Wisdom in food choices

With the power we have gained we most learn to use it wisely. Oriental healing theory is approxiamately 5000 yrs old (from henceforth when I refer to oriental healing it is not just Chinese, but the three ancient oriental healing systems I have studied, Egyptian, Chinese and Aryveda).   It is based on sound observation, intuition and experience.  I cannot go into all of it, for I would end up writing a very long book, but there are some things that need to be mentioned in the context of the problems we face today.  I honestly believe the natural world is a direct reflection of our conciousness, and if we heal ourselves we will heal the earth.

            Food is key here.  You are what you eat.  There is a priciple in Aryveda, the Vedic system I have studied, called Sattva.  It basically states that the conciousness of whatever you eat will meld with yours and so you will take on the properties of what you ate.  You are literally what you eat. That being said, the various convoluted, unethical porecesses our food goes through needs to be paid attention to.  Agriculture in this country needs some serious revising.  I am a vegetarian, so I am anti meat, but most Americans are not and we’re not going to break the carnivores overnight of their addiction to flesh.  What we can do however is work out the kinks in the system so that so much biomass is not wasted.  As it stands right now, 80% of the grain grown in this country goes to feed livestock.  As you go up the food chain you lose a factor of ten in energy, so that when you get to something like tuna, a secondary consumer, the energy it provides is 1000% less effiecient  then if you ate some beans.  On top of that, in the fields of Iowa, the equivalent energy to prep the field for either corn or wheat is equivalent to three to four tons of TNT per acre.  A normal grassland prarie ecosystem produces more biomass naturally than our most advanced wheat field. The supposed problem is that it’s in the form of grasses that we cannot palate.  But with 80% of our grain production going to feed feedlot animals wouldn’t it make more sense to go let them graze on the natural prares?  They can eat it.  There were more bison produced naturally on the great plains before farming then all of the beef cattle farmed in the same area today.  Not only that but it gives them a much better quality of life.  I don’t know about anybody else, but my biggest beef with meat-eating is the lack of respect and dignity given to these animals, the appalling inhumane conditions they spend their entire life in.  Not only would it free up farmland to grow things like hemp (which paper among other things can be made out of)  but it would reduce our dependency on oil, as most commercial fertilizers are petroleum based, not to mention save a sizable chunk of change considering the government subsidizes this whole nonsense.   Another thing that could be done is avoid all refined sugars.  The health benefits of eliminating that and any refined grain (breakfast cereals included) from a persons diet are amazing.  Sugar should be classified as an addictive drug.  It was an industry founded on the suffering and death of countless Africans, and that darkness rules it still.  In our current age of anxiety and stress, these refined foods further accelerate and destabilize our bodies’ metabolism.  Magnesium, a mineral found in brown rice and stoneground wheat (make sure the ingredient label says stoneground because otherwise it’s been refined) directly acts to break up what scientists have dubbed the anxiety peptide the forms in the brain.  The magnesium found in whole grains cures restless legs, muscle cramps and spasms and has a general stabilizing effect on the  body and mind.  The amount of energy to manufacture refined products, that are only slowly killing you anyway is absurd.  Two thirds of grain corn is used for further processing.  45% of this goes into making sugar, The rest goes into making ultra-refined products such as ethanol (ethanol is not a fuel holy-grail).  This would also significantly cut down on the algae blooms choking our waterways and causing the dead zone in the gulf of mexico.  It would also cut global warming by eliminating the gases released from fertilizers and leave more trees to clean the air.  Anyone who wants further information on this subject should visit http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915

On a related note, I stumbled across a myth on Hathor, the Egyptian Goddess of mothers and of children.  When not depicted as a nursing human mother, she was depicted as a cow.  The story goes that Ra, her father found out humanity was plotting against him, he sent his burning eye (mind you Ra was a sun god) and it took the form of Hathor, who as her “alter-ego” if you will, Sekhmet(the lioness headed goddess), started destroying all of humanity. Now maybe this is a stretch, but I believe all ancients stories speak of some truth, however long forgotten it may be.  We are starting to see the effects of Global warming (burning eye of the sun) and it can be directly linked with in addition to fertilizers, such things as manure from mega cattle and dairy farms(Hathor).  This chokes our waterways, interfereing with the natural respiration cycles and water cycles of our world, preventing rain from naturally washing CO2 out of the atmosphere.  Interesting coincidence, or long forgotten truth?  I know what I think. Nurturing and nursing is not easy, I feel so sorry for the cows that are impregnated by artificial means (if your going to have a baby, you should at least have fun creating it).  Their children are taken away from them to be chained up in a small isolated plastic hut, then their slaughtered to be tender meat for somebodies descerning palette.  Dairy cows are hooked up to machines that are degrading (if you’ve every used an electric breastpump in public, you know what I mean) and that can literally blowup and injure a teat.  And then when these cows are spent, they are discarded like trash and sent to the slaughter house.  For creature that gives us so much, we treat Hathor’s sacred cows horribly.