The World Peace Diet

A new Oprah-tunity!

Dear friends,

More signs of progress - Oprah is now on a 21-day vegan "cleanse". This is potentially great news because multitudes will be participating with her, and hopefully learning about the plight of animals in our food production system, and of the enormous benefits of a plant-based diet for our health and the health of the Earth and for future generations. And that it's dee-licious, too!

Over the past 2 years since my book, The World Peace Diet, was published, so many people have told me that I "need to be on Oprah." After her hugely successful class with Eckhart Tolle, I've been hearing this from people even more. It seems that we humans are ripening spiritually, and I believe that there is nothing more important at this stage of our spiritual evolution than developing compassion for all living beings, and transforming our eating habits to reflect more compassion and awareness.

The World Peace Diet, of all the books out there, presents the spiritual, cultural, and psycho-social dimensions of our meals and would provide a solid foundation for Oprah's (and the world's) transition to a plant-based way of eating. We have to understand the "big picture" in order to make major changes in our lives, and when we do, it's easy to make the changes. So many people have told me that they've gone vegan after reading The World Peace Diet, and I think this is why.

So, people have asked me to encourage all of us to go to Oprah's website and suggest that she read The World Peace Diet. I hope you'll take a few minutes to do this! Use your own words and speak from your heart. The window of opportunity over the next 3 weeks days is beckoning! If Oprah reads The World Peace Diet and "gets it," we will have hundreds of thousands more people "getting it" also, which could lead to amazing and rapid improvements in the lives of all of us -- people, animals, and future generations. And if there are other vegan speakers, writers, chefs that you feel would illuminate, please let Oprah know of them as well!

Please do it now, if possible. The link is:
http://www2.oprah.com/email/reach/email_reach_fromu.jhtml

The link to the discussion message board:
http://www.oprah.com/community/thread/64750

The link to her show with Kathy Freston on the Pillars of Wellness:
http://www2.oprah.com/spiritself/slide/20080520/slide_20080520_350_201.jhtml


Upcoming retreat: "Creating A New Culture Of Peace:"

We are delighted to report that on our upcoming World Peace Diet weekend retreat, July 18-20 in southeastern Michigan, we will be joined by Mark Stroud of Cincinnati! Mark will help facilitate the retreat, and he is a dedicated advocate for compassion. Mark has already taught 2 classes on The World Peace Diet through the New Thought Unity Church in Cincinnati, and he has created an excellent Study Guide for facilitators of The World Peace Diet. So, if you are feeling an inner pull to help our world by facilitating a class or study group on The World Peace Diet in your area, I hope you will be able to join us on this retreat. While it is especially designed for people who would like to become certified facilitators of The World Peace Diet, it is open to anyone who would like to deepen their connection with and experience of the transformative ideas in the book. Mark is an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and educator.

Celebrity chefs! We are thrilled to have on the retreat the services of Deer and Justice Fields, who will be preparing the organic vegan meals that we'll be savoring. Deer and Justice are legendary, world-traveling vegan chefs who have prepared scrumptious feasts in their own restaurants in Maui and San Diego, as well as cooked for countless conferences, expos, Rainbow gatherings, and events throughout North America and New Zealand.

For more information on this July retreat, and to register for it:
http://worldpeacediet.org/retreat.htm

We are now in Virginia Beach, heading north and then west for the summer - you can see details of our tour on our website at: http://willtuttle.com/schedule.htm. We do over 150 events per year, and have been traveling full-time in our "rolling home" now for over 12 years. It just keeps getting better! We have added some more events to our schedule, including a second lecture in New York City in June.

Finally, we have been sending out our free daily "Veg Inspiration For The Day" since May 1st, so if you'd like to begin receiving that every morning, you can sign up on The World Peace Diet website:
http://worldpeacediet.org

Deepest thanks to all of you who are blessing our world with your efforts to build a new society of kindness, peace, and harmony. We hope our paths will cross with you and people you know, so please check our tour schedule from time to time, as well as our Worldwide Prayer Circle for Animals: http://circleofcompassion.org.

Hope to see you all on Oprah! And at the July retreat! And in your area when we come through...

That's it for now. Thanks for being the blessing you are!

Will & Madeleine

Open Letter to the Union Of Concerned Scientists

Dear Union of Concerned Scientists,

Having read the first chapter of your CAFO report, I commend the time, effort, research and intelligence required to produce it.

Your arguments against CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and your advocacy for medium-to-small animal feeding operations, as well as for a change in public policy to permit such a shift, are worthy of attention. May your suggestions be heeded by politicians and policy-makers -- in the interim, anyway.

But, long-term, what I believe we need is for every individual to look at his or her reasons for eating animal products in the first place. If this self-examination were done with integrity, many of us would reach a conclusion even more intelligent, not to mention compassionate, than the findings of your white paper.

Specifically, we would realize that our obsession with -- yea, our addiction to -- meat/milk/eggs is no more than an entrenched cultural tradition that is both unkind to animals and unkind to humans on many levels. For one thing, eating meat is terribly inefficient, thus wasteful, thus cruel to the world's poor, since it takes five times more land to grow crops for livestock feed than it does to grow grain for people to eat. Too, there is no nutritional justification for meat/milk/egg consumption, since all needed nutrients are available in an abundant variety of non-animal-based products. In short, the selfish, speciesist mentality that breeds, raises, slaughters, buys and consumes the flesh of sentient, sapient beings simply to please the palate leads to the inevitable degradation of our physical health, not to mention to gross misuse of our precious land and its natural resources.

Put another way, your study is valuable as far as it goes. It opens eyes to the unfair, unethical, uneconomic, unwise, unhealthy system that rewards CAFOs and discourages better alternatives. But to assume that we should remain stuck in the rut of what is, bottom line, a barbaric practice -- eating the flesh and secretions of other animal species -- is to leave us mired in obsolete thinking and behavior. We will never find that ever-elusive peace and harmony, either individually or collectively, as long as we treat animals as our property and as production units. They are God's beautiful creations, and they deserve to be respected as autonomous beings, with the right to life (or even the right not to be bred for food) instead of as mere means to human ends.

Please read The World Peace Diet  by Dr. Will Tuttle if you want to further understand what I'm trying to articulate here.

Sincerely yours,

S.B.H.C.

Houston, TX