularly in Enrichment.com. A number of articles emanate from Mr. Robbins' websites: FoodRevolution.org and Healthyat100.org, and are given through Mr. Robbins' permission].

One day in Iowa I met a particular gentleman—and I use that term, gentleman, frankly, only because I am trying to be polite, for that is certainly not how I saw him at the time. He owned and ran what he called a “pork production facility.” I, on the other hand, would have called it a pig Auschwitz.

The conditions were brutal. The pigs were confined in cages that were barely larger than their own bodies, with the cages stacked on top of each other in tiers, three high. The sides and the bottoms of the cages were steel slats, so that excrement from the animals in the upper and middle tiers dropped through the slats on to the animals below.

The aforementioned owner of this nightmare weighed, I am sure, at least 240 pounds, but what was even more impressive about his appearance was that he seemed to be made out of concrete. His movements had all the fluidity and grace of a brick wall.

ENRICHMENT.COM WELCOMES JOHN ROBBINS AS COLUMNIST

John John Robbins, author of the international bestseller DIET FOR A NEW AMERICA and founder of the non-profit EARTHSAVE, will be featured as a columnist on Enrichment.com. John is considered to be one of the most eloquent and powerful spokespersons in the world for a sane, ethical and sustainable future,

Robbins is also the author of THE FOOD REVOLUTION -- How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World, THE AWAKENED HEART -- Meditations on Finding Harmony in a Changing World, and the widely acclaimed RECLAIMING OUR HEALTH -- Exploding the Medical Myth and Embracing the Source of True Healing.